continue to exist for many generations into the future. It will not end with your life or with hers. It will go on, you see, as long as the world does.”
Will came to stand next to me as I continued to examine the picture on the wall. When she caught sight of what I was looking at, she lowered the page she had been reading, and lifted a hand her mouth, which was suddenly hanging open. “What?” I asked, frowning. “What’s wrong?”
She shook her head, as though she wasn’t sure what she was looking at. “I didn’t realize it with the other pictures.” She pointed at the board, right at the picture I’d been staring at. “Dempsey. He’s so young in this picture. I’ve never seen him so damn young.”
“What do you mean?”
She looked at me, pressing her lips together like she wasn’t sure how to make the word unfurrow from her throat. “Dempsey is my great-grandfather, Nash.”
I looked between her and the board, seeing the similarities, the shape of her cheeks, just like Dempsey’s and the sharp point of her chin. They were nearly identical, but that didn’t make sense.
“How?”
“I... I don’t know.” She immediately went back to the letter, skimming through the words, her eyes moving down the page until she came to a line that widened her eyes. “…After Sookie and Babette died, Dempsey’s father blamed Joe Andres, telling the police, those not in Simoneaux’s pocket, that it was the fat man that had started the fire. Dempsey did something stupid, I’d say, though it did free us all up to worry less over that rotten family. He told the sheriff he’d seen his father start the fire, told him he’d testify if he needed to. Knowing his own son was willing to testify against him, the old man didn’t put up a fight and Simoneaux got hauled off to parish prison. Dempsey’s word, it seemed, was enough to put his daddy in jail for murder and destruction of property—but it wasn’t enough to keep himself safe.
“We took him to Alabama after the trial then on to the Army recruitment station where he signed his name as Eric O’Bryant, and O’Bryant is what he remained until the day he died.”
Will lowered the letter again, stretching a hand out to rest it on my arm like she needed me to keep her from falling. Her face was open, her features expressive as she blinked and seemed to look inward, as though there were too many thoughts clouding up her mind and she needed to sort them out.
“That means…” She looked at the board, searching for a name, maybe a face, and after a few moments, she covered her mouth again, pointing at the string of yarn that ran from her great-grandfather’s picture to a smaller one further down. “Nash, look. It’s Riley. Riley and Isaac.”
I had to look closely at it, and there was Riley, standing on the steps of a synagogue with an older version of Dempsey at her side, next to an older woman—Riley’s mother I guessed— and a man that looked even more like Will than her great-granddaddy. I nodded to the man and Will smile. “That’s Ryan. That’s my daddy’s daddy, Nash. Riley’s brother Ryan. I’d never put the name together. Riley. They never talked about her. Not ever. I only knew her name because it was in my grandfather’s prayer book. I saw it when I was ten and asked him who she was.” She stared at the image again, stretching a finger toward it. “He said Riley was his sister who’d gone off to heaven a long time ago. Then he made me promise never to mention her to Gramps. He said it would hurt him too bad to talk about her.”
Next to Riley was a tall, broad black man. There was a small grin on his face and he held Riley close to his side, but he stood ramrod straight, like a soldier, and I wondered how long Isaac went on that way, being on guard, once Riley was gone. I wondered if when he was alone with Riley he smiled the way I did when Willow looked at me.
“Isaac,” I said, pointing to the picture, then frowned when I fingered the string that ran from his wedding picture, then across the board to the second family tree. “Holy shit.”
“Nash…”
I pointed at another picture, this one with Isaac too, but Riley was missing. He looked younger in that picture and there