Amelia laughs once. “That’s a very easy thing for people to say when they’re not the ones who will be found.”
Whiskey looks at me.
We have enough.
Not all of it, but enough to know Vale ain’t just a bad husband with a bruised ego. Money. Church. Control. A wife with possible Welles blood. A kid. Oregon in the history. Paducah in the middle. Hell at the end.
This ain’t a thread.
It’s a knot.
Sophie turns to Amelia. “Did Jeremy know you were coming to Hell?”
“I don’t think so.”
“But he knew about Mike?”
“Yes.”
“And he knew your mother was from Oregon?”
Amelia nods. “He knew everything. He made a point of knowing everything. Where I came from. Who I talked to. What I bought. What time I got home. He said secrets were poison in a marriage.”
Whiskey’s face goes dark. “Men who say that usually keep the most.”
Amelia looks at him like that lands somewhere deep.
“Daddy?”
The small voice comes from the stairs.
Every man in the room turns.
August stands halfway down in dinosaur pajamas, hair sticking up, eyes swollen from sleep. Sophie is on her feet first, but Amelia moves faster, nearly knocking the chair over to get to him.
“I’m here,” she says, rushing to the stairs. “Baby, I’m here.”
He comes down two steps, then stops when he sees all the men looking at him.
He shrinks.
That pisses me off.
Not at him.
At the world that taught a five-year-old to measure a room before entering it.
I look around. “Everybody find something else to stare at.”
Men move.
Fast.
Derby is the only one who doesn’t look away. He watches the kid with the same expression he wore earlier, like someone opened an old wound and set a child in the middle of it.
August clings to Amelia when she reaches him. “I woke up.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”