Once you discover enough of it, it moves backward.
It contaminates yesterday.
Then the day before.
Then anniversaries.
Birthdays.
First kisses.
Until eventually you reach a moment you once considered pure and discover someone had already been lying inside it.
I drove to the Chesapeake cottage after dark.
Mom was asleep.
I sat alone on the screened porch.
The bay was black except for a narrow path of moonlight trembling across the water.
On the table beside me lay two things.
My parents’ old wedding photograph.
And my mother’s broken glasses.
She had wanted to throw them away after buying the new pair.
I had asked to keep them.
For evidence, I told her.
But the case no longer needed them.
Maybe I did.
One gold rim was bent.
One lens remained.
The other was missing the piece police had cut from Ryan’s boot.
I thought about my father hiding an envelope because he wanted to protect his daughter from a truth he could not prove.
