I’d talked myself down from hysteria twice so far and was working my way back up once more as I paced my living room rug. I tried coming at it from every conceivable angle and could not come up with a single reason why my father would have had the sweater Callie Kendall disappeared wearing. Unless he had something to do with that disappearance.

I’d begged off of lunch with Devlin and made up an excuse about being tired. I was so wired with adrenaline I thought I might actually launch into orbit on the ride home. But Devlin didn’t ask any questions. Instead, he held my hand the whole way home and then deposited me on my doorstep, promising to take me back to my dad’s to get my truck whenever I was ready.

I might never be ready.

I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Daddy was many things, lots of them bad. But he wasn’t a kidnapper, a killer. I couldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t believe it.

I shot an apprehensive glance at the sweater, folded neatly on my kitchen counter. By itself, it was harmless. It was just cotton and buttons. But the bigger picture was much darker. This could be the first clue in a twelve-year-old cold case, and it pointed squarely at my father.

Maybe he’d found it somewhere? Alongside the road or in a ditch. There was no crime in that. But then why would it have been tucked away, hidden like a family memento... or a trophy?

I shook the thought out of my head. I couldn’t go there.

My father was no murderer.

And how many others would believe like I did, I thought. I couldn’t even count on my own brothers to know that Daddy wouldn’t have done this. Gibson wouldn’t even be surprised. He’d take it as a vindication that our father was as bad as he’d claimed him to be for all these years.

“Fuck,” I muttered to myself. “And things were going so good, too.”

The knock at my door shoved my heart into my throat. I raced the four steps into the kitchen and grabbed the sweater that I’d shoved in a sealable freezer bag. It was evidence

“Scar? Open up.” It was Bowie.

“Shit, shit, shit.” I ran around in a circle like a teenage boy about to get busted in his girlfriend’s bedroom. Finally, I stuffed the sweater under the couch cushion and tried to look natural when I opened the door.

“What’s wrong?” Bowie asked.

Damn him and his stupid sensitive nature.

“Nothing. What do you want?” I asked woodenly.

Jameson stared at me. “We’re sorry,” he announced.

“Great. I accept. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m busy.” I tried to shut the door on them, but they muscled their way inside.

“Now, Scarlett,” Bowie drawled. It’s how he always talked me down with his annoying logic and his shiny good nature.

“Don’t ‘now Scarlett’ me. I just don’t feel like talking right now.”

“And we’re here to talk about why you don’t feel like talking.”

There was no fucking way in the entire world that they could know what I’d found. Unless, they were in on it? Oh my God. What if my brothers caught Daddy—

“Sit,” Jameson ordered, shoving me into Gram’s rocking chair.

“Jesus, Scar. You look like you’re gonna pass out. Do you need a doctor?” Bowie asked, crouching down in front of me.

I sprang out of the chair like a jack-in-the-box and side-stepped him. “Can y’all just tell me why you’re here so we can all get on with our lives?” I demanded.

Bowie and Jameson exchanged a look. I’d seen that look every time I had my period in my teens and they bore the brunt of my hormones.

“Do you want like a hot pad or some chocolate?” Bowie ventured.

“What I want is for you to get to the point and then get out.”

“We’re sorry for being assholes,” Jameson said. He made himself comfortable on my couch. On the cushion under which I’d just shoved evidence in a case that had fascinated the east coast for over a decade.

I swallowed hard. “Be more specific.”

Bowie took a deep breath. “We’re sorry for expecting you to take care of everything related to Dad, including his house.”

“Apology accepted. Go away.”

“Now, don’t be like that, Scarlett. We were wrong. And it was unfair of us to expect you to handle everything just because we had grudges and hard feelings.”

“Speaking of grudges and hard feelings, where’s Gibson?” I asked.

They shared another look. Gibson’s MO was to run off when things got tricky or sticky or annoying. “Y’all have been doing this for years. Why the sudden apology?” I caught the winces.

“It’s been brought to our attention that—”

“Devlin called us chickenshits,” Jameson said, cutting to the chase.

“He saw how hard all of this is on you. Something that none of us ever noticed before, and we’re sorry,” Bowie added.

I did not have time for this. “I get it. You’re sorry. Can we just skip ahead to the ‘everybody’s fine’ part and call it a day?” That sweater was going to develop a telltale heartbeat any second now.

“I don’t think we should skip ahead in this situation,” Bowie argued. “See, I feel like we’ve spent several years screwing up, and a couple of apologies aren’t really enough.”

“And Gibson feels like he doesn’t have anything to apologize for, right?” I added.

“You know, Gibs,” Jameson said cryptically. I did. And there were certain things we all knew without talking about. One of those things was that Gibson saw my loyalty to our father as a disloyalty to him.

I avoided looking at the couch, just in case they’d notice my attention.

“Scar, we’re family,” Bowie said, taking my chin in his hand. “We should be in things together, and I’m sorry for expecting you to handle all of this shit on your own. It’s not gonna be that way anymore. I’m goin’ to Dad’s tomorrow.”

“Me, too,” Jameson sighed.

“We’ll get this settled together, and then we’ll move on together,” Bowie promised. “That’s how it should have been from the beginning. You’ve been toughing it out for a long time on your own, and I don’t want you to ever feel like that again.”

“Damn it, Bowie.” I stomped my foot on the wood floor. “You couldn’t just leave, could you?”

“What?” He looked startled.

Sonsabitches wanted to be family? Then they deserved to suffer with me. “Get up, Jameson.” My brother did as he was told while looking at me like I was having a breakdown. Who knows? Maybe I was.

I pulled the sweater out from under the cushion and threw the baggy on the coffee table. “Now, how are we going to deal with this as a family?” I demanded.

They stared down on it.

“Um. Is it too small?” Bowie asked. “Maybe we could order a new one?”

“It’s a nice color for you,” Jameson offered.

“Christ!” I stormed over to my kitchen and dug through drawers until I found what I was looking for. “Here.”

I threw the old Missing poster on top of the sweater. Jameson picked it up and frowned. I saw the instant he got the connection. The tightening of his jaw, the narrowing of his eyes. He handed the poster to Bowie and stared at me.

“Where did it come from?” he asked me flatly.

“Holy fucking shit, Scar. You didn’t kill her, did you?” Bowie asked, dumbfounded.

I don’t know why I found it funny. Or maybe I didn’t find it funny at all and was just flat out hysterical. But I collapsed to the floor laughing so hard I cried.

“You automatically assume I had something to do with it?” Hadn’t I done the same toward my father?

“It was a knee-jerk reaction,” Bowie said defensively, staring at Callie’s sweater like it was an angry boar.

“I found it in Mama’s trunk upstairs,” I told them. “I recognized it right away because of the button. Remember how every girl in Bootleg swapped out their top button for a year afterwards? He’d packed a bunch of stuff in there. Family photos, some of Mama’s clothes, and this was in the very bottom.”

Jameson picked up the bag and examined the sweater. He dropped it, his face pale. “It’s stained.”

“What?” I asked, snatching it back from him. I held it up to the light, and there was a little pattern of stains. “It looks like drops or splatter.”

“Blood,” Jameson said quietly.

“He didn’t do it,” I said, shaking my head. Someone needed to say the words out loud. I braced for their argument, held my breath.

Bowie, still staring at the offending sweater, remained silent. “Devlin know about this?” he finally asked.

I shook my head. “He knows I found the sweater, and he knows it was hers, but he doesn’t know she disappeared wearing it.”

“He’s a smart guy, Scar. How long does he have to be in Bootleg before he knows every detail of the Kendall girl’s disappearance?”

I scrubbed my hands over my face. “What do we do? I mean, I know we have to turn it over to the cops, but…”

The “but” hung in the air.

“But what?” Bowie asked. “We have to take this to Sheriff Tucker.”

Jameson swiped a hand over his forehead. “I don’t know man. What if it was an accident?”

“What kind of accident?” Bowie demanded.

“What if he was driving drunk that night. She left the lake, and it was dark, right?”

My stomach dropped out. My brothers believed there was a possibility that our father had done this.

“And then what?” I demanded, my voice a near shriek. “He dumped her body in the lake? He buried her in our backyard? He wouldn’t have done that. You can’t believe that.”

“What’s the other option, Scar?” Jameson demanded. “Why else would he have her blood-stained sweater hidden away?”

“We have to take this to the sheriff,” Bowie said again.

“And say what? Our dad might be a murderer? You know what that will do,” Jameson argued.

“We’ll all be guilty by gossip,” I said to myself.

“We can’t not take this to the cops. There’s blood on it. This might be the answer that that poor girl’s parents have been looking for,” Bowie said.

“But it might not be the right answer, Bowie,” I argued. “Before we throw ourselves on the mercy of this town and beg them to believe us, don’t you think we owe it to Daddy to at least dig a little deeper ourselves?”

“We’re not crime scene investigators,” Bowie snapped. “We have evidence in the highest profile missing person case in the state, and you want to sit on it and hope that our father had nothing to do with it?”

“We vote then,” I said. Jameson was with me. Together we could overrule Bowie.

“We’re not all here,” Bowie said.

Gibson would love to crucify daddy in the court of public opinion. To have the rest of the town believe like he did, that Daddy was a low down, dirty loser? Gibson would gladly sell us all out for that tasty slice of revenge.

“Look,” I began. “I agree that we need the police at some point. But can we just sleep on it? Bow, I’m not ready for everyone to start looking at us as the reason she’s gone. Think about it. Your job could be on the line. What will your friends say? Your neighbors?” I was shamelessly pushing him to think of Cassidy. And it was all selfish.

The second the sweater went to the cops was the moment I’d have to say good-bye to Devlin.

“This is a fucking nightmare,” he said.

“No one can know about this for now, Bowie,” I told him. Not Dev, not Cass. And I wasn’t even sure about Gibson at this point.

“So, what do we do?” Bowie asked.

“We think back. Where were we when Callie went missing? Do we remember anything specific about Dad at the time?”

“How the hell are we supposed to remember?” Bowie growled in irritation. “It was over a decade ago.”

“It’s one of those things where you always remember where you were when it happened,” I told him.

“Gibson’s,” Jameson said suddenly.

I looked at him, the memory dawning. “Yeah. That’s right. We were all at Gibson’s. Cassidy called over to tell us.”

“Why were we all at Gibson’s apartment?” Bowie asked, frown lines carving into his forehead.