Joel had learned another lesson that summer, in those moments of fulfilled, defiant happiness: that shame and love, while one might breed the other, could never truly be felt at the same time. For a few brief miles on the way back to Bentley, before the disgust and the fear and the cunning set in again, Joel would feel happier with Troy, righter, than he had ever felt in his life.

He doubted now that Troy’s feelings had been anywhere near as ecstatic. Apparently the man had had much larger concerns that summer than some rough head in a stand of trees (Joel supposed a drug habit explained the permanent sheen of sweat that seemed to cover Troy’s copper skin under even the coldest air-conditioning). Troy had certainly abandoned Joel easily enough: in the wake of all that happened in the park, all that had happened with Deputy Grissom and Joel’s arrest, Troy had cut off all contact, had let Joel sink like an anchor cut loose from its tether.

When Joel had heard, two months after his world had imploded, that Troy had gone missing, he hadn’t allowed himself to be worried. He’d forced himself not to care. After that final betrayal, Troy had taught Joel a second lesson that summer. He had taught Joel how to cauterize his heart.

As Joel’s phone began to buzz, the question finally popped into his head: why had Troy not asked Joel to meet him here, in this clearing, that night when Joel was arrested? The two of them had never once gone to the public park together, and for good reason.

Kimbra Lott had texted him.

hey. there’s some things you should know.

I’m listening.

There was a pause.

Luke Evers doesn’t have an alibi for Friday night.

Joel let out a little whistle. A manic grin tightened his face. He began to type a response but Kimbra cut him off.

there’s more.

CLARK

At 2:04 that afternoon a woman named Patsy Boyd Vaughn, a forty-one-year-old mother of three, made a left onto South Street from the highway going fifty-five miles an hour. She was speeding, though this was hardly unusual in Bentley—South Street was all but abandoned in the midafternoon and was often treated as an extension of the highway. That morning, however, Patsy had complained to her husband that she hadn’t slept well since Friday night.

At 2:04 she was asleep at the wheel, and by 2:05 was lying dead against it.

She lost consciousness somewhere in the middle of the turn. Her foot came to rest on the accelerator. Her restored lime-green Cadillac, a lavish birthday gift from her husband as an apology for an affair, carried on at fifty-five miles an hour and fishtailed into the first building at the intersection of South Street and Highway 77.

Emily Bunner, a bored girl with a husband (still) in Iraq, was the sole teller that afternoon at First Community Bank, and she didn’t look up from her phone until Mrs. Vaughn’s Cadillac came flying through the bank’s front windows. Emily leaped out of the way, though she lost her leg in the subsequent collision. Ironic, folks said later, that Emily’s husband had made it through three tours of IEDs and ISIS unscathed, but it was she who would be the amputee.