Page 6 of I Will Find You

“What is?”

“This whole thing. It can’t be Matthew. We are both letting our want cloud our judgment.”

“Rachel,” I say.

She meets my eye.

“Why didn’t you show this to your sister?” I press.

Rachel twists the rings on her fingers. Her eyes leave mine, dart about the room like startled birds, settle back down. “You have to understand,” she says. “Cheryl is trying to move on. She’s trying to put this all behind her.”

I can feel my heart going thump-thump in my chest.

“If I tell her, it’ll be like ripping her life out by the roots again. That kind of false hope—it would devastate her.”

“Yet you’re telling me.”

“Because you have nothing, David. If I rip your life out by the roots, so what? You have no life. You gave up living a long time ago.”

Her words may sound harsh, but there is no anger or menace in the tone. She is right, of course. It’s a fair observation. I have nothing to lose here. If we are wrong about this photograph—and when I try to be objective, I realize that the odds are pretty strong that we are wrong—it will change nothing for me. I will still be in this place, eroding and decaying with no desire to slow that process down.

“She remarried,” Rachel says.

“So you said.”

“And she’s pregnant.”

Straight left jab to the chin followed by a powerful blind-side right hook. I stagger back and take the eight-count.

“I wasn’t going to tell you—” Rachel says.

“It’s fine—”

“—and if we try to do something with this—”

“I get it,” I say.

“Good, because I don’t know what to do,” Rachel says. “It’s not like this is evidence that would convince a reasonable person. Unless you want me to try that. I mean, I could take it to an attorney or the police.”

“They’d laugh you out of the room.”

“Right. We could go to the press maybe.”

“No.”

“Or…or Cheryl. If you think that’s right. Maybe we can get permission to exhume the body. A new autopsy or DNA test could prove it one way or another. You’d get a new trial maybe—”

“No.”

“What, why?”

“Not yet anyway,” I say. “We can’t let anyone know.”

Rachel looks confused. “I don’t understand.”

“You’re a journalist.”

“So?”

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