“Diane, I saved the drama for my momma,” I say, hopping into the passenger seat. Ricky’s urn returns to my lap as I buckle in for the home stretch. As we peel out, I can’t look back at Ario’s home—not at the destructive wake I’ve left. Or he’s left. Or really, that my mother has left. I never even considered she might be capable of making legal trouble for Ario—but it makes sense. His whole hands-off attitude to me after my coming out blew up makes terrible, horrible sense.

Our fifteen-minute journey from White Eagle to Ambrose is a single country road of open fields, but each mile feels like another step closer to the end of the world.

The only glance at my phone I allow myself is to reread Marcos’s last text: a selfie of the two of us—mud-splattered, rode hard, and put away wet—in the lobby of our hotel the night we arrived. He captioned it Icons .

Once more, my heart squeezes through a vice. I miss him like a limb. A lifetime has passed in the twenty-four hours since we said goodbye.

On our second day in luxurious Costa Rican custody, Special Agent Elms and her partner Agent Rhodes descended like savior eagles into the hotel. While they battled the local government over permission to charter a boat to find the island, Marcos and I remained sequestered. When we weren’t passing time with each other, we passed the time YouTubing the Hannigans. I had no idea how massive Ricky’s tragedy had actually been. 60 Minutes devoted an entire special to the unsuccessful manhunt, spawning a 2001 made-for-TV movie, which is impossible to find online because it was so maligned. Back then, Mrs. Hannigan wouldn’t cooperate, so too many details of the attack remained shrouded in mystery, leaving filmmakers to get offensively creative filling in the holes. Two decades came and went, and the Hannigans faded into history—even among those who experienced it firsthand.