He picks up the first photo.
At first, he blinks like he doesn’t understand what he’s seeing. Then the color starts to drain from his face. A flicker of disbelief, followed by something that looks too much like fear—and worse—recognition.
I don’t let up.
“They tell quite the story, don’t they, Father?”
He exhales sharply through his nose. Grim now. His expression collapses inward as he sets the photo down with a trembling hand.
“Grant—”
“She was sixteen.”
The words cut out of me like a blade, low and venom-laced. My breath comes harder now, like the effort of keeping it all in has become too much.
“That first one?” I nod at the photo nearest to him. “That’s you. Laying Corrine out on your desk. Your head between the legs of a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl.”
His mouth opens. Closes. Then?—
“You don’t understand, Grant?—”
“Oh, don’t I?” I lean forward, voice trembling, fury riding the edges of every syllable. “But you didn’t have enough? Mom was picking me up from school, and the next photo?—”
I stand suddenly, pointing behind me toward the study’s doorway. Toward the blank expanse of wall that will never be blank again.
“—that’s you. Right there. Your mouth on her breast. Your hand up her skirt.”
He flinches, and I fucking hate him for it.
The tears come before I can stop them, burning down my face in silence. I can’t even wipe them away. My voice is shaking, gutted, nearly unrecognizable.
“She saw you.”
He rises now, slow but insistent.
“Son, there’s more to this—there’s a lot more you don’t know.”
But I’m already standing. Already unraveling.
“Oh, I know it all.” My voice cracks, louder now. “I know it all and I wish I could cut it out of my mind forever.”
The words rip through the room, spit flying from my lips as my chest heaves with the weight of it. Of years spent trying to make sense of something that never had any.
“I thought she was upset with me.” My voice breaks. A sound I don’t even recognize. “But she wasn’t. She saw you.”
“She walked in. Saw everything.”
“That’s why she ran upstairs. That’s why she opened my door already crying. She didn’t say anything, but I knew something was wrong. I thought it was me.”
“This whole time, I thought I killed her.” I let that truth hang between us—shame and sorrow curdling into rage.
“But she saw you,” I whisper. “She fucking saw you.”
I reach for the glass, and throw it.
The glass explodes against the back wall of the fireplace, shards catching the light as they scatter into flame. The whiskey hisses, sizzling as it hits the embers.
A fitting sound, I think, for the truth I’m about to lay at his feet.
