I didn’t respond. I couldn’t. The anger building in my chest was too intense. It choked the words right out of me. Who the hell did this guy think he was? To think he knew me, after only meeting me a couple of times? To think he had a right to that, just because he wanted in my mom’s pants? And to say I was like him. I could tell right then and there that he and I were nothing alike.

He was wrong. He had no clue why I had jumped in that trench.

I kicked the passenger door open before he’d even finished pulling into the driveway. “See you on Saturday,” he called as I stomped past the garage up to the front door and jammed my thumb onto the keypad. I could still feel his eyes on my back as I slammed the door behind me.

It was four o’clock. Mom and Celeste wouldn’t be home for a couple more hours, at least. It was time to dig out that box.

Chapter 3

I searched high and low for that damned thing. My first thought was that it would be in Mom’s lab, the converted garden shed in our backyard where she worked on her smaller projects. But I checked every drawer and cupboard, every nook and cranny, and found nothing. It wasn’t in the garage, either, or in the kitchen. I looked through her dresser drawers, the back corner of her closet, everything.

It occurred to me, as I slumped back on my heels after feeling around under her shoe rack, that she might have thrown the box away when she took all of Dad’s clothes to the recycling center. The thought made me sick to my stomach.

I closed my eyes, trying to remember what the coin had looked like. I was sure the arch engraved on its face looked just like the one out at Erick’s dig site, but my memory was fuzzy. There had been other things in the box that had held my attention more, things that were more definitely Dad’s, like his spare e-cig atomizer and his great-uncle’s wristwatch. And his wedding band.

That’s what I’d been looking at when Mom caught me. I still remember the way her face hardened when she saw that ring there, in a box of junk he must have buried in the garden before he took off. I still don’t know why he’d left that stuff there. I guess maybe I’d hoped he was planning to come back for it. But when Mom saw that ring, I think she knew once and for all that he wasn’t coming back.

Mom had taken the box and told me she wanted me to forget about it. Fat chance of that.