Page 27 of The Night We Lost Him

“I just refuse to be something else that makes you feel trapped,” she said. “Or to put myself in a position of being someone you feel like you have to lie to. I want to be the person you never lie to.”

“I can make you that deal.”

“Except you’re going to want to go to the Cape for fall break or on a road trip with your roommate for Christmas. You’re going to want to do all sorts of things that have nothing to do with coming home to me… which will make you feel badly and then you will lie about that, so I don’t feel badly too. I’m not interested in any of that.”

“I have no intention of lying to you about anything,” he said. And he meant it.

“Great,” she said. “So that’s settled.”

He tilted his head, looked up at her. “I don’t think we just agreed to the same thing.”

“Can we not spend the night this way? You understand what I’m telling you even if you don’t want to understand what I’m telling you.”

He didn’t say anything. What was there to say? She saw right through him. She saw right through most people. She’d figured out how to do that, early on. She’d learned it as a coping mechanism, as a way to survive in her house. It was one of the reasons arguing with her was so difficult. She was wiser than he was. She knew better. But what good was her knowing better, if that meant he was going to lose her?

“You’re my favorite person,” he said. “That isn’t going to change.”

“Then we have nothing to worry about, do we?”

She straightened her dress and stood up. He looked up at her. He had never known anyone like her. He suspected, even in this moment, that he would never know anyone like her again.

“Let’s go downstairs and I’ll put on some pasta. I need sustenance if you want to continue pretending tomorrow is going to go another way.”

“New Hampshire,” he said.

“What?”

“Charles Hearst III went to boarding school in New Hampshire. Not Maine.”

“See?” she said. “We’re already growing apart.”

“What if I want more?”

She bent down, looked into his eyes. “Well, on the day that I believe you’re capable of that, maybe we’ll be more.”

Three Lies & the Truth…

“Tell me he wasn’t being super cagey,” Sam says.

Sam is driving us out of Hope Ranch and toward the 101, toward Los Angeles, toward the red-eye that will take me home.

“Seriously,” he says. “Look me in the eye and tell me there isn’t something going on here.”

“You came at him pretty hard, Sam.”

“So?”

“So that would make anyone defensive. Who knows how much of it was that he was just reacting?” I ask.

“How much of it do you think was him just reacting?”

I turn toward Sam, more suspicious than I’m willing to let him know. I could see it when I looked at Uncle Joe and we were pressing him. He was keeping something from us, protecting it fiercely. The question is: Was it the thing that could help explain what had been going on with our father?

“Why didn’t you want me to talk to him about the night Dad died? Isn’t that what we are supposed to be doing here?”

“That is what we’re doing here,” Sam says. “But we can’t be telling anyone about that. Not even Joe. Not until we know he wasn’t involved.”

“Wow. Just when I think you’re not entirely crazy.”

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