“Accident,” Paul states and shifts back to me. “He agonized, Mallory. He truly didn’t know what happened that night. She was there one minute and gone the next. He did not hit her, and he sure as hell didn’t shoot her. Whether she jumped or fell, he just didn’t know.”

“But why were they out there that night at all?” I ask, reliving the frustration we all felt at the time. “The ocean was churned up—”

“Not when they left. Tom was firm about that, and the forensic report supports it. It was foggy, but nothing that his chart-plotter couldn’t beat. The squalls were a ways off.” He broadens his gaze to include Jack. “She begged him to take her out. She needed his ear, needed his sympathy, his advice.”

“Did he give it?” I ask.

“He told her he didn’t know what to say.”

Jack’s voice rises. “Did he advise her to kill herself?”

“Pu-leeze.”

“Or disappear?”

A chuffing sound is Paul’s response.

“How do you know?” Jack demands. His eyes are granite hard. This is the man I fled from twenty years ago. I hadn’t known how to handle him.

Paul seems to. In the face of anger, his composure grows. “Because I know Tom,” he says levelly. “I also know how difficult the last few years were for him. His mind wandered. I’d be sitting with him, and without warning he’d be back in time. Often it was to that night, and he was asking me what she’d been thinking. He kept saying there had to be another way, that nothing could be so bad to make her disappear like that. I’m not sure he knew what he was saying or remembered saying it after he had—but beneath it all, there was a method to his madness. I don’t think his illness allowed him to lie.”

Jack rolls his eyes. “Dementia guarantees the whole truth and nothing but the truth?”

“Even before dementia. He was law-abiding.”

“So the cops got the whole truth? Did he tell them any of what led up to that night?”

Losing a tad of his composure, Paul lashes out, “Would you have wanted him to tell the police that she stole from her family’s estate and then covered it up? Or that she planned her disappearance so the problem would go away? Because he did think that. For years, he held onto that hope. But the fact is, Jack, he didn’t know. He didn’t know the whole truth.”

Jack wraps a hand around the back of his neck and says nothing. Wanting to bring him back, I grab onto the edge of his pants pocket and give a little tug, but he seems unaware.