“You go first,” I say.

He leans back, moves his gaze away. “So many to choose from,” he says.

“I’m sure. What, you leave dirty dishes in the sink at night?”

He shakes his head, smiles. Closes his eyes, as if remembering something distant and sweet.

“Maybe I’m not better than your late husband, because I cheated on Tasha,” he says. It’s so sudden and dissonant with what I was expecting that I have to replay his words in my mind.

“She was trying,” he says. “She was really trying. After Micah was born. I have to give her credit, she wanted to make it work, and I didn’t. I wanted to blow things up. I thought I could be a perfect dad without her help. But I was wrong. I cheated on her… I think just to get caught. God, I was so arrogant.”

“Wow,” I say.

Now he looks at me. “You know what? You’re the first person I’ve ever told that to. Ever.”

“I don’t know what to say to that.”

“I don’t need you to say anything,” he says. “But it feels good for me to tell you.”

I appreciate his honesty, but there’s a tinge of a stain to Alec now. We are all weak in some way or another, but the pain of infidelity is particularly acute with me.

“I have a hard time moving on from the past,” I say, not wanting to hear more about his faults.

“No fair. That’s too vague. Look at what I just told you.”

“It’s true.”

“So that’s it, then?” he asks. “That’s your worst fault?”

God, I want to open up to him, and maybe my inability to fully do so is truly my defining fault. My whole life is a secret, and I’m too scared to have it any other way. I want to tell him how I think of death as touching a rainbow, one appearing in a cornfield after a summer storm. I want to tell him how I’m so scared Max will grow up like anyone in my family and I have no idea if I’m able to parent him away from that. I want to tell him about my books and the place I go in my head when I write, a soft darkness that’s both a sanctuary of comfort and horror all at once, and maybe the only place I’m truly myself.

I want to tell him about Riley, about what he became in the end and what that did to me.

But more than anything, I want to tell him about Caleb Benner.

But I won’t.

And that is my biggest fault.

I don’t answer his question. Instead, I tell him the things I’m able to say, which is still more than I’ve told anyone else.

“I came back to Bury to…try to face up to some things from my past and to give Max some stability I didn’t think he could have back in Milwaukee. But now this detective shows up and starts questioning me about Riley’s death, like I had something to do with it. Just because there’s a scene…” I pause, searching for the right words.