Chapter 2

At 11:47 that night, the lights in the Hale residence were still on.

The house sat at the end of a long driveway, a dark brick colonial that had belonged to the family for sixty years, and in all of Desmond Hale's life, he had never once entered his father's study after midnight. The study was his father's room. It had been his father's room when the old man was alive, and it had remained his father's room in the sixteen months since he died, the door closed, the blinds down, nothing touched, as if the room itself had been buried with him.

Desmond stood in front of the closed door with a glass of water in his hand and the photograph he had not returned burning a hole in his memory.

He would have said he was not thinking about it. That was his habit, the family habit, the way of the Hales: you do not reopen what has been closed. His father had been a man of decisions, and his decisions had been final, and Desmond had spent fifty-eight years learning not to question them. His brother had left. The ring had come back. The money had been found. That was the story, and the story had held, and the story had been the floor of his life for twenty-four years.

But the girl in the dining room had laid a photograph on his table and said, "That's my father," and Desmond had looked into the face of a brother he had not seen since the day his father announced the family was done with him.

He had not gone to the funeral. His father had said it was better that way, and Desmond had agreed, because that was what you did. You agreed. You moved on. You wore the ring your brother had sent back and you did not ask questions, because his father had said the ring was the only thing worth keeping, and Desmond had taken it because taking it was easier than asking what else had been thrown away.