She picked up one sneaker, clutching it to her heart as she moved to the window. Then she stood, watching the field and waiting, with her back to us. Blame began to gather like weather, pressing at every corner of the room, and there was Ruth, right in the darkening middle. But she’d lied. To everyone. She was right where she deserved to be.

RUTH

I hold Pim’s clothespin in my hand, trace over our initials. I couldn’t let them bury it with him. At the funeral, while Mom coughed out tight little gasps, I went to the casket to say goodbye one last time and saw it there beside his body, and I took it, hoping that somehow Pim would know that his home was always with me. I don’t consider that stealing.

But I did steal the photo of Pim from the family album the summer I left the farm. They wouldn’t have given it to me if I’d asked. I took it because it’s happy. It’s as simple as that. There was once a time when everything was okay. There were days when we weren’t in ruin, when I wasn’t the one to blame.

I took that photo, but I didn’t leave it lying on the coffee table for Chase to find. No, he sifted through my things. Maybe I should be angrier about that, but at least he only searched my bag hanging on the hook and didn’t get as far as Eli’s coffee tin, which remains stashed under the bathroom sink. I’m not mad at him; not really. Rifling through another person’s past is all any of us are doing anyway. And if you give a dog nothing but scraps, eventually it will seek out its own food. I tried to explain that to Alex when she finally returned home four hours later, but she didn’t believe me.

“You left it lying somewhere on purpose,” she all but spat at me. “You love that he found it.”

“Alex! Do you think I came here just to mess you up? I’m not trying to cause trouble, you know.”

“No?” she said. “Why break the habit of a lifetime?”

Perhaps she doesn’t understand that everything she lost, I lost, too. There are moments even now when I’m still flooded by Pim, the smell of him, his brown-berry summer skin, his laugh. He used to join Alex and me when we snuck out of our bedroom to watch television long after we’d been tucked in.