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Clyde watches, silent now, his gaze unreadable.
I pull harder, dragging it free, the scrape of wood on stone grating in the stillness. My arms tremble as I lift it into the weak glow of the cellar bulb.
It’s heavier than I remember.
I wipe the lid clean with my sleeve, leaving streaks of mud and blood-red dust. The lock is rusted, broken from the last time I opened it. He watches as I lay them across the bench, unwrapping each bundle, peeling back the oilskin to reveal photographs, letters, cassette tapes, scraps of paper yellowed and curling at the edges.
“This is some of the things that I found. The rest is up in my room,” I say, spreading the items out across the bench. “This is all proof. Secrets. Their gospel.”
The photos come first.
Clyde stares down as I untie the twine, flipping them over one by one onto the wood. His face tightens with every image, grainy snapshots of girls. Bound. Bruised. Their eyes glassy and far away.
His hand hovers above them, hesitating. Then he picks one up.
A black-and-white image of a young girl, maybe nine, bound at the wrists, staring straight into the camera. Her face is blank. Her dress is torn.
Clyde’s fingers tremble as he flips to another. Then another. Girls. Faces blurring together under the same cold lens.
He freezes.
Clyde’s knees buckle. He sinks onto the bench beside me, his hands trembling as he gathers the photos into a shaky pile. His breath rattles in his throat, shallow, sharp.
Her small frame. Her frightened face. The familiar bow in her hair.
“Cindy.” His voice shatters, a broken sound dragged from somewhere deep.
He stares at the photo, his sister, younger, her hair braided neatly down her back, standing stiff beside a man whose hand grips her shoulder too tightly.
His hands curl around the edges of the photo like he could crush the image between his palms. “No…” he whispers. “No, no, no…”
I don’t speak. I just watch him.
I watch the way his shoulders hunch forward, folding in like the weight’s finally pressing him down. The way his throat bobs as he swallows hard, like he’s choking on something he can’t spit out. The way his eyes stay locked on her face, like if he stares hard enough, he can pull her back from the paper.
We sit in silence. The kind that hums, heavy and swollen. I let him have it. Let him sit in the wreckage. Let him process the loss of his sister again.
A flicker of guilt worms through me, but I push it down. He needs this. Needs to see what they did. What his father helped make.
I’m not sure if he truly believed Warren’s confession before he killed him. Maybe a part of him still clung to the man he remembered as a father. But if there were any doubts left, they’re ashes now.
Photo evidence is always the strongest weapon.
Still, as I watch him, bent, breaking, I wonder what it says about me that I feel nothing at all, not relief, not triumph, not even pity.
Only the hollow thrum of waiting.
He flips to the next photo, and freezes.
His breath hitches, sharp and shallow. His shoulders lock, every muscle gone rigid.
“What… what’s this?” His voice scrapes low, like he’s afraid to say it out loud.
I lean closer.
It’s me.
Bound. Younger. My wrists raw, swollen red. My chin lifted stubbornly toward the camera. A man’s hand gripping my jaw, forcing my face toward the lens.
