I interrupted him. “And you know I don’t like being lied to. I think they had suspects and you knew about it. So why don’t you just tell me? What is there to hide? Who were the suspects and why weren’t they caught?”

His face turned red, starting with the tips of his ears and creeping all the way down his throat into the collar of his shirt. He stared hard at his hands, and I could practically feel the discomfort vibrating off him. “Okay, I suppose you’re old enough now.”

“You think?” I said.

“I didn’t want to burden you with it when you were young. You had enough to deal with, losing your mother like that. You didn’t need to know that they suspected . . .”

I was impatient and let him flounder for only a second. “Suspected who?”

He pressed the rim of his coffee cup in, fidgeting. “Me.”

I felt the world around me pulse green and gold. I had suspected Dad had something to do with Mom’s murder, but hearing him say it out loud was still a shock.

“They thought you did it?” My throat felt small and tight. Was this going to be the moment when I finally got honest answers? “Why?”

He shrugged. “They always suspect the husband first, right?” He shook his head at the ground and muttered, “Damn cops.”

“So what happened?” I asked, not wanting him to stop talking. But also definitely wanting him to stop talking. If my dad confessed to me, would I have to do something? Would I be able to turn him in? It seemed so cut-and-dry, so easy, when it was all theory. But now, sitting next to him—the man who’d brushed my hair and fixed my lunches and took care of me when I was sick—it seemed so much more complicated than that.

Still. It didn’t matter what he might have done to atone after the fact. If he was the one who had taken her from me, I would still hate him.

“They questioned me a few times and decided they had nothing on me. Then they let me go. And as far as I could tell, they closed the case. They were so certain that I’d done it and had just covered it up well enough that they couldn’t bust me, they didn’t even bother to really look at anyone else.”

“It’s getting hot,” we heard, and both turned to see Marisol clomping toward us on her impractical heels, fanning her face with her hands. The tension between Dad and me snapped away in an instant. Damn it.

Dad checked his watch. “Oops!” He hopped up on his feet. “We’re going to lose any semblance of good light if we keep sitting around. Nikki, you want to take the next few shots?”

That was it.

That was it?