TELLING DAD THAT I was thinking of becoming a cop may have been the least of the problems we had between us, but it was a problem nonetheless. He wasn’t happy about it. He didn’t like the police any more than I did. Maybe even less. They’d never solved my mother’s murder, and in his eyes, that was just as bad as being the murderer. It wasn’t logical, but I could understand where he was coming from. The crimson memories of my mother were the worst memories I had, and every time I thought about her murderer, walking around in the world, totally free, while she rotted beneath the ground, the crimson fused with indigo betrayal that blanketed me with such hopelessness, it was like I was the dead one. At least on the inside.

But how much of Dad’s outrage over Mom’s death was genuine, and how much was a front? This was a question that had been nagging me for months now, ever since I’d discovered Mom’s ties to Vanessa Hollis’s escort service, and Dad’s complete and total lie about not knowing anything about the Hollises at all. Something fishy was going on, and I hated that the one man in this world that I thought I could trust was the source of my unease.

I hated it, but I accepted it. Because I didn’t have a choice.

Every time Dad left the house for any amount of time—and with his job as a photographer, he was constantly on location—I busied myself with trying to figure out what exactly he was hiding from me, and how. The problem was, when you’ve been hiding something from someone you live with for over ten years, you get pretty good at hiding. I had searched the entire house, top to bottom, twice, and had found nothing. Only a dusty, locked metal box beneath his desk, and even that I had run across by accident. And I couldn’t crack the combination to save my life. Or to avenge Mom’s. Or whatever it was I was trying to do.

I came home from the physical therapy parking lot and plopped the manila envelope on the kitchen counter, grabbed a glass from the cabinet and turned to the refrigerator to fill it. I was so irritated by my run-in with Chris, I almost didn’t see Dad sitting at the kitchen table, poring over some paperwork of his own. He looked up when I dropped the envelope.

“Bad day at the station, Officer?” He said it like he was teasing, but he still had a bitter edge to his voice whenever he brought up my future plans. And to think, just a few months ago at my graduation, he was desperate for me to have future plans.

I took a long drink of water. “For your information, I’m not even applying. I decided today.”