Something in his voice stopped me.
He turned toward the SUV, then paused.
“Your son didn’t borrow two million dollars for a business.”
I said nothing.
Victor opened the passenger door.
“He borrowed it to keep his wife quiet.”
Then he got in, and the SUV rolled backward down the drive.
I sat there long after it disappeared.
Santos walked to the gatepost and picked up the envelope with two fingers. “Want me to open it?”
“No,” I said.
But I took it from him.
Inside my house, the air was still and smelled faintly of cedar. Elaine’s photograph sat on the hallway table, smiling from a summer twenty years gone. I stood before it with the envelope in my hand.
“You’d tell me to sit down first,” I murmured.
So I did.
At the kitchen table, I opened it.
There were photographs.
Not many.
Five.
The first showed Brandon outside a hotel, face turned away, arm around a woman who was not Amber.
