“I wanted—” Flo’s voice trembled. “I made peanut butter cookies for you and wanted to bring them with clothes and books, but they said that I’m not allowed to give you anything. I have to mail them or something.”

Marie nodded. “They got a lot of rules.”

“They only gave us thirty minutes to visit,” Ned said.

“How are you?” Flo said. “I mean here, and with everything?”

“I got a place to myself. I eat in my room. I get a half hour alone in the yard to exercise. It’s a little lonely. I wish I had a TV. It’s boring.”

Ned exchanged a quick glance with his wife, repositioned himself and took a breath.

“Marie, we have to know if it’s true,” he asked.

She stared at her parents, reading the pain, terror and utter emptiness in their expressions, just as she had at Pike’s funeral.

“Is it true? What do you think, Dad?”

“We need to hear it from you.”

“My lawyer told me not to talk about it.”

“We’re your parents,” Flo said.

“We got a right to know,” Ned said.

Marie looked away, blinking back her tears, sniffling, brushing at her nose. Then she looked back at her parents before telling them in a voice barely audible: “It’s true. We did it.”

Ned shut his eyes, cursed under his breath and stifled a sob by covering his stubbled face with a shaking, calloused hand.

Stabbed with a sorrow she could not bear, Flo groaned and, straining to breathe, she whispered: “You killed a mother, a father and two little children?”

Marie was silent.

“Why?” Ned’s voice creaked with pain.

Marie lowered her head, her hair curtained in front of her face. In a soft voice she said: “It just happened.”

“It just happened?” Her father’s anguish and anger seethed beneath the surface. He stifled another curse. “I was there to move the cars. I saw cops bawling and you tell us, ‘it just happened’? God, it’s like Pike all over—”

Marie’s head snapped up, her eyes locked onto her parents.

Flo seized his tattooed forearm. “Don’t, Ned. Don’t!”

Ned caught himself, struggled for composure.

“Don’t you have any remorse?” Ned asked. “Are you even sorry for what you’ve done?”

Marie was silent.

“You’ve ripped the heart out of the entire town,” Ned said. “Legal Aid was going to force us to pay for your lawyer. We had to prove we didn’t have the money. I would’ve lost the business, maybe had to sell the house. Do you even grasp the depth of the destruction you and—”

“Stop,” Flo said.

Marie’s eyes narrowed into slits, intensifying the fire burning in them. Assessing her mother and father, her body shook.

“You won’t have to worry about me ever again. I’ll be out of your lives just like you always wanted.”