Days bleed by with no Reagan, no Ota, no sleep, and no rest from the barbaric media. Some dark force in the universe had slit me open like an old pillow, sending everything that once held me together off into space. The nexus of who I really am blew away like feathers, and yet that dark force insists on the constant vacuuming of my soul. There is nothing left but grief and agony.

We stepped from one pile of shit to the next. That nut job Heather Evans has set up a GoFundMe and already we’re at over a hundred thousand dollars.

“We don’t need this money,” I lament, tapping my finger to the screen. “What the hell are we going to do with it, anyway? It’s blood money. I don’t want it.”

Allison comes over in her sickly green robe, her hair disheveled. We’ve devolved to bathing under a strictly as-needed basis, and since there’s not a soul we want to see outside of our daughter, our hygiene has hit rock bottom.

“Neither one of us is employed if you haven’t noticed,” she points out. “I’m pretty sure the money we have saved will dry up within a year.”

The money we have saved is a misnomer, but I know better than to correct my wife without infusing her first with coffee. And that seems to be why my father is still hanging around. He’s been our butler in every capacity, and for the first time I can honestly say it’s a pleasure. I’ve never needed him like I do now. God knows we’ve been through it all together.

Allison shuts the laptop over my fingers. “Don’t look at it. I hate it. And I hate her.”

“Son,” Dad calls me over with a tick of the head.

“I’ll be right back.” I touch my hand over my wife’s, and for the first time in years it feels like a genuine display of affection.

“What’s up?” We head out back to the dusty earthen-scented soil that’s rich with humidity. A heat wave in late October. Reagan would have loved it. Would have. I slap my hand to my forehead to keep from slipping to that dark place that calls to me as enticing as sleep. “God help me.”

“I’m here,” Dad says it with such sincerity I give a half-hearted chuckle, first one in as long as I can remember.

“You’re not God.”

“I’m close enough.” Those mirror blue eyes of his, that face, my face in thirty years’ time. Dad has always been a preview of what I might look like some day. “How are things going between you and Allison? There’s no more talk of divorce, I take it? Rumor has it, there’s talk of babies.” He offers a congratulatory slap to my back.

“No, she just panicked. Our only concern is Reagan.”

“Now that you got some time alone, don’t you think the two of you should get on a right path together?”

I look over at him, bewildered where this might be coming from. “Reagan is not at the sitter’s, Dad. And we’re not on vacation. She’s missing. So excuse me if Allison and I aren’t up for wooing one another in the interim.” My eyes close involuntarily as I let out a stiff breath. “Look, I know you mean well. Everyone is saying things that don’t make any sense. We’ve all hit a wall.” I stagger out into the yard a few feet and spot her hula-hoop buried under inches of grass, the periphery yellowing like a halo and the pain of not having my child here safe with me is suddenly too much to bear. “God, when will this end?” I roar out in grief as I let the heat bite through my clothing.

He grunts out something between a groan and a laugh. “The reporters have come by sniffing in the mornings when I take my walk.”

My lids spring wide at the thought of my father, the marriage counselor, carrying on a conversation with any of them.

“You didn’t say anything, did you?” That’s right. I don’t even need to preface it with the subject matter. We both know the topic, dead and buried as it may be.

“Oh no. Heaven’s no.” He slaps the back of his neck and offers up a sheepish look. “But a few have asked about your siblings. Seems good news travels fast.”

Good news. That’s his verbal way of whistling Dixie.

“Shit.” I stalk past him and head back into the kitchen to find Allison holding up my phone, that curious frown embedded on her face.

“Who’s this Hannigan?” Her lips twist at the screen. “And why doesn’t he think we need IVF? As if it’s any of his damn business.”

I snap the phone out of her hand and head into the living room. Shit.

“Don’t mind him.” I hear my father say in his inappropriately cheery tone. He’s gone from coffee butler to a dancing devil in a single bound. “I got him a little worked up. My fault. I’ll take the blame on this one.”

My father is so fixated on gluing the frayed edges of my marriage back together he has no clue he just covered for my mistress and me.

Mistress. I hate the word. It sounds like something off the cover of one of those regency romance novels my mother used to devour. Something old and archaic like a courtship or taking an evening constitutional. I don’t have a mistress. What happened with Hailey last summer was just an off moment for me. A moment of abject weakness driven by the almost certainty that Allison and I were about to throw in the towel. She didn’t make a secret of it.

When I think back on that dark season—a brighter light than that of today—I think of the arguments, the fact we were perennially angry with one another over the most trivial things. One of us forgot to pay the car insurance? The other one was mad. Someone forgot to put the trashcans out for the week? The other one was angry as hell. Left a trail of bread crumbs in the margarine tub? That would be me, and Allison was markedly pissed.

And now, in the light of a very scary day, none of it seems to matter. If I could go back and bask in the glory of those barbed wire lined days, it would be a pleasure. But I didn’t bask in anything at the time. Instead, I became a willing party to Hailey Oden’s own insecurities, always asking if her jeans made her ass look wide, if that sweater she wore enhanced her figure or hid it? We played fashion trivia for so long I felt like her personal stylist. And then one sweltering Southern California day when the temperature hit triple digits, she invited me over for a swim. Allison had driven upstate with her parents to visit Jane—Faulk was out of town on business, and it was so damn hot. She wore a red bikini, bright red. It reminded me of the Hawaiian Punch my mother used to give us out of the big can back when I was a kid. There was nothing as thirst-quenching on a horribly hot day. And when she asked if I could tighten her bikini top for her, of course, I said yes. Who the hell was going to help her out if it wasn’t me? She stood at the foot of the pool, toes pointed to the water as my fumbling fingers did the honors, but as soon as I untied the knot, her top slipped south and she grabbed my hands, landing them right over those store-bought tits. That’s what Allison used to call them, store-bought. She was right, of course, but at the moment I didn’t care. I had a painful hard-on that couldn’t be quenched. I had already tossed off to her so often it only felt like an inch past the crime I had already committed. We dove into the pool, me hoping to cool off, and her in an effort to lose her bottoms, too. And she did. And we did. Right there in the pool. We spent the weekend together. After that, anytime I saw Faulk swimming in that semen-infested water, I felt bad for the guy. Bad for me. Bad for Allison. It went on for three long bad weeks. That’s when he caught us. And that’s when I woke up and realized I was horrifically at fault for a crime against my marriage. I prayed it wasn’t too late—and with therapy, our move to Concordia, we somehow miraculously patched ourselves back together—only to blow to pieces again the night I sent our daughter to the wolves.

My phone burps, alerting me to the fact I’ve gotten another text.

I glance at the phone, thankful for once that my father is demanding to make Allison a nice steaming cup of tea.

“You’re not going anywhere, missy,” he scolds her playfully. “You sit right here.”

The message above stops my heart cold. Hannigan is having a baby.

“Shit,” I hiss. My fingers fumble to delete the entire message thread as if I were deactivating a bomb.

“What’s that?” Allison pads her slippers in this direction, and I flip on the television and turn up the volume.

“Give me that.” She snaps up the remote before landing on the sofa adjacent to me.

My heart pounds erratically, a bite of heat erupts underneath my arms—my crotch the scene of the crime. Didn’t Hailey mention something about Faulk getting snipped years ago when he left his first wife? Faulk Oden had a pile of money when Hailey first dug her claws into his hairy back, but no sooner did they tie the knot than things went south for him in a series of bad real estate investments.

Shit. I can’t have a kid. I have a kid. One that I badly misplaced.

My fingers grip the hair at my temples before I can stop them.

“Can you believe this?” Allison turns up the volume, and I glance over to find the two of us miniaturized in a freeze frame between a panel of talking heads. “I hate this show. They routinely mock justice and—” before she can get another word out, a picture of a blonde, frumpy, beak-nosed woman pops up with the caption Heather Evans.

“A GoFundMe was set up by a close family friend who claims James and Allison Price need all the money they can get their hands on, but public real estate transactions show that the Price family had more than four hundred thousand dollars between the sale of their old house and that of their new.”

“People are talking,” the man in a bow tie next to her pipes up. “Some people wonder if this was a ploy for money.”

“What?” I lean in, momentarily distracted from the phone in my hand.

The redhead in the middle holds up a finger in an effort to interrupt the bickering between the other two. “People are talking, and it’s not just about that GoFundMe page that’s sucking in the hard-earned cash from innocent people. Allison Price’s sister is currently serving a sixty-five-year sentence at Welders Correctional Facility.”

Allison drops her head in her hand. “Oh, for Pete’s sake.”

But the redhead goes on. “And what about the information that’s surfaced about Mr. Price’s siblings? Three died before the age of twenty? One of which he shot to death himself in what was deemed as an accidental discharge.”

“Shit.” I gulp down my next breath.

The redhead tosses up a hand, exasperated. “We don’t know what we’re dealing with here. I’m telling you, none of this would have been unearthed—nor would this case have garnered half the public interest it has if it weren’t for the fact they claim there is a little girl who goes by the nickname Ota who disappeared along with their daughter. Who is this little girl, and why has nobody claimed her?” She holds up the police composite of the smiling little brat, the one I commissioned with my own bad thoughts, and I’d swear on my life it’s grimacing at me.

“My God.” Allison drops to her knees, her nose tipped to the screen. “They don’t believe us.”

“No, they don’t.” My father comes in with two steaming cups of tea and settles them on the coffee table, right over the bare wood, a crime in another lifetime. His chipper attitude stops up the room with its stench. “They’re convinced we are all a bunch of killers.” He clicks his tongue. “I’m not paying it no mind, and neither should you. This kind of social behavior is the norm for times like these. Our society is full of hate. Nothing good ever comes from it if you ask me.”

I get up and pull Allison off the floor. “Don’t worry about it. It will all blow over,” I say as I bypass the tea and help her upstairs.

“You don’t believe that.”

“No, but you should.”

No sooner do I get her settled in bed than my phone buzzes for my attention once again. My gut cinches until I spot Richard’s name.

“Who’s that?” Her voice is thick with grief and a week and a half’s worth of fatigue.

“Rich.” His name flies from my lips with a sigh of relief. “He wants me to give him a call—something about paperwork.”

Her affect goes from hopeful to hellish. That sums up this nightmare in a nutshell.

I head back downstairs and give him a call.

“What’s up?” I frown over at the television set with a blowup picture of myself on the screen. I look old, bedraggled, like a bona fide lunatic. If these are my fifteen minutes, I want every damn one of them back.

“You busy?”

“Nope.”

“Good. Because you’re going to want to get down here.”

---

The Concordia Police Department is stale, sized down from what you might expect in a county this big, cartoonish, something out of a black and white show from the sixties.

I find Rich standing by the front desk and he walks me wordlessly down the hall to his office. For some reason the chicken wire embedded in the glass of his window reminds me of my elementary school years.

“Take a seat.” He shuts the door behind me, sealing us in, and my ears fill up with a strange echoing silence as if we were in a fishbowl. “What’s going on? You need my help with anything?”

“No.” The bags under his eyes look voluminous since the last time we spoke and those lines that swim across his forehead seem to have magnetized. There she is, my mother warbling in his features. As mesmerizing as it may be, I’m forced to look away. “I’ve been getting calls nonstop about your family.”

I glance up. He’s got my attention and he knows it. I know exactly which haunted branch he’s talking about. “They’re digging ’round the proverbial graveyard, picking apart those bones. You’re gonna have to break your silence on it sooner than later.”

“Aston.” I nod at the thought of my dead brother. The one I singlehandedly put in the ground. “I will. If it comes up, I’ll just tell them the truth. We were going hunting, cleaning rifles, I was being stupid and blew his head off.” It decorated the walls for weeks. Mom moved us into a hotel until a cleanup committee she hired could scrape every last bit of my brother off the walls. My father tore out the drywall and installed new sheeting, had a painter come in and paint the dining room my mother’s favorite shade of apricot, giving her some time to mull over wallpaper options. The wall-to-wall carpeting was eschewed for hardwood floors. My father joked my mother finally got that remodel she wanted. Sick fuck. Sick fuck, sick fuck.

“Dude.” Rich gives a quick knock over his desk. “They’re asking about Rachel and Wilson, too.” He winces. “What exactly happened to Rachel again?”

Rich and I are about the same age, but Rachel had six years on me at least.

“Female problems. I don’t know. She was sick. Something to do with her period. I was too embarrassed to get the details while my mother was still around to give them. Have been all my life. And Wilson—you know, OD’d.”

“Right, I remember that.” He stares off a moment as if reliving the event. Wilson OD’d in a park after a rock concert. He and a bunch of friends tried heroine. The next morning, he was found by an off-duty cop with his brain bleeding out of his nose, flies swarming around him as if he were a piece of rotted meat. “I’ll keep it clean if anyone asks. All you have to say is no comment. You might want to tell Allison the same. What the hell is her sister doing time for, anyway?”

“She knifed her husband to death.” We share a quick smile as if to say that’s a woman for you. That very well could have been Allison a few months ago. Still might be if she finds out Hailey Oden is about to hear the patter of little feet no thanks to the deposit my dick made into her vaginal account. I cringe at the thought.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, everything’s just peachy. Anything else?”

Rich purses those lips until they turn white. “There is one more thing. There seems to be a growing interest in your father.”

“That’s to be expected. He was the man with the robe for decades around here.”

He gives a slight nod. “They’re not interested in the fact he’s a judge.”

“What now?”

“You don’t know?” His cheek depresses on one side and I’m wondering if I should be equally depressed by what this might mean.

My mouth opens but not a word comes out.

Rich shakes his head at me in dismay. “You don’t know your father at all, do you?”

“And what exactly do you know?”

“My mother claims there’s someone who’s had a long running affair with the old man.” He flicks a pencil my way and it rolls right off his desk. “Your mother found out about it, and poof she turns up dead.”

My stomach bottoms out. My mind swims with every insane thought Rich just planted in it.

“You’re right, Rich.” I get up and stagger for the door. “I don’t know my father.”

All that one-woman, one-man bullshit he’s been feeding me for the last few years was just that, bullshit. The wages of sin is death. Only he’s fucking made of Teflon.

I hit the street and let the balmy breeze pump me back to life.

For whatever reason, I believe Rich. Or at least I want to. As cringe-worthy as it sounds, news of my own father’s affair takes some of the heat off mine. A million valid excuses bounce through my mind. The proverbial apple didn’t roll far from the tree after all. I was genetically predisposed to cheat. My DNA is programed to wander. I had an affair.

As much as I have hated the man, and I have hated him deep down for many, many years—I was just like dear old Pops.