“Dad buried Caleb out on this trail?”

She answers my question with one of her own. “Don’t you remember that morning when he finally came back home? It was nearly daylight. We hadn’t slept. You pissed yourself, just another stain we had to clean.”

“No,” I tell her. “I don’t remember that.”

“Daddy walked in the house, nearly passed out from exhaustion. Covered in dirt and sweat. Grabbed a drink and collapsed in the big leather chair. Didn’t even change out of his clothes.”

This part is all blank to me. I remember my father telling us to go get a tarp, and the next thing I recall is waking up in my bed sometime the next day.

“I must have blocked that out,” I tell her.

She turns and the sudden movement startles me, causing me to drop my phone, which clunks on the parking-lot asphalt. Instead of reaching for it, I remain upright. Cora is a few fast strides away.

“You were nearly catatonic at that point,” she says. “Daddy told us to sit on the floor next to his chair, and we did.” The hand holding the knife sways like a sunflower in a gentle wind. “He patted us on the heads, like dogs. Said he’d been out on the Chester Woodall trail, and what he’d done was the hardest thing in his life. Physically, emotionally. But he said he did it because we were a family, and no matter how sideways families got, they stuck together.”

I remember none of this. I glance at the ground and see my phone, screen pointing up. I’m horrified to see the recorder app visible, counting away the seconds as it captures our conversation.

“He never supported me,” I say.

“That’s because you left, Rose. Sticking together means being together, all the time.”

I almost ask what happened to her to make her who she is, but the moment I part my lips to speak, they are shut by a horrible, blinding thought. A thought so distorted and perverse it can’t be tethered to reality, but it invades my brain as if planted there in a microchip.

The thought is this:

My father molested Cora.

Maybe for years. And this is why she’s who she is. Why she did that to Caleb Benner. I have no evidence of this, or even an inkling of it, but it’s forcefully real and possible.

I gasp. She takes a step closer. I hold out my arm and kneel to the ground, scooping up my phone.

“You’re overcome,” she says, taking another step closer.

“Stay away from me.” I rise.

“Daddy was so loyal to us. How he protected us when the police came and asked us questions.”

I’m dizzy with fear and adrenaline. “I barely remember talking to them.”

“You didn’t talk to them for long. Neither did I. And Daddy was there the whole time, putting an end to things before we said anything stupid.”

“God, stop calling him Daddy,” I say. “You never call him that.”