“That’s good,” he said.
Wade frowned. “What is?”
“I needed one more thing to hate him for.”
Elise wiped at her cheeks. “You don’t mean that.”
“Yes, I do.”
“No. You need something to keep you from missing him.”
He looked at his sister.
She held his stare.
I had forgotten, in all the years they had spent being adults in separate houses with separate schedules, that they knew how to wound each other with surgical precision.
Jonah looked away first.
We kept searching.
There was no better phrase for it. At some point the locker stopped being a place and became Randall’s final body, every box another organ we were dissecting for motive. We found calendars with medical appointments written under false initials. We found lists of foods he could tolerate, then increasingly short lists of foods he could not. We found receipts for motel rooms, hospice consultations, pain medications, and gasoline.
