“Him,” Morgan said.
“What?”
“He was good with Sammy, not me,” Morgan said. “I never got an A in my life.”
“You got a life, though,” Shay said. “I figure Sammy would swap that report for one of those. Just give her something. It won’t need to be much. Then tell Mac that you’ve remembered Deacon Hill, or whatever. Whatever he’ll buy.”
“You’re sure he did it?”
Shay shrugged. “Someone had to,” he said. “I know I didn’t, and everyone who doesn’t think it was me thinks it was him.”
Downstairs the oven slammed, and Donna’s voice filtered up through the floor along with the smell of burned meat. “I’m ordering pizza, boys,” she said. “What do you want?”
For a second, Morgan’s mind went so blank it echoed.
“Cheese, nothing else,” Shay stepped in with his cue. Then he pitched his voice to carry down the stairs. “Hawaiian for me, Mom.”
Morgan hesitated. Guilt tasted like dust and matches against the roof of his mouth, but he forced the words out past it. The fear of what would happen if he didn’t—of locked doors and shared quarters and the press of bodies around him—pushed it through. He didn’t think he’d survive another stint behind bars. The first had scared him as straight as he could survive.
“Plain cheese,” he said. “Nothing else.”
Donna laughed in relief before she caught herself. “It won’t be long. The Pie Place closed a few years after… a few years ago… but there’s a Domino’s in town now.”
Shit.
Morgan sat down on the rumpled bed, the old report that had pride of place on the wall for fifteen years dangling between his knees, and shook his head.
“Look, I know you want someone to pay for what happened to your brother,” he said. “But isn’t there some other way to do this? Can your mom really handle it if she thinks she’s got Sammy back and then never sees him again when I skip town? Or worse… when she finds out we all lied to her after Sammy turns up one day?”
Shay looked away from Morgan and stared at the walkie-talkie by the window. He clenched his jaw as he shrugged. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Maybe I’ll wire you money and you can call her once a year, tell her you’re okay, and that’ll be enough for her to live on. Or it won’t. What I know is that she can’t handle it now, and neither can I. You know why my marriage broke up?”
“You know I don’t care?” Morgan checked.
The tips of Shay’s ears went so red it looked as though someone had pinched them, but he pushed on.
“You want a reason to do this? Then you listen,” he said roughly. “I loved Sarah, and she loved me. People warned her off, told her all the old theories, but she didn’t care. Until one day she did. You see, she wanted kids, and she didn’t want them with me—not because she thought I’d done it, but just in case.Just in caseI’d murdered my little brother and hidden him somewhere.”
The faded horror in Shay’s voice was somehow more vulnerable than a denial would have been. That “just in case” felt like something Shay had kept picked open over the years. Until he just got used to the raw meat of it.
Morgan shifted uncomfortably on the bed. The last thing he wanted was a glimpse at the Shay who wasn’t just an asshole with a perfect profile. One thing should stay simple.
“That sounds fucked-up,” he said. “But she was just cracked.”
“It wasn’t just her,” Shay said. “The whole damn town looks at me and thinks,Just in casebefore they don’t ask me to fix a car or have a drink. It’s not just me and Mom either. Boyd has spent his whole life guilty that he wasn’t murdered in Sammy’s place. You think I didn’t want to bring my brother home? You think I don’t want to know what happened to him. I do, but I’m never going to get those answers. So I’ll make my own, and I can live with that.”
Morgan looked at his hands. He’d rolled the old report into a tight tube, and he let it unfurl again.
“Will Boyd be able to?” he asked.
“That won’t be your problem.”
Shay stepped away from the door and headed downstairs. Left to himself, Morgan took one last look around the messy little shrine and waited. Just in case.
Nothing. It was just some kid’s room. He didn’t remember being tucked in under Batman sheets or writing some report on—he glanced at the now-curled paper—how elections worked. Or he did, but Batman sold a lot of sheets, and everyone did reports at school. There was nothing distinctlySammyabout any of it.
“Sorry, kid,” Morgan muttered as he got up off the bed. He pinned the report back in place on the brittle corkboard next to a sun-faded picture of Sammy and a lanky teenager Morgan assumed was Shay. “I didn’t mean to get in your space.”
He left the room to the ghost of the memory that clung to it and headed downstairs. Time to remember something useful for Mac.
