I just said what he told me to say.”
I stood up from the table.
I didn’t know I was going to.
My body just moved.
I walked to the sink and stood there with my hands gripping the edge of the counter, staring at the backyard.
The pie was still on the rack.
Chloe’s favorite.
Blueberry.
I made it every year to feel close to her.
All five of those years, Daniel had sat across from me at this table.
He had held my hand at the cemetery.
He had cried at her name.
“There’s something else,” Ava said behind me.
I turned around.
She reached into the inside lining of the jacket — a hidden pocket I hadn’t known existed — and pulled out a small photograph.
She set it on the table face-up.
It was Daniel.
Taken from the passenger seat.
His hands on the wheel, his face turned sideways, caught mid-shout.
And in the corner of the frame, barely visible — Chloe’s hand reaching toward him.
“Chloe took it,” Ava said.
“Right before it happened.
Her phone was thrown from the car.
I found it in the grass two days later when I went back.
I printed the photo and hid it in the jacket lining because I didn’t know what else to do with it.”
I picked up the photograph.
Daniel’s face.
My husband’s face.
Screaming at our daughter in the last seconds before the crash.
“Ava,” I said slowly.
“Does anyone else know about this?”
She shook her head.
“Then we need to be very careful,” I said.
“Because if he came back for his phone and saw your face — he already suspects something.”
Ava’s eyes went to the window.
Outside, a car had slowed at the end of our street.
It wasn’t Daniel’s truck.
The car stayed at the end of the street for four minutes.
I counted.
Then it moved on.
I stepped back from the window and told myself it was nothing.
A neighbor checking their phone.
Someone lost.
I told myself that, and I almost believed it.
“We can’t stay here,” Ava said.
“We’re not running anywhere.
Not yet.” I picked up the photograph again.
“We need to think.”
“There’s nothing to think about.
You have the note.
You have the photo.
You have me.”
“My word and yours against a police report that’s five years old.” I set the photo down.
“We need more.”
Ava was quiet for a moment.
Then: “His brother.”
I looked at her.
“Marcus,” she said.
“Daniel’s brother.
He was there that night.
Not at the crash — but before.
He was at the house when Daniel started drinking.
He left before Daniel made us get in the car, but he saw the state Daniel was in.” She hesitated.
“He called me once.
About a year after I moved in here.
He said he was sorry.
He said he’d been carrying something heavy and he didn’t know what to do with it.”
“Did he say what?”
“He said Daniel had called him from the hospital.
Before the police arrived.
He said Daniel told him there’d been an accident and to keep his mouth shut.” Ava’s voice was flat.
“Marcus hung up on him.
But he never came forward either.”
I sat back down at the table.
Marcus.
I had known Marcus for fifteen years.
He came to Christmas dinner.
He’d stood at Chloe’s graveside with his hat in his hands and wept.
And he had known.
“Do you still have his number?”
“Yes.”
