place to put any of them.
“He told me my father had left me with him,” he said.
“He lied,” Margaret said.
Daniel looked at the note in her hand. “For how long?”
“His whole life,” she said. “And yours, until today.”
Kate was crying quietly in the corner, the particular crying of someone who is grieving something complicated — the loss of a man who had done an unforgivable thing, and the guilt of having loved him without knowing what he had carried, and the relief of having finally put it in front of the right people.
The mayor arrived an hour later, pale and accompanied by two state police officers. He was the man who had been sheriff when Daniel disappeared, the man who had looked Roy in the eye and believed his denial, the man who had, when Margaret called him from Route 9 with a Polaroid on
