Through all this, his face is ice. I’ve never spoken to him this honestly in my life, and there’s a comfort to his steely gaze, as if his tensile strength can withstand all the pressure I’m putting on him in the moment.

I reveal to my father my recurring nightmares. How I relive that night from two decades ago and can’t take it anymore. The final thing I confess is that the weight of the secrets has broken me and how I think about the allure of death more often than I should. Really think about it.

Some indeterminate amount of time later, I finish, drained of everything. I slump in my chair, thinking I could sleep a year and it wouldn’t be enough.

My father is quiet, contemplative. After a silence that stretches for minutes, the first thing he says is “I think you killed Riley.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

I force myself to look into his eyes, gaze past the perpetual squint and lock in on him with resolve. I would do this as a kid, in those times he showed enough interest to chastise me about something. I’d lock eyes with him and take his barrage, focusing as deeply as I could into his pupils, those black orbs behind the squint, nearly hypnotizing myself in the process. He could belabor his verbal abuse, never yelling (and never needing to), but as long as I kept my focus, his words lost their impact. He’d eventually run out of steam, and that felt like a victory for me.

I keep my focus on those pupils, just as I did as a kid.

“I’ve stopped caring what you think,” I say.

He doesn’t blink. He looks at me with a fierce intensity.

“The truth doesn’t matter,” he says. “I think you did, and I’m your father. So of course the cops think you did. They’re going to keep coming after you for that, and that’s already led to this Milwaukee detective sniffing around the Benner disappearance.” His left cheek twitches for a split second, the only sign of anger he’s allowed. “You said you can’t change what happens next, but you’re wrong. I’ve spent my life figuring out how to change inevitable destinies.” He leans in and jabs a finger to the sky, as if all the world’s answers are housed there. “And you can only change the future by doing something unexpected. Something the other guy never expects you’re going to do.”

I ask, “Who’s the other guy?”

“Whoever’s trying to fuck you.”

I break eye contact first. Damn it.

“How?” I ask. “How is it you’ve lived your life all these years in this way? You can’t be happy. Not with how you make everything a competition to win. A battle to survive.”

“I think you and I have very different definitions of happiness.”

“We’re different in every way,” I say.

“But are we really, Rosie?”

I choose another path, asking him something I’ve thought of many times but never voiced. “Did you ever love another woman after Mom?”