He lived twenty miles away in a home that sat on the shore of a small lake. His backyard sloped downward, and at the end of it, a long wooden dock jutted out into the water. I snuck back there and hid within a cluster of trees while gathering the courage to kill him, just shoot the son of a bitch and be done with it. I didn’t care about the consequences. But after watching him sit with his arms crossed at the end of the dock, I realized he was crying. I had convinced myself that he’d been using my mother, wooing her with his wealth and position to add excitement to his life by having a casual fling, but after seeing how crushed he still was, how deflated he appeared, I suddenly realized that he really had loved my mother, and probably had every intention of marrying her just as they had talked about once the timing was right for her to leave my father, which, according to his word in court, was going to be that very week. The defense attorney threw everything he had at him, but the man never wavered, not that it would have mattered. My mother was, after all, dead, and my father’s defense was that he was so intoxicated he couldn’t recall the shooting—his blood alcohol level was .41, and toxicology results showed there was enough cocaine and heroin in his system to kill an elephant.

I sat in the bushes and watched the man for a while. At some point I started crying too, moved by an urge to go out there and sit with him so we could mourn together. I didn’t, of course, and when I finally left I never saw him again. But I hold firmly to the belief that he loved my mother, and that she loved him back, for on that final day, she looked as happy as she had ever looked before, and if there’s any solace to what followed, it’s that in the last hours of her life, she had regained much of the vibrant sheen she’d lost along the way, and had fallen deeply in love, truly feeling happiness.