Page 103 of Coram House

Gears turn until it all snaps into place. The thing I couldn’t see. The same story, but from a different angle. Sarah Dale drinking too much. Sarah Dale dying in a car crash. Her two-year-old granddaughter in the back seat.My kid died, Parker had said that night with the whiskys.

“Parker, I’m so sorry.” I choke on the words.

He nods but his face doesn’t change. “After the case, she started drinking. Just a little at first to help her sleep. I don’t know when it went beyond that. I didn’t notice, I—” He breaks off. “I should have noticed.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“When you have a kid, you have all these firsts. First steps, first words. You just expect the rest to come. And then it was just—over.”

It feels like a hand is squeezing my throat. I can’t speak. Can’t breathe. But the words are pouring out of him now. Maybe he’s never been the silent type. He’s just been living behind a dam he built between his mind and voice.

“I tried so hard to hate her. But I knew all the things she was trying to forget. It was like this chain of terrible things, one leading to another,but if you followed it all the way back to the beginning—to the people who did this—what happened to them? Nothing.” His voice is blazing. “They all got exactly what they wanted.”

“This isn’t the way,” I say, but I sound unconvincing, even to myself. There’s some part of me that agrees with him. Jeannette Leroy didn’t earn a life of peace. She abused children. Watched a boy drown. She should have died in jail. But there are other kinds of justice.

Parker looks at me. For a moment, it’s like everything else disappears. The wind. The cold. The bleeding man at his feet. “There was nothing left for me but darkness,” he says. “At least, this way there would be a point.”

Something inside me breaks. Maybe my heart.I understand, I want to tell him. I too have looked into the mirror and seen an empty container, filled with grief.

Red and blue lights flicker on the ice. I turn. Coram House stands sentry on the hill. Police lights strobe the sky. I didn’t hear the sirens over the wind.

“You called Garcia?” Parker asks.

I don’t trust myself to speak, so I just nod.

“All right,” he says. “Okay.”

“Parker, let him go. Please. I don’t want another body.”

Our eyes meet for a long second. Then he looks down at Bill. He steps back.

It takes Bill a second to realize he’s free. Then he scrambles across the ice like a crab. “Help,” he shouts. He slips and falls and then gets to his feet again. “Here, I’m down here.”

He takes off toward the flashing lights at a limping run.

I face Parker, ten feet of ice between us. He doesn’t step toward me, doesn’t move. Tears make warm tracks down my face. It’s incredible what a person can carry inside, unfathomable from the outside.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

But I can’t find my voice, couldn’t forgive him anyways. It’s not up to me. But I can’t hate him either.

“Parker.”

His name comes out as a whisper, but his eyes are trained ahead,where the mountains would be if there was enough light to see them. Now it’s just darkness.

“If you knew you’d die horribly,” he says. “If you knew how it ended—would you go back and undo the moment you were born?”

He turns to look at me with those brown eyes ringed in gold, waiting for my answer.

I think about Tommy, his short life, his terrible death. Parker’s daughter, two years old, crushed in a totaled car. Adam, who lived with his own slow death rolling toward him. Would I erase them, knowing what I do about how their lives ended? Then there’s the bottomless sadness of my own heart. Would I go quietly into oblivion or do it all again?

“No,” I say. “I wouldn’t undo it.”

“Why?” he asks.

“Because, what else is there?” It’s not a good answer, but it’s the only one I have.

Parker nods. “I’m sorry, but I don’t regret it. You tell them that.”

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