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He picks up another photo, my father, Kerr, and Henry. His expression changes, and it isn’t confusion, isn’t curiosity. Something else.

“You think these pictures are going to give you something the past didn’t already take?” He looks at me. “You’re not going to let this go, are you?”

“I don’t think I can.”

He leans back. “And you won’t tell me why. Because I know it’s not about understanding. You’ve never needed to understand.” Again, I don’t give him an answer. He sets the photo down too hard. “Then be careful. Jonah’s not the only one watching. You don’t want the wrong people knowing how deep you’re digging.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He doesn’t answer. Just watches me. The muscle in his jaw ticks.

I stand. Sling the bag over my shoulder. My voice lowers. “Whatever happened to Cindy,” I say, “you couldn’t have stopped it.”

His eyes lift, wide and unreadable.

“She was already gone,” I add. “You just didn’t see it yet.”

I leave him in his silence and step into the cold.

But it follows me. Clings to my skin like smoke.

The silence of a girl in a photograph.

The silence of a brother who knows more than he says.

The silence of a town that still thinks it can bury its sins in soft dirt and shuttered windows.

Not this time.

CHAPTER

FORTY-ONE

The world narrows when you’re hunting.

I sit at the kitchen table, the journal opened in front of me, my fingers hovering just above the page like the ink might burn if I touch it wrong. The smell of cleaner Janice is constantly using to make sure my father’s suppressed immune system doesn’t attack him. I wish she’d stop with the cleaning. The stench is thick and sharp, settles into the bones of the house. No matter how many windows I open, it never leaves. It clings like sweat. Like guilt.

My father is locked away in his office. I haven’t heard a sound from him in hours. Not the groan of the floor beneath his wheelchair. Not the soft thud of something falling. Not even a grunt.

I don’t know if he’s asleep or awake. Alive or rotting in his silence. Maybe he’s gone mad in there, lost somewhere behind those useless eyes, trapped in a body that won’t move, a prison even he can’t pray his way out of. And maybe that’s the point. Let him sit there. Let everything he did crush him, inch by inch, breath by ragged breath.

I glance back down at the journal. His handwriting coils across the page, familiar, neat, looping like a sermon written just for me. Each word feels like a whisper from the grave. And still, he speaks louder here than he ever did in life.

Levi’s name stands out again and again underlined, circled, clawed into the page like a man trying to pin down a ghost. The handwriting is frantic, slashed across margins in ink that’s smeared in places where my fingers have lingered too long. I keep tracing the same loops and arrows, like if I follow the right one, I’ll unlock the rot buried under it all.

The photo from the church potluck sits beside the journal. Levi’s wiry frame and too-sharp grin are frozen mid-laugh, like even the past couldn’t catch him clean. My thumb taps against the edge of the table in that same unconscious rhythm, the one that shows up when the walls close in. The other hand grips the pen like a weapon.

I’ve looked for him for months. I feel like December bled into March, then April, barely able to recall what’s happened over the past three or four months because I’ve done nothing but look.

Where are you, Levi?

The search has been surgical. Church rosters. Tax records. Obituaries that came up short. I’ve spent nights crafting fake social profiles, baited with scripture and modest smiles, each one a hook cast into the digital dark. I’ve been fishing in Levi’s Pond. And I’m finally feeling the tug.

My father’s journal has become the map. Each note a breadcrumb, each margin a whisper. He tracked Levi like prey, but he never got to the end. Maybe he was afraid of what he’d find. Or maybe Levi didn’t want to be found… until now.

Then I see it. A date, scrawled in the corner like an afterthought:

Green Pastures Revival – 2012.