The old woman’s eyes, so tired of it all, drift nearly imperceptibly toward the bureau of framed photographs that Ricky’s hospital bed used to obscure. The pictures, conveniently, maddeningly absent of Bill Hannigan, that rabid dog, taunt me with their hope. In the frontmost frame, two young children, boys, one slightly smaller than the other, embrace on a dock at the end of a grand lake house. A dull ache grips my chest like an old war wound: I’m convinced these boys are Ricky and his young cousin Stanley Packard. They’re soaking wet in their swim trunks, pure joy in their eyes, unmarred by time, unaware of the savage future waiting for them.

They were friends.

The cruelty singes my lungs black. My eyes burn with tears. They’re dead. They don’t need to be, this didn’t need to happen. I wrestle with the unfair weight and constraints of time—I’m furious at my body for not being able to instantly travel back in time, right now, and rescue those boys on the dock.

“Why couldn’t you have just let them alone?” I whisper darkly. Without waiting for an answer, I leave.

Surrounded by her picture frames, Mrs. Hannigan calls after me, “I did my best, you know. I did my best. I did my BEST.” She repeats this on a loop, almost a mantra to herself, because I’m clearly not listening and I don’t stop walking. I leave her alone, the only surviving member of the Packard-Hannigan family, save for Bill. Her brother is dead by her nephew’s hand. Her nephew, son, and son-in-law are dead by her husband’s hand. She did her best, but what’s her best when the men of her family have massacred each other like a pack of lions?

I fight a twinge of guilt as I hug Ricky tighter—he probably wouldn’t have wanted me to treat his mother this coldly, but I have many difficult conversations ahead of me today and I can’t spend all my energy on a ghost.

“One down, two to go,” I say as my driver pulls her sleek, government-issued sedan out of the Hannigans’ sloping driveway and toward the rich part of White Eagle.

“Starting route to 731 North Orchard Court,” the GPS says, and my breath vanishes. I grasp the knotted bamboo of Ario’s recorder beneath my tank top and press it to my lips.

I’m not ready for this at all.