“Scarlett is gonna murder us for using her new towels to clean up bodily fluids,” Cassidy predicted as I ran the towel under the hot water.

“Honey she’d be a lot more pissed if we left this mess for her,” I teased, cleaning us both up as best I could. She was beautiful with her walls down and her cheeks flushed. Happiness radiated out of her like heat from the sun.

“That was crazy hot, wasn’t it? I mean, I thought it was,” Cassidy said. She had a tendency to jabber after sex. A trait I found fucking adorable.

“Crazy hot,” I agreed.

“What will we do after we run out of fantasies?” Cassidy asked, concerned.

I rinsed the towel out in the sink and looked down her long, lean body. “Honey, I think we’ll be fine.” I had a feeling I could spend a lifetime coming up with new ways to appreciate Cassidy’s body.

“I can’t believe we did that,” she said, hopping off the counter and feeling around on the floor for her pants.

I leaned down and kissed her hard. “You’re my every dream come true. When are you gonna realize that?”

She smiled up at me, and I couldn’t help but gather her up and swing her around in the tight space.

I wondered if she’d known that she’d just given me my very happiest memory in this house.

“Is it weird to be here?” she asked, reading my damn mind.

I set her down on her feet and pulled my shirt over my head. She looked disappointed that I was getting dressed.

We had it bad. I doubted that I’d be able to hold off on popping the question much longer. Especially after I’d heard her confessions to Scarlett. She wanted me every Christmas morning. I wanted to give her time to get used to the idea, time to find the right solution at work. But all she had to do was look at me with those gorgeous green eyes, and I was already halfway to my knee.

It was right. We were right.

“It is,” I admitted. “It’s different now, but I still have all these memories popping out at me every room I step into.”

We picked up our coats off the floor and, loose-limbed and smiling, started down the stairs. “I feel like any minute now your mom is gonna poke her head in the front door and tell Scarlett and me we have to unload the groceries from the car—” She broke off in mid-sentence, freezing on the stairs.

“What is it?” I asked. Had she seen a bat? Did I have the chance to play hero again?

“Her car.”

“What car?”

“Your mom’s car.”

“What about it.”

“She never let your dad drive it.”

I recalled a few dozen arguments about my dad’s driving ability. My mom drove a beat-up Pontiac bought from a cousin for a grand. It only started half the time and overheated the other half. The speakers on the right side didn’t work, and the fabric on the ceiling had come loose. She kept it pinned up with sunflower safety pins. But it was her pride and joy.

I was surprised by the swift rush of memory.

“She hated the way Dad drove,” I recalled. “He was a terrible driver, even before the drinking.”

“Funny thing about memories,” she said, sounding kind of far away. “Like walking down these steps I remember your mom pulling up out front in your dad’s truck. Her honking the horn at us to come help unload. She was pissed because one of the bags fell over in the truck bed and the eggs were all broken.”

A vague recollection was beginning to take shape.

“She was really upset about the eggs. Upset enough, I figured it was about something more than broken eggs,” Cassidy continued quietly.

“She was upset about a lot of things,” I said, not sure what Cassidy was getting at.

“We should probably head home,” she said. But I got the feeling she wasn’t hearing or seeing me right now. She had that look in her eye that I usually only saw during game night when she was one strategic play away from a win.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

But she didn’t answer, she was already pushing her way out the front door.

I stared down at the beer I was holding while SportsCenter replayed receiver GT Thompson’s injury play over and over again as they discussed his career options. After gritty, raw, incredible sex, Cassidy had given me a perfunctory kiss on the back porch and marched right on into her own house. No invitation. No apology. Just a single-minded focus on something that she didn’t feel like sharing.

I’d heard every damn word she and my sister exchanged the other night. And I thought Cass had taken it seriously. I had hope. But tonight was just another example of her shutting me out.

Jonah had tried to pry it out of me when I got home, but I’d brushed him off. I didn’t feel like talking about how much my girlfriend had let me down. It was worse, coming on the heels of willingly going out in town together. And then baring our souls in a house that held hardly anything but sadness for me.

“Fuck,” I swore. This wasn’t the relationship that either one of us wanted or deserved. I didn’t know what to do about it. I loved her. I belonged to her. We had a future together. But I couldn’t make her trust me. I couldn’t make her open up.

The knock was so soft I didn’t think I’d heard it. Then it was back. Three soft taps coming from the door between our kitchens.

I pulled myself off the couch and shuffled down the hall. The door was unlocked, as always, but she was asking for permission.

I opened it. Cassidy hadn’t bothered changing out of her ice cream and sex clothes. She was clutching a thin stack of papers. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey.”

“I’m sorry for kind of ghosting on you,” she said.

I remained silent. I wasn’t going to make this easy for her anymore.

“Bow, your mom never let your dad drive her car.”

“What are you talking about, Cass?” I asked wearily.

“But he took her car to New York. He was in her car when he got the speeding ticket.”

To give myself something to do besides feel hurt and confused, I headed into the kitchen for another beer even though I’d barely touched the one I had. Cassidy followed me.

“There was something that bothered me about your dad’s speeding ticket. It was the fact that he got it in your mother’s car. A car he wasn’t allowed to drive. So why would she have lent it to him for a multi-state road trip?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he stole it,” I said.

Or maybe he needed the trunk of a car to conceal something he couldn’t haul in the open bed of a pickup. The thought turned my stomach, and I put the second beer on the counter next to the first.

She was fired up. I could see her cop brain working. Excitement was crackling off of her. And I wanted to take it away from her the way she’d taken my hope away from me.

“What does it matter? My mother died in that car. It was totaled.”

“And sent to Buddy Foster, Jr.’s junkyard,” she said, shuffling the papers. “Buddy never gets rid of anything. There’s a chance her car is still there.”

If my father had used that car to cart Callie’s body out of the state… “It’s been more than ten years.”

“But there might be something in it. Some clue.”

“What could you possibly find?” I asked, not caring that I was raising my voice. “There’s no way DNA evidence could survive ten years in the elements.”

“We have to try, Bowie.”

The woman I loved, the one I wanted to marry, was asking me to help her prove that my father was a murderer. She was, essentially, expecting me to help her ruin my family’s life. Didn’t she care what this would do to my family? Not just to our reputation, but how we saw ourselves. We were already the sons and daughter of a drunk. What would adding “murderer” to that description do?

“What about the pictures from the Kendalls?” I was grasping at straws.

“If we find the car and there’s nothing in it, no evidence that Callie was ever in it, that could pull in favor of the theory that she hurt herself. If there’s nothing to be found, that’s another huge piece of evidence that Connelly can’t keep ignoring.”

I needed her to say it. Did she think my father was guilty or innocent?

Cassidy took a deep breath and blew it out again. “I’ve been struggling with wondering if I should tell you something or not. So I’m gonna say it. You have a right to know.”

“You’re starting to make me nervous,” I said, picking up one of the beers.

“There’s a possibility that your mom’s accident wasn’t an accident.” She blurted the words out, and the beer went bitter on my tongue. “I talked to my dad about it and he had his suspicions.”

“What? You think my dad murdered Callie and got a taste for it so he went ahead and killed my mom, too?” It would have been laughable if it weren’t my fucking life. My fucking family.

“No. Not that kind of a not an accident,” she explained gently. “There’s a chance—a small one—that your mom crashed on purpose.”

“Suicide? You think she went through that guardrail on purpose?”

“We both know she wasn’t happy, Bowie,” Cassidy began. “She had dreams much bigger than being a stay at home mom in a tiny town always worrying about money.”

“They did the best they could.” But even I didn’t believe it. My parents had let blame and dead dreams ruin what life they did have.

“I know, Bow. I know,” she said softly. “But what if your dad had some kind of involvement and…and your mom knew?”

She was asking me what if my mom found out that my dad killed Callie and she couldn’t live with it.

If Mom couldn’t live with it, how was I supposed to?

“We need to go to Buddy’s,” she said, crossing her arms against some invisible chill.

We. She was including me in this. I almost laughed at the irony. I didn’t want to be included.

I wanted to rewind to two hours ago when Cassidy had given me something beautiful to hang on to in that house. I felt sick.

She was supposed to be my future. My parents, my childhood, those were in my past. But if Cassidy had her way, she’d drag my past back out and make sure it haunted me forever.