That silenced him.
Wade inserted another card into the camera. The screen on the wall brightened with a date from three weeks after the divorce. Randall sat in a room I did not recognize, propped against pillows, wearing a gray sweatshirt I had bought him one Christmas. There was a plastic cup with a straw on the table beside him and a photograph turned face down.
He looked worse.
My body recognized it before my mind did. The swollen stomach hidden under the blanket. The thin forearms. The waxiness of his skin. I had seen those signs in treatment waiting rooms, on strangers who avoided one another’s eyes.
Randall stared at the camera.
“I called Wade tonight,” he began. “Asked how Meryl was.”
His voice was weaker than in the car video.
“He said she had a bad week.”
Wade shifted in his chair.
Randall rubbed his thumb along the seam of the blanket. “He shouldn’t have told me details. I told him not to. That was one of the rules, and then I kept asking until he broke it.”
