In my mind I see the way the light spun golden threads in her dark hair right before she left. Still feel the way my heart sliced open. “Why does she deserve that?” I say it quietly, and picture Tate with fingerprints of bruises across his arms that turned yellow, then green, before they disappeared. Anger rushes hot through my veins at what his father did to him. “Could you ever be proud of your father if he was better?”

“My . . . dad was different than Alice, Claire, and you know that.” He speaks softly but firmly, and my spine curves forward with shame. He’s right. His father was violent and spiteful and spared not a single drop of love for his son.

“I’m sorry.”

“But I did try to understand him.” He eyes my empty hand, looks sheepish. “Okay, you should write this p . . . p-art down so you remember it. I did bring your notebook along, well, kind of. Here.”

He pulls the truck to the side of the road, picks up the tablet in my lap, opens it to a program that has a notebook-paper graphic. He switches dictation on, looks up at me, eyebrows raised. “This way I can t . . . t-alk, but it’s getting recorded in your notebook—well, this version of your . . . notebook, if you like it, or you can always recopy it to your p . . . p-aper one, after you ride home in your horse and buggy, of course.”

A playfulness lights up his eyes, and instead of being upset, I am warmed by his humor. I’ve always recognized my antiquated ways.

He pulls back onto the road, taps the steering wheel while he talks. “It was a few years ago. I came back because I thought that . . . seeing him would heal something in me. And maybe I thought he’d be man enough to say he was sorry.” Tate rubs the stubble on his cheek. “He had n . . . n-othing to say to me except more of the same, and do you know what I did? I started laughing.”

I want to touch his face, put my arms around him, hold him. “Why?” I ask.

“In my head he’d always been a g . . . g-iant, a monster who held all the power. He was a man and I was n . . . n-othing. But I finally saw him for . . . what he truly was.”

“And what was that?”

“N . . . n-othing, Claire. Only a shriveled bit of human flesh. Pathetic and alone. N . . . n-ot a monster at all. Just a man who’d made all the wrong decisions and hurt anyone who loved him.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, oh. But your mom, Claire, she’s different.”

“How?”

“She loves you, for one.”