“Sorry? You’re sorry? If you’d kept quiet, this wouldn’t have happened. I had no idea who you were. I didn’t know what you were doing until it was too late.”

Tears paint mascara tracks down her blotchy cheeks, and she looks both ways, then back at me.

For a second, I think she’s going to hit me, but she shakes her head and says, “You have no idea.”

I want to tell her I have the exact idea, because what gives her the right to own heartache?

I still wake up sometimes after dreaming of Mom, and for a fraction of a second, I think she’s there before the truth tears the morning in two. I still stare at her picture and will her back to life. I still miss her so much.

Lorna Banks’s mom opens her mouth to speak again, but before she does, my dad walks into the hallway and says, “You should come in.”

Chapter 90

She hesitates, then steps inside and waits.

“It’s okay,” Dad says.

She looks deflated, tiny, broken. It’s as if she pumped herself full of anger, and now, emptied of it and standing silently in our hallway, she has halved in size.

“Cup of tea?” I say, and she stares at me, confused.

This clearly isn’t how she thought things would go. But when I woke up this morning, I didn’t expect to have the mother of the Magpie Man’s fourteenth victim in my house.

She nods and follows me into the kitchen, watches me boil the kettle, make three cups, then hand one to her.

“This is…” I pause.

“Frances,” she says.

“This is Frances, and this is my dad.”

“Hello,” he says, then, pointing to the living room, “Have a seat.”

“I’m sorry about Lorna,” I say, but she isn’t listening.

She’s too busy staring at my dad, her eyes flitting from his odd socks to his stained shirt to the beard that creeps out rather than down like an out-of-control bush. It used to be red, but now there are only small flecks of orange wrapped in gray.

He must look a mess to her. But Dad’s face, his sorrow, the same rumpled clothes he wears over and over again, I’ve grown so used to them, I don’t notice anymore.

Frances looks around our living room until her eyes catch mine.

“We know what you’re going through,” I say. “I’m sorry about what happened, but we’ve been going through it for years.”

She opens her mouth to speak, then closes it again, her eyes focusing on my parents’ wedding photo. She stares at it for a long time, and when I look over at Dad, he is staring too—at the day he smiled the most genuine smile of his life.

“I’m sorry,” Frances whispers. “I just…I don’t know what to do.”