Charlie felt her vision blur. Panic gripped her throat. She could only hear the screaming inside her head.
Ben knew.
She asked Sam, “Did you tell him?”
“No,” Sam said.
“Don’t lie to me, Samantha. Just tell me.”
“Charlie,” Sam said. “You’re focusing on the wrong thing.”
There was only one wrong thing. Her husband knew what had happened to her. He had beat a man nearly senseless because of it. He had spat on him, he had told him—
You let him rape my wife.
Let him.
Charlie felt a rush of air leaving her lungs. Her hand slapped to her mouth as bile swirled up her throat.
“It was him,” Ben said. “Not Daniel.”
“In the woods?” Charlie asked, her vocal cords straining around the question. She saw Zachariah Culpepper’s hideous face. She had punched him so hard that his head had whipped around. Blood had come out of his mouth. And then Daniel Culpepper had tackled him to the ground and started beating him the way that Ben had just beaten Mason Huckabee.
Except it had not been Daniel Culpepper in the woods.
Charlie said, “You tackled Zachariah.” She had to swallow before she could add, “You were too late.”
“I know.” Mason rolled over onto his back. He covered his eyes with his hand. “In the house. In the woods. I was always too late.”
Charlie felt her knees turn rubbery. She leaned her shoulder into the wall. “Why?”
Mason moved his head side to side. He was breathing hard. Blood bubbled out of his nose.
“Tell them,” Ben said, fists clenched.
Mason wiped his nose with the back of his hand. He looked at Ben, then Sam, then Charlie. Finally, he answered, “I hired Zach to help me take care of Rusty. I gave him everything I’d saved up for college. I knew that he owed Rusty money, but—” He stopped, his voice cracking. “You guys were supposed to be at track practice. We were gonna take Rusty, drive him down the access road, and get rid of him. Zach would get three grand on top of wiping away his legal bills. I would get my revenge …” He looked at Sam again, then Charlie. “I tried to stop Zach when your dad wasn’t here, but he—”
“You don’t have to tell us what he did.” Sam’s words were so strained that they were almost inaudible in the open space.
Mason covered his face again. He started to cry.
Charlie listened to his dry sobs and wanted to punch him in the throat.
Mason said, “I was going to take the fall for your mom. I said that out in the woods. Five times, at least. You both heard me. I never wanted any of it to happen.” His voice cracked again. “When your mom was shot, it was like I was numb, like, I couldn’t believe it. I just felt sick, and shaky, and I wanted to do something but I was scared of Zach. You know what he’s like. We were all scared of him.”
Charlie felt rage pumping through every artery in her body. “Don’t you we any of this, you pathetic prick. There was no we in the kitchen except me and Sam. We were forced out of our house. We were led into the woods at gunpoint. We were terrified for our lives. You shot my sister in the head. You buried her alive. You let that monster chase me through the woods, rape me, beat me, take away everything—everything—from me. That was you, Mason. That was all you.”
“I tried—”
“Shut up.” Charlie clenched her fists as she stood over him. “You might tell yourself that you tried to stop it, but you didn’t. You let it happen. You helped it happen. You pulled that trigger.” She stopped, trying to catch her breath. “Why? Why did you do it? What did we ever do to you?”
“His sister,” Sam said. Her voice had a deathly kind of calmness. “That’s what he meant about getting his revenge. Mason and Zachariah showed up the same day Kevin Mitchell walked on the rape charge. We assumed it was about Culpepper’s legal bills when it was really about Mason Huckabee being mad enough to kill but too scared to do it with his own hands.”
Charlie’s tongue turned into lead. She had to lean against the wall again to keep from falling down.
Mason said, “I was the one who found my sister. She was in the barn. Her neck was—” He shook his head. “She was tortured by what that bastard did to her. She couldn’t get out of bed. She just cried all the time. You don’t know what it’s like to feel that useless, that helpless. I wanted someone to be punished. Someone had to be punished.”
“So you came looking for my father?” Charlie felt the now-familiar vibration in her hands. It spread up her arms, into her chest. “You came here to kill my father, and you—”
“I’m sorry.” Mason started crying again. “I’m sorry.”
Charlie wanted to kick him. “Don’t you fucking cry. You shot my sister in the head.”
“It was an accident.”
“It doesn’t matter!” Charlie yelled. “You shot her! You buried her alive!”
Sam’s arm went out. She blocked Charlie from standing over Mason, beating him the same way Ben had.
Ben.
Charlie looked at her husband. He was sitting on the floor, back to the wall. His glasses were blood-streaked, crooked on his face. He kept flexing his hands, opening the wounds, encouraging more blood to flow.
Sam asked, “Why was Rusty writing checks to Zachariah Culpepper’s son?”
Charlie was so shocked she could not make her mouth form a question.
Sam explained, “The check numbers. Twelve checks a year for twenty-eight years, four months, would be a total of three hundred forty checks.”
“That’s the most recent check number,” Charlie remembered.
“Right,” Sam confirmed. “And then there’s the balance. You started at one million, correct?”
She was asking Mason.
Slowly, reluctantly, Mason nodded.
Sam said, “If you start at one million and subtract two thousand dollars a month for twenty-eight years and change, that leaves you with approximately three hundred twenty thousand dollars.” She told Mason, “Everything began to click into place when you told us that your parents had money. Back in 1989, no one else in Pikeville had that kind of wealth and especially that kind of reach. They traded your freedom for one million dollars. That would’ve been a lot back then. More than Culpepper would ever see in his abbreviated lifetime. He bargained away his dead brother for his unborn son.”
Mason looked up at her. He slowly nodded.
Sam asked, “What was my father’s part in this? Did he set up the deal between you and Culpepper?”
“No.”
“Then, what?” Sam demanded.
Mason rolled to his side. He pushed himself up. He sat with his back toward the door. The masking tape Rusty had used on the window made a sort of lightning bolt above his head. “I didn’t know about any of it.”
Ben glowered at Mason. “You’re gonna rot in hell for dragging Rusty into your bullshit.”
“It wasn’t Rusty. Not at first.” Mason winced as he touched his jaw. “My parents set up the arrangement. The night it happened, I walked home. Six miles. Zach took my shoes, my jeans, because they had his blood on them. I was half-naked, covered in blood, by the time I got home. I confessed to both of them. I wanted to go to the police. They wouldn’t let me. I found out later they sent a lawyer to talk to Zach.”
“Rusty,” Ben said.
“No, someone from Atlanta. I don’t know who.” Mason worked his jaw. The joint popped. “They left me out of it. I had no choice.”
Sam said, “You were a seventeen-year-old man. I’m certain you had a car. You could’ve gone to the police on your own, or waited until you turned eighteen.”
“I wanted to,” Mason insisted. “They locked me in my room. Four guys came. They drove me to a military academy up north. I joined the Marines as soon as I was old enough.” He wiped blood out of his eye. “I was in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia. I kept volunteering. I wanted to earn it, you know? I wanted to use my life to help other people. To redeem myself.”
Charlie bit her lip so hard that she felt the skin start to open. There was no redemption, no matter how many countries he had pinned on his stupid world map.
Mason said, “I put in my twenty years. I moved back home. I went to school. I thought it was important to give back here, in this town, to these people.”
“You bastard.” Ben stood up. His hands were still clenched. He walked down the hall. Charlie was afraid that he was going to continue out the back door, but he stopped at Mason’s iPhone. He slammed his heel into the glass, breaking it into tiny pieces.
Ben lifted his shoe. Glass clinked down from the sole. He said, “Daniel Culpepper was murdered because of you.”
“I know,” Mason said, but he was wrong.
Charlie was the one who unleashed Ken Coin on Daniel.
She told Mason, “He called you brother.”
Mason shook his head. “He called a lot of people brother. It’s just something guys do.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Ben said. “Neither one of them should have been here in the first place. Whatever happened after that is on them.”
“It is,” Mason agreed. “It’s on me. All of it’s on me.”
Sam asked, “How did your clothes and your gun end up at Daniel’s trailer?”
Again, Mason shook his head, but it wasn’t hard to come up with the answer. Ken Coin had planted the evidence. He had framed an innocent man and let a guilty one go free.
Mason said, “My mom told me about the arrangement after my dad died. I was stationed in Turkey, trying to do right by people. I came home for the funeral. She was worried something would happen and Zach would renege on his part of the deal.”
Sam said, “To be clear, the deal was that Zach would keep silent about Daniel’s innocence—and your guilt—in exchange for two thousand dollars a month to be paid by your parents to his son, Danny Culpepper?”
Mason nodded. “I didn’t know. Not until my mother told me. Eight years had gone by. Culpepper was still on death row. He kept getting out of his execution dates.”
Charlie clenched her jaw. Eight years after the murder. Eight years after Sam clawed out of her grave. Eight years after Charlie was ripped apart.
Sam had been starting her master’s at Northwestern. Charlie was applying to law school, praying that she could make a fresh start.
Sam asked, “How did my father get roped into this?”
“I went to him to confess,” Mason said. “Here, in this house. We sat in the kitchen. I don’t know why, but in a way it made it easier to sit at the table and unburden myself. The scene of the crime. I got sick just letting it all out, every piece of the truth. I told him how I was torn up about Mary-Lynne, how I paid Zach to help me get my revenge. When you’re young like that, you see things so clearly. You don’t understand how the world works. That there are consequences you can’t predict. That bad choices, bad deeds, can corrupt you.” Mason was nodding, as if to agree with himself. “I wanted to explain to Rusty what happened, why it happened, man to man.”
“You’re not a man,” Charlie told him, sickened by the thought of Mason and Rusty sitting in the kitchen where Gamma had died, that the setting had brought Mason absolution rather than pain. “You’re an attempted murderer. You’re an accomplice to rape. To the murder of my mother. To abduction. Kidnapping. Breaking and fucking entering.” She could not let herself think about all the girlfriends he’d had, the parties he’d attended, the birthdays, the New Year’s Eve celebrations, while Sam got out of bed every morning praying that she could fucking walk. She told Mason, “Joining the Marines does not make you a good man. It makes you a coward for running away.”
Charlie’s voice was so loud that she heard her words echo up the hallway.
Ben said, “Rusty had him sign a confession.” He looked at Sam, not Charlie. “I found it in the safe.”
Charlie looked up at the ceiling. She let her tears fall. She would never forgive herself for making Ben find out from a piece of paper.
Mason said, “I wanted to sign the confession. I wanted to come forward. I was sick with it, the lies, the guilt.”
Sam held onto Charlie’s arm as if to keep them both rooted in place. “Why didn’t Dad turn you in?”
“He didn’t want another trial,” Mason said. “You guys were living your lives, getting past it.”
“Getting past it,” Charlie mumbled.
Mason continued, “Rusty didn’t want it dredged up again, to make you come home, to make Charlie go on the stand. He didn’t want her to have to—”
“Lie,” Sam finished.
The box, sealed for so long, placed high on the closet shelf. Rusty had not wanted to force Charlie to choose between lying under oath and opening up the box for the world to see.
The Culpepper girls.
The torture those nasty bitches had put her through—still put her through. What would they say, what would they do, if proof came out that they had been right about Daniel’s innocence all along?
They had been right.
Charlie had pointed her finger at the wrong man.
Sam asked, “Why did my father write the checks?”
Mason said, “That was one of Rusty’s stipulations. He wanted Zach to know that he knew, that somebody else could blow up the deal, cut off the money to Danny, if Zach didn’t keep his mouth shut.”
“That put a target on his back,” Charlie said. “Culpepper could’ve had him killed.”
Mason shook his head again. “Not if he wanted the checks to keep going to his son.”
“Do you think he really cared about his son?” Sam asked. “Culpepper was taunting him. Did you know that? Every month, he sent Rusty a letter telling him You owe me. Just to rub it in. To remind Rusty that he could tear apart all of our lives, rob us of our peace, our sense of safety, at any moment.”
Mason said nothing.
Sam demanded, “Do you know what kind of stress you caused our father? Lying to us. Hiding the truth. He wasn’t built for that kind of deception. He’d already lived through his wife being murdered, his daughter almost dying, Charlie being—” She shook her head. “Rusty’s heart was already weak. Did you know that? Do you know how much your lies, your guilt, your cowardice, contributed to his bad health? Maybe that’s why he drank so much, to chase away the bad taste of his own complicity. Complicity that you drew him into. He had to live with that every day, every month when he wrote that check, every time he called me—”
Sam finally broke. She took off her glasses. She pressed her fingers to her eyelids. She said, “He was protecting us all of those years because of you.”
Mason leaned his head between his knees. If he was crying again, Charlie did not care.
Ben asked, “Why are you here? Did you think you could talk them out of turning you in?”
“I came to confess,” Mason said. “To tell you I’m sorry. That I have tried every day since then to make up for what I did. I’ve got medals.” He looked up at Sam. “I’ve got combat medals, a purple heart, a—”
“I don’t care,” Sam said. “You’ve had twenty-eight years of your life to plead guilty. You could have walked into any police station, confessed, and taken your punishment, but you were afraid you would end up with life in prison, or on death row, the same as Zachariah Culpepper.”
Mason did not answer, but the truth was self-evident.
Charlie said, “You knew we never told anybody about what really happened in the woods. That’s how you got my father on your side, isn’t it? You blackmailed him. My secret for yours.”
Mason wiped blood from his mouth. He still said nothing.
Charlie said, “You sat in that kitchen where my mother was murdered, and you told my father that you would use your family’s money to fight a murder conviction, no matter who it hurt, no matter what came out during the trial. Sam would’ve been dragged back down here. I would’ve been forced to testify. You knew Daddy wouldn’t let that happen to us.”
Mason only asked, “What are you going to do now?”
“It’s what you’re going to do,” Sam said. “You’ve got exactly twenty minutes to drive to the police station and confess on the record, without a lawyer, to lying to the police and taking Kelly Wilson’s gun from the scene of a double homicide or so help me I will take your written confession to attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder straight to the chief of police. This town doesn’t forget, Mason. Your excuse that you were just standing there, that it was an accident, still constitutes felony murder. If you don’t do exactly as I say right now, you’ll end up in a cell beside Zachariah Culpepper, where you should’ve been for the last twenty-eight years.”
Mason wiped his hands on his pants. He reached for his broken phone.
Ben kicked it away. He opened the back door. “Get out.”
Mason stood up. He did not speak. He turned and walked out of the house.
Ben slammed the door so hard that a new crack spread up the window.
Sam put her glasses back on. She asked Ben, “Where is the confession?”
“On the safe by the letters.”
“Thank you.” Sam did not go to the office.
She walked into the living room.
Charlie hesitated. She didn’t know whether or not to follow Sam. What could she say to her sister that could possibly make either of them feel better? The man who had shot Sam in the head, who had buried her alive, had just walked out their back door with nothing but a threat to make him do the right thing.
Ben turned the latch on the deadbolt.
Charlie asked him, “Are you all right?”
He took off his glasses, wiped the blood from the lenses. “I’ve never been in a real fight before. Not where I managed to hit anybody.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry that you were upset. I’m sorry that I lied. I’m sorry that you had to read about what happened instead of me telling you myself.”
“There’s nothing in the confession about what Zachariah did to you.” Ben slid his glasses back on. “Rusty told me.”
Charlie was speechless. Rusty had never betrayed a confidence.
Ben said, “Last weekend. He didn’t tell me Mason was involved, but he told me everything else. He said that the worst sin he had ever committed against anybody in his life was making you keep it a secret.”
Charlie rubbed her arms, unable to fight off a sudden chill.
Ben said, “What happened to you—I’m sorry, but I don’t care.”
Charlie felt his disregard as an almost physical pain.
“I said that wrong.” Ben tried to explain, “I’m sorry it happened, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t care that you lied. I don’t care, Chuck.”
“It’s why—” Charlie looked down at the floor. Fittingly, Mason Huckabee had left a trail of blood on his way out of the house.
“It’s why what?” Ben was standing in front of her. He tilted up her chin. “Chuck, just say it. Holding it in is killing you.”
He already knew. He knew everything. And still, she struggled to give voice to her own failures. “The miscarriages. They were because of what happened.”
Ben rested his hands on her shoulders. He waited for her to look him in the eye, then said, “When I was nine years old, Terri kicked me in the nuts, and I peed blood for a week.”
Charlie started to speak, but he shook his head, telling her not to.
“When I was fifteen, I got punched in the junk by a jock. I was just hanging with my nerd herd, minding my own business, and he punched my balls so hard I thought they went up my asshole.”
Ben pressed his finger to her lips so she could not interrupt.
“I keep my cell phone in my front pocket. I know I’m not supposed to because it scrambles your sperm, but I do it anyway. And I can’t wear boxers. You know I hate the way they bunch up. And I masturbated a lot. I mean, some now, but when I was a kid, I was Olympic-ready. I was the only member of the Starfleet Club in my school, and I collected comic books, and I played triangle in the band. No girl would look at me. Not even the ones with acne. I jerked myself off so much that my mom took me to the doctor because she was worried I would get blisters.”
“Ben.”
“Chuck, listen to me. I dressed up as red shirt ensign from Star Trek for my senior prom. There wasn’t a theme. I was the only guy who wasn’t in a tux. I thought I was being ironic.”
Charlie finally smiled.
“Obviously, I was not meant to procreate. I have no idea why I ended up with someone as hot as you, or why we couldn’t—” He didn’t say the words. “It’s just the card we drew, babe. We don’t know if it’s something that happened to me or something that happened to you or plain old natural selection, but that’s the way it is, and I am telling you that I don’t care.”
Charlie cleared her throat. “Kaylee could give you children.”
“Kaylee gave me gonorrhea.”
Charlie should have felt wounded, but the first emotion that registered was concern. Ben was allergic to penicillin. “Did you have to go to the hospital?”
“I spent the last ten days going to Ducktown so no one here would find out.”
Now she felt the wound. “So, this was recent.”
“The last time was almost two months ago. I thought I was just having trouble peeing.”
“You didn’t think that was a sign that you should go to the doctor?”
“Eventually, obviously,” he said. “But that’s why I didn’t—the other night. I tested clean, but it didn’t feel right to not tell you. And I was there to check on you because I was worried. I didn’t need a file. There was no plea deal that went south.”
Charlie did not care about the lie. “How long did it last?”
“It didn’t last. It was four times, and it was fun at first, but then it was just sad. She’s so young. She thinks Kate Mulgrew got her start on Orange Is the New Black.”
“Wow,” Charlie said, trying to make a joke so she didn’t cry. “How did she manage to get through law school?”
Ben tried to joke, too. “You were right about being on top. It’s a lot of work.”
Charlie felt nauseated. “Thanks for the image.”
“Try never being able to sneeze again.”
Charlie chewed the inside of her cheek. She should have never told him the details. She sure as hell wished she had not heard his.
He said, “I’m going to go pack up that stuff for Sam.”
Charlie nodded, but she didn’t want him to go, not even down the hall.
He kissed her forehead. She leaned into him, smelling his sweat and the wrong detergent he was using on his shirts.
He said, “I’ll be in your dad’s office.”
Charlie watched his goofy, loping gait as he walked away.
He hadn’t left the house.
That had to be something.
Charlie didn’t immediately go to Sam. She turned around. She looked into the kitchen. The door was hanging open. She could feel the breeze coming through. She tried to adjust her memory to that moment when she had opened the door, expecting to find Rusty, instead seeing two men, one in black, one wearing a Bon Jovi T-shirt.
One with a shotgun.
One with a revolver.
Zachariah Culpepper.
Mason Huckabee.
The man who had been too late to stop Charlie’s rapist was the same man she’d had frenzied sex with in the parking lot of Shady Ray’s.
The same man who had shot her sister in the head.
Who had buried Sam in a shallow grave.
Who had beaten Zachariah Culpepper, but not before he had torn Charlie into a million tiny pieces.
“Charlie?” Sam called.
She was sitting in the straight-back chair when Charlie entered the living room. Sam was not throwing things or fretting or doing that slow boil that she did when she was ready to go off. Instead, she had been studying something in her notepad.
Sam said, “Quite a day.”
Charlie laughed at the understatement. “How did you figure it out so fast?”
“I’m your big sister. I’m smarter than you are.”
Charlie could offer no evidence to the contrary. “Do you think Mason will go to the police station like you said?”
“Did it seem likely to you that I wouldn’t follow through on my threat?”
“It seemed likely that you would’ve killed him if someone had put a knife in your hand.” Charlie winced at the thought, but only because she didn’t want Sam to have literal blood on her hands. “He didn’t just lie to the GBI. He lied to an FBI agent.”
“I’m sure the arresting officer will happily explain to him the difference between a misdemeanor and a felony.”
Charlie smiled at the neat trick, which could mean years in federal prison as opposed to monitored probation with weekends at the county jail. “Why are you so calm right now?”
Sam shook her head, puzzled. “Shock? Relief? I always felt that Daniel got away with something, that he hadn’t suffered enough. In a strange way, it brings me some satisfaction to know that Mason was tormented. And also that he’s going to go to prison for at least five years. Or at least he’d better unless the prosecutors want me hounding their very existence.”
“You think Ken Coin will do the right thing?”
“I don’t think that man has ever done the right thing in his life.” Her lips curved into a private smile. “Maybe there’s a way to knock him off his perch.”
Charlie didn’t ask her to explain how that miracle would come about. Men like Coin always managed to weasel their way back on top. “I’m the person who pointed the finger at Daniel. I said that Zachariah called the second man his brother.”
“Don’t put that on yourself, Charlie. You were thirteen years old. And Ben was right. If Mason and Zachariah hadn’t been here in the first place, none of it would have happened.” She added, “Ken Coin is the one who took it upon himself to frame and murder Daniel. Don’t forget that.”
“Coin also stopped the investigation into finding the real shooter.” Charlie felt sick when she considered the unknowing part she had played in the cover up. “How hard would it be to figure out that the rich kid who was suddenly shipped off to military school in the middle of the night was involved?”
“You’re right. Zachariah would have flipped on Mason without inducement,” Sam said. “I want to care about Daniel, even about Mason, but I just can’t. I feel like it’s behind me now. Is that strange?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know.” Charlie sat in Rusty’s cleared-out space on the couch. She tried to examine her emotions, to explore how she felt about everything Mason had told them. She realized that there was a feeling of lightness in her chest. She had expected to feel unburdened after telling Sam the truth about what happened in the woods, but it hadn’t come.
Until now.
“What about Dad?” Charlie asked. “He hid this from us.”
“He was trying to protect us. Like he always did.”
Charlie raised her eyebrows at her sister’s sudden conversion to Rusty’s side.
Sam said, “There is value in forgiveness.”
Charlie wasn’t so sure about that. She slumped back into the couch. She looked up at the ceiling. “I feel so tired. The way cons feel when they confess. They just go to sleep. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in the middle of an interview and they start snoring.”
“It’s relief,” Sam told her. “Am I wrong for not feeling guilty that Daniel was a victim in this just as much as we were?”
“If you’re wrong, then so am I,” Charlie admitted. “I know Daniel didn’t deserve to die like that. I can tell myself he’s a Culpepper and he would’ve eventually ended up behind bars or six feet under, but he should’ve been allowed the luxury of making his own choices.”
“Apparently, Dad got past it,” Sam said. “He spent most of his life working to exonerate guilty men, but he never cleared Daniel’s name.”
“‘Nothing is more deceitful than the appearance of humility.’”
“Shakespeare?”
“Mr. Darcy to Bingley.”
“Of all people.”
“If it wasn’t his pride, it was his prejudice.”
Sam laughed, but then she turned serious. “I’m glad Dad didn’t tell us about Mason. I think I could handle it now, but back then?” She shook her head. “I know this sounds horrible, because the decision obviously haunted Dad, but when I consider where my mind was eight years after being shot, I think that making me come back here to testify would have killed me. How’s that for hyperbole?”
“Pretty accurate, if you include me.” Charlie knew that a trial would have accelerated her own downward trajectory. She would not have gone to law school. She would not have met Ben. Neither she nor Sam would be here talking to each other. She asked, “Why do I feel like I can handle it better now? What’s changed?”
“That is a complicated question with an equally complicated answer.”
Charlie laughed. This was Rusty’s real legacy. They were going to sit around quoting a dead man quoting dead people for the rest of their lives.
Sam said, “Dad must have known that we would find the confession in the safe.”
Charlie easily spotted one of Rusty’s high-stakes gambles. “I bet he thought he’d outlive Zachariah Culpepper’s execution date.”
“I bet he thought he’d figure out how to fix it on his own.”
Charlie thought they were probably both right. There was not a plate that Rusty would not try to spin. “When I was little, I thought Dad was driven to help people because he had this burning sense of justice. And then I got older and I thought it was because he loved the idea of himself as the scrappy, asshole hero fighting the good fight.”
“And now?”
“I think he knew that bad people did bad things, but he still believed that they deserved a chance.”
“That’s a very romanticized way to look at the world.”
“I was talking about Dad, not me.” Charlie felt sad that they were talking about Rusty in the past tense. “He was always searching for his unicorn.”
“I’m glad you brought that up,” Sam said. “I think he found one.”