Nan says that whenever she is proud of me but doesn’t want to spell it out. It always makes me happy-sad, but you learn to live with that.

I don’t cry, and when Dad starts hammering upstairs, I’m grateful that she can shout him into action. But she is his mother-in-law. She was there when they got married. She was the woman he was desperate to impress when he first fell in love with her daughter.

So I guess she has a power that I don’t.

Chapter 52

If you don’t know the whole story, you would assume my dad is an asshole. But he’s not, because when Mom first died, some people pointed the finger at him. A few pointed more than a finger.

This isn’t the first time we’ve had a brick thrown through our window, because if enough people are interested in your story, some will make you the villain. That’s what happened with Dad, when someone started saying he didn’t look upset enough while he was appealing for witnesses. They questioned his lack of tears, forgetting that by then, he was all cried out.

Like all bullshit, most people ignored it. But not everyone, including some idiot who thought spraying insults on our garage door was a good use of his time, who thought throwing a brick through our living room window was a perfectly normal thing to do.

If you’d seen my dad back then, you’d recognize the look in his eyes when he saw my bedroom window shattered. He thought he was the reason. He felt the finger pointing at him again, but he was too tired to fight.

I remember the day it happened, the knock on the door and the hushed voices.

Mom was working late, so Dad had picked me up from school. He was making dinner—a real meal, with vegetables and spices and three saucepans on the stove.

A policeman whispered his way into our living room. He said maybe it would be better if I wasn’t around to hear this.

Dad told me to go upstairs and play, so I did, because I was seven. I played while they told my dad his wife had been murdered within screaming distance of our house. Except she didn’t scream. She didn’t get the chance.

And when I came down, Dad was sitting in the living room with the scariest look on his face. The bulbs behind his eyes had blown. He looked broken.

At some point, he threw the dinner away, and he cried when I said I was hungry.

These aren’t memories. They are stains. I couldn’t forget them if I wanted to.

But what I know with absolute certainty is that my dad had nothing to do with my mom’s murder.

Chapter 53

That night, Danny calls and says, “I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”