Chapter 7: His Father's House

The file was eleven minutes long, and I had stopped it at "Come here."

I had never played the end.

I dragged the slider to the last minute and pressed play.

For a few seconds there was only breathing and the creak of the bed.

Then a door closed, and a shower started somewhere far away.

Brandon was gone.

The phone was close to a mouth.

"Jo," Kendall whispered.

I stopped breathing.

"If you ever hear this part, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. It's all I could do."

Her voice shook.

"It took three times. I couldn't stand it a fourth. Please don't hate me too much."

The file ended.

I sat in the dark, holding the phone against my chest.

It took three times.

I did not understand it.

I did not know what I was supposed to understand.

She had slept with Brandon three times and called it all she could do.

I played it again.

I played it a third time.

Then I deleted nothing, and I closed the app.

In the morning I did not tell Hayes.

I told myself it was because I was not ready to say it out loud.

He drove us to a long gravel driveway lined with maples, and he stopped the truck at an iron gate.

"This is it," he said.

"Your father's house?"

"The one Constance shut up the month after he died," he said. "She moved to the city and never sold it. She just wouldn't let me in."

The gate opened with a key he had taken from the courthouse lawyer.

The house sat at the end of the drive, white clapboard, with black shutters and a porch that wrapped around three sides.

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