Page 82 of The Ashes of Summer

Then he sits back, entirely relaxed. Entirely certain.

"Let him come." Calm. Almost amused. "Let him see exactly what his hesitation cost."

On the screen, my father walks through those doors again. Another date. Another lie. Another night.

Jackson's eyes drift to it, and something in his face comes loose. The certainty slides off it like a mask that's been untied at the back.

"Your father killed her."

The words go through the numbness like wire through wax.

I don't move. I don't ask. I've learned that my silence is the only thing that keeps him talking, and some starved part of me still wants to know—still needs the shape of the thing that's swallowed my whole life.

"Not with his hands. Men like Michael Miller never do it with their hands." He's watching the screen, but he isn't seeing it. "He wanted her. I said no. So he took her from me anyway, and then he made sure she couldn't come home."

He stops. His jaw works.

"I found her."

His voice changes on those three words. It goes somewhere thin and far away, and the man in the chair goes with it, and I understand that he isn't talking to me anymore.

"There was so much blood I couldn't find where it was coming from. I thought if I just kept my hands on her—if I kept saying her name—" He stops again. "She was still warm."

Something moves in me that I don't want. I don't want to feel anything for him. Not after tonight. Not ever. But the numbness has cracked in one small place and through it comes the picture anyway: a man on a floor with a woman going cold in his arms.

And underneath it, immediately, comes the second thought, and it's mine, and it's cold as stone.

Good.

I hope you never stop feeling it.

"His deputies dragged me off her." The sound that leaves him isn't a laugh, whatever it's pretending to be. "That's what they walked in on. Me on the floor. Her blood to my elbows. Two of your sheriff's men hauled me off a body I wouldn't put down." His head tilts. "Every one of them decided in the same second what they were looking at. Nobody asked. Why would they? A man like me, holding a girl like that."

The footage keeps looping. He hasn't blinked in a long time.

"They buried her on a Thursday." Quieter now. Almost gentle. Gentle enough that my skin crawls, because I know exactly who he's speaking to, and it isn't me. "Her mother chose the flowers. I put in a request. It was reviewed in due course." His hands have gone still on his knees. "I sat on a bed four hours away and watched a clock go round."

Then, so soft I nearly don't catch it:

"I never even saw where they put her."

And there it is. The thing at the bottom of all of this. Not the murder. Not the prison. A man who never got to stand at the edge of a hole in the ground and say goodbye, and who has spent every day since trying to build her back out of other people's bodies.

Mine. Out of mine.

His eyes come back into the room, and they settle on me—really on me, the way they did on the floor with my cord around his throat. Whatever was almost human in them a moment ago is gone.

"I thought I could make you her." He says it simply, like a man reading back a figure that didn't add up. "I thought if I took enough away, if I got it right—the hair, the scent, the way you hold your mouth when you're angry—I thought I could get her back."

He looks at me for a long moment. Something in his face closes like a hand.

"But you'll always be Michael Miller's daughter. And I'm never going to change that."

The floor goes out from under me.

Because I know what I've been to him since the moment he put me in this house. A vessel. A canvas. A thing worth keeping careful, worth feeding, worth dressing—because there was something he wanted to grow inside it. Every hour I've survived here, I've survived on the back of that want.

And he's just set it down.