I don’t want to keep walking, and it has nothing to do with the fact that my ankle is killing me. Eleven years ago, Shane Nelson tried to kill me. Five minutes ago, his mother tried to kill me. Even if he is temporally incapacitated, there’s no telling what he might do to me out here, with no witnesses aside from a scared little boy.

What if this is a trick? What if he is lying in wait, and the second I get over there, he’s going to jump up and wrap his fingers around my neck?

“Mom!” Josh is tugging on my arm. “You have to come help him!”

I reach into my pocket and wrap my fingers around the gun. If he tries to attack me, I’m going to be ready for him. I shot his mother. I can shoot him too.

I push on for the last ten yards, my hand gripping the pistol. Just past the snowman, there’s a figure lying in the snow. The figure appears completely still.

And not just that, but there are droplets of crimson around his head, marring the perfect white of the snow.

“Is he okay, Mom?” Josh wipes his nose with the back of his hand. “The ice from that tree over there just all fell on him at once!”

The trees are all covered in frozen icicles that hang down like ornaments on a Christmas tree. It’s actually very beautiful. My hand is shaking around the gun as I tentatively step closer to get a better look at Shane, lying in the snow. His body is half-covered with snow and ice, and his face is bloody. There’s a gash in his forehead much bigger than the one I sewed up all those months ago.

And his eyes are open and not blinking.

“You need to call an ambulance!” Josh tugs on my sleeve again. “He needs to go to the hospital!”

I can’t bear to tell him the truth. I hated this man, but Josh doesn’t know that. He doesn’t know that the icicles from the tree may have saved his life. He doesn’t know that the man lying in front of us in the snow is his father—the one he has been desperate to meet all these years.

He doesn’t even know Shane is dead.

Chapter 54

ONE MONTH LATER

“I saw Tim today.”

Josh drops that little nugget on me at the dinner table. I’m in the middle of chewing a bite of macaroni and cheese. And I’m not talking about gourmet macaroni and cheese made with four different varieties of cheese, with a layer of crispy, buttery breadcrumbs on top like Margie (sorry, I mean, Pamela Nelson) used to make. I’m talking about macaroni and cheese from the box. It came in a six-pack that cost three dollars. It’s flavored with powdered cheese that is labeled cheese number forty-two.