Page 85 of Family Bonds- Kelsey & Van

He took it out of her hand and looked at it. “Jesus,” he said. “I was sixteen in that picture. It got me laid that weekend for the first time.”

“Hey,” she said. “No talk about your exes.”

“Not exes,” he said. “That was a party. We’d won the championship. I wasn’t even the winning score but just a picture they’d taken. We had a few beers at my friend's house and I ended up in the back room with Sheila Commons.”

“No more,” she said, putting her fingers in her ears and making noises.

“Fine,” he said. “Are you jealous?”

“I think we’ve established that I’m a jealous girlfriend. This article is your name listed for high school graduation. Here is your name for the academy. A few more with arrests you’d made. Oh man,” she said when she got to the last one.

“What?” he asked, pulling it out of her hand.

“It’s when you were stabbed. Poor Barry. I wonder when he got that. I remember when my father told us about it, but I can’t put the dates together of when he found out.”

“This article was released a week after it happened,” he said. “They kept it as quiet as they could to get the arrest. Or bring in everyone involved. The guy who stabbed me was killed on the spot by my partner, but they still had to investigate more. The case we were working on too.”

“I want to say he found out a few weeks after this date. I just know he was really upset but then found out you’d been released and were okay. I mean you would be fine. So yeah.”

“I was in the hospital for a few weeks and home for a few months recovering,” he said.

“Then he found out much later,” she said.

“How was he?” he asked.

“Devastated, as I said,” she said. “I remember my father coming home upset. My father said it was damn close to how Barry was when he found out your mother passed. I think Barry got in a dark place for a while there.”

“I know what that is like,” he said. “I felt I lived in that cave for years after my mother died.”

“I can’t even imagine what you’ve gone through in your life,” she said. “I’m sorry I pushed you to open this.”

“But not sorry enough you wouldn’t wish I’d open another?” he asked.

She shrugged. “You have to make that decision and you have to be the one to open it. Not me.”

He picked up another envelope and tore it open.

“I’m glad you’re here for this one,” he said and handed it over.

She looked and saw it was the obituary for his mother.

“There is something on the back,” she said and flipped it over. It was a piece of paper taped to it marking the day Barry found out.

“Did you see this?” she asked, handing it back.

He looked at it. “This is supposed to be his proof that he didn’t know?”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Van. Other than he knew you wouldn’t believe him and it seems to me Barry has gone to a lot of work to try to get you to see otherwise.”

Van put the article back in the drawer with the others and shut it. “I need to get out of here. Where can we go with Frankie to get some air?”

“We could go back on the deck, but I think you mean you want to get out of the house.”

“I do,” he said.

She found it sweet that he wanted to bring Frankie with them when they could have easily brought the dog back to her house a mile away and done anything else.

“There is a dog park in Plymouth,” she said.

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