Rae proved she was listening. “Yes. He might have put her there for the waves to wash away.” Her voice contained a sharp, bitter note. “What made him do that?”

Kellen reminded herself that Dylan’s problems started long before they arrived, and said, “Daddy and I think he poisoned himself with his homemade liquors. Maybe he ate a poisonous mushroom, or smoked bad weed.”

“What is it about some people? Why do they hurt the ones they should love?”

Great. The big interrogation, and of course Max was gone. Wouldn’t you know when the questions got tough, he’d be flying in the opposite direction? Kellen tried to dig down to the basics, and didn’t try to pretend she knew the answers. “Some say people are all the same. But they’re not. There’s a big fight called, ‘Nature versus nurture,’ and that means, ‘Are we born the way we are, or does the way we’re raised form us?’”

“And?” Rae had crossed from torment into belligerence.

That was fair; Kellen was pretty peeved herself. “There’s no answer, but I know what I think.”

Rae trudged along, pushing her bicycle. “What?”

“I think it’s a little of both.” Kellen stopped outside the garage door. “‘The flame that melts the butter, tempers the steel.’ Can you figure out what that means?”

“No!”

“If you want to melt butter, you put it over a fire. If you want to temper iron, make it hard, like the steel on the body of that pickup—” Kellen gestured into the garage “—you put it over a fire. It’s the same fire, but completely different reactions because the material you start with is different.”

“So everything depends on how we are when we’re born?”

“And how we’re treated as we grow and live. Some people have an easy life. Some people walk through hellfire to get where they’re going. None of us ever knows what goes on in another person’s head and heart and life.” Kellen went inside, got her bike, came back out into the sun and found Rae standing mulishly still.

“Mommy, you didn’t answer my question.”

No, she supposed she hadn’t. “I guess I don’t know the answer.”

Rae shouted, “That’s not funny!”

Overwhelmed with a surge of love and empathy, Kellen caught Rae in a sudden fierce hug.

Rae resisted, then hugged her back, her face pushed hard into Kellen’s chest. “I don’t want to see it anymore—Dylan and all that blood.” Her voice was muffled. “Every time I let my mind drift, it’s there. I don’t want to see it. I want to know why it happened. I want Jamie to be alive. I want to be safe.”

Kellen understood that, all right. “You want it to be last year.”

“Yes!”