“He told me to stay away from you.”

“How’s that working out for you, little brother?” Jason smiled but kept his eyes closed, as if his joke was the end of it.

“It was weird. He looked scared.”

“That is also not my problem.”

But I played the conversation again: my father’s hands on my shoulders, and how they’d squeezed hard and then fluttered like feathers. “Do you ever get scared?”

“Of what?”

“Anything.”

“Nope.”

“Not ever?”

“Well, that’s the thing about war, isn’t it? Once enough people try to kill you, the little things don’t matter. Cops. The past. Not even dying.”

“What about prison?”

I knew the question was unfair, but so was his talk of fearlessness and little things. My life was made of little things. Jason understood, I thought, but I’d made him angry, too.

“Prison is different.”

He tried to end the discussion, but I was tired of being the youngest, the sheltered, the only one unproven by combat or adulthood or a long dive from a tall cliff. “But you’re scared of it,” I said. “You have to be scared of something.”

“Why? Because you are?”

“It’s not like that.”

“But you throw prison in my face when you know fuck-all about it.”

“Only because I saw you on the road that day.”

“You have no idea what you saw.”

“I saw your face, man, your face.”

My voice was too loud, and if someone asked, I’d be hard-pressed to say why any of it mattered so much now, on this day. Maybe it was because my father was afraid and my brother calm, or because the cliff rose above us. Perhaps it was due to thoughts of war and graduation, or the fact that Chance was dodging the draft, and made no bones about it. Whatever the reasons, I needed to see something of myself behind the armor my brother wore as easily as a T-shirt. If Jason understood that need, he didn’t care. His eyes were equally hard, his mouth the same tight line. “Just swim away,” he said. “Swim away, little fish.”

When French left his son at the quarry, he understood the hurt feelings he’d left behind. But what else could he do? Even if Jason was not involved in Tyra’s death—Please, God, don’t let him be involved—he’d still be swept into the investigation and tarred with the doubts born of his own poor choices. He was the killer, the user, the convict. How many people would resist the certainties of guilt by implication? French had few illusions.

Oh, you don’t know about Jason French?

The war?

The drugs?

They say he killed a hundred people …

Charlotte was a big city, but not that big. People knew your business, or thought they did, or thought they had the right. Gibby would be tarred with the same brush. So would Gabrielle.