frustration. “I want to go back—you know? Stop it before it all began. Save you. Save your friend Tess. Even Hank. If I could just lift that one moment out of all of your lives. It’s stupid. I couldn’t protect you then—in a lot of ways I can’t protect you now. How, then, do I protect Lily?”
He pressed his mouth into a tight, angry line, looked away.
“That’s who you are,” she said, rubbing his shoulder. “You’re a fixer. A protector. But we can’t always protect each other. All we can do is love each other.”
“It’s not enough.”
“It has to be.”
“And Kreskey,” he said after a moment.
“What about him?”
He traced a finger along the line of her jaw, pushed the hair back from her face.
“The abuse,” said Greg. “The police found him in the basement. They kept him in there, for days and weeks, no food, no sunshine. He was twelve. He’d never been to school. His mother had taught him how to read and write, claimed she was homeschooling him for religious reasons. He’d only seen other children at the grocery store. He had broken bones that had healed wrong, scars from cigarettes that had been put out on his flesh. His right eardrum had been pierced by something. What if you could go back even further, and save him?”
His words bounced around the car.
What if?
If only.
That black spiral into nothing.
“The investigation into Kreskey’s murder,” said Greg after they were quiet for a while. “It was—cursory.”
“How do you mean?” She felt her body stiffen a little, forced herself to relax.
“There wasn’t a lot of energy put behind it,” said Greg. “There were a few lackluster interviews, other ex-cons at the halfway house, doctors who treated him, a woman whose land edged the Kreskey property.”
The wizened old woman with her hat and stick, the camera around her neck. How swift she’d been on the path through the trees, how quickly she’d disappeared. Was it her?
“What’s her name?” asked Rain. “The neighbor.”
“Greta Miller.”
“Is she still alive?”
“She’s still alive,” he said. “She still lives in the house next to the Kreskey property.”
“Did she see anything that night?”
“That was the strange thing,” he said. “There was no recording or transcript from her interview. I mean, things get lost in small departments. No one is as organized or meticulous as you’d hope, especially when you go back that far. But everything else was intact.”
Greta Miller. What did she see?
“But no one was ever brought in, no one charged. No leads. No real suspects.”
He went on, “In a way, it reminds me of the Markham murder. The story is already out of the news, the investigation ‘ongoing.’ You know? No one cares. It’s like—good riddance.”
Yeah, good riddance.
In recovery, she’d struggled with the idea that Kreskey still thought about her. He could still dream about her. She existed in his fantasies, as if a version of herself was trapped within him. She used to wonder: What does he do to me in his dreams? She could still hear his voice, feel his hands, the hard shock of his fist. When Kreskey died, the part of her he kept in his fantasies died, too. She was free.
“But it’s just this cycle of abuse, violence, murder,” said Greg. “If we never understand it, we can never lift that next Kreskey out of his circumstance, or save the next Hank, Tess and Lara.”
“Maybe that’s why I do what I do,” said Rain. “That’s what my father thinks, what Tess’s mom thinks.”
“You’re trying to understand.”
“Yes,” she said. “Because monsters live and thrive in the dark. Hank, too, I think. I think we’re both trying to understand, to fix, to prevent.”
He stared ahead, nodded lightly.
“So,” Greg said, reaching to the seat behind and retrieving a thick file folder. “Here’s all my research so far. I’m in—I’ll do what I can. I’m behind you. I support you—we’ll make this work. We’ll make sure Lily gets everything she needs. And that you do, too.”
She took the file, held it in her lap, opened it and flipped through the pages, then closed it again and looked into the face of her husband. She knew it represented a lot of hours he didn’t have, phone calls, requests for information. She leaned in and kissed him, long and deep.
“About the letters,” she said when she pulled away. She’d put them back in the drawer where she kept them. She didn’t want them. She couldn’t let go of them. “I shouldn’t have kept them from you.”