“Okay. Look. Your grandfather turns out to be kind of a dick. I know that has to hurt. I’m not completely insensitive. But we’re producing something here, something important.”

“It isn’t that important.”

“You don’t mean that, Q. You said it yourself. This podcast is going to change lives, including your own.”

“I don’t want to change my life.” Quentin looked at Dean, his tapered fingers tightening on the book.

“You know what I mean.”

“I don’t want anybody else to hear that interview,” he said. “I don’t want to do this podcast.”

At last, the awkward pause.

“I thought I could do something,” Quentin said. “Change lives, like you said. Or at least learn from it. But . . . I think what I’ve learned is that I don’t want anybody to know about my mother, or my grandfather, or my connection to these murders.”

“Why?”

“Because,” he said quietly, “the one thing I’ve learned is that my only real family is Dean. And I don’t feel like doing a podcast on that.”

Quentin took a breath. He could feel Dean’s gaze on him, but he didn’t return it.

“Okay,” Summer said. “What if I told you that we could do Closure with hardly a mention of your family?”

“That’s not possible.”

“It is,” she said. “It’s why I called you in the first place. I’ve found somebody.”

“What do you mean?”

“Actually, he found us. His name is George Pollard. I forwarded you his email.”

Quentin opened his email. When he clicked on his in-box, Summer’s forwarded one was at the top—the only unread email in his queue, George Pollard’s name the return address. He gaped at the subject line. “Oh, come on.”

“Don’t judge until you read it.”

The email came with an attachment, and Quentin opened that first—a faded, scanned photo from the ’70s of a thin, dark-haired boy in a gas station attendant’s uniform, posing between pumps.

“Pollard isn’t insane,” Summer was saying. “I talked to him. He’s actually very respectable—hospital administrator from Duarte, married for thirty years with three kids. President of his local rotary club . . .”

Quentin enlarged the picture. George Pollard was also movie-star hot in his youth, especially for a guy who came of age before going to the gym became trendy.

“He knew her,” Summer said. “He claims they were in love.”

“Yeah, and?”

“The video? The one he sent us the link to? Hello?” She said it as though he were an easily distracted kindergartner, and she was trying to teach him the alphabet.

“I haven’t looked at it yet.” Quentin zoomed closer in, to the handsome teen’s shoulder. His mouth went dry.

“Come on,” Summer said. “Have you even read what he has to say?”