Page 43 of Second Chance

“Oh, shoot, she fell asleep already?” Gianna winces as if it’s Tony’s fault she stayed much longer than either of them thought she would.

“Sorry.” Tony isn’t sorry. He also isn’t in the habit of using his customer service voice on family. There’s a first time for everything.

“It’s fine. I gotta get her to the car though.” Gianna takes off toward the lot, carefully maneuvering the stroller down the steps and not asking for help. “Thanks.” The last is thrown over her shoulder, barely an afterthought.

Tony rolls his eyes. “Anytime. Happy to help.”

She can’t hear him anymore.

“What a nightmare,” Colette announces.

For a second, Tony wants to defend Gianna—she’s a pain in the ass, but she’s notthatbad. Then, he realizes Colette’s talking about the memorial. “I only caught the Cliff notes out here. What happened?”

“Amy’s husband happened,” Colette says sourly. “That is a man with anger management problems.”

A bad feeling sinks low in Tony’s gut. Francie did say she didn’t like when her dad got loud. He wonders what Mr. Lawrence said or did when his daughter couldn’t hear it.

“He’s going through something awful.” Daniel’s more measured, but he doesn’t deny the anger issues. “People react to grief all sorts of ways.” The last, he says with a pointed look at Colette.

“I suppose that’s fair.” She sounds begrudging about it at best. “Still, I never yelled at three separate faculty members in front of the entire student body.”

Tony raises his eyebrows. “Guess I missed some pretty wild stuff.”

“Eh.” Daniel makes a weighing motion with his hands. “Extreme emotions happen at funerals. To be honest, it seemed like he and Amelia had been having some issues for a while. She was working too much, he didn’t approve, you know.”

Colette crosses her arms and inspects the fingernails on her right hand closely. “If you ask me, he should be the prime suspect after the show he put on.”

Daniel doesn’t protest.

Tony shakes his head. “I don’t see it.”

“You didn’thearit,” Colette points out.

“He came out this way after.” Tony wonders if he should repeat the things Mr. Lawrence said, the naked desperation in his tone. He doesn’t think it would help. “He didn’t seem like a killer, just a grieving husband.”

Colette sighs, put-upon. “All those seasons ofBones, and you learned nothing.”

“Sure, I did.” Tony grins. “Police violence is justified when it’s the good guys.”

Colette scoffs in disgust, heading for the car. “America,” she mutters under her breath as she goes.

Daniel follows her. “You don’t mean that.”

They bicker across the parking lot about the merits and lack thereof of the USA, the tone light and teasing to hide their unease. It’s familiar, which is why Tony started it. Familiarity is comforting. He wonders if he’s been hiding behind it for too long now. Maybe he should have broken up the slow, steady routine at the garage to have a real conversation with his father about Daniel. Maybe he should have broken up his weeknight routines with Daniel to talk about Stacy and Mario properly. Maybe he should have broken up his own routines to find someone professional to listen to all the things he didn’t know he needed to say.

Tony considers breaking up this routine to tell Colette about Sean needing more hands-on counseling or about Mr. Lawrence and his utter devastation. Instead, Tony says nothing as he slides into the passenger seat, still thinking about Francie and her father.

When they pull up in front of the apartment, Tony’s shocked out of his daze by the sight of a knife taped to the door.

“Um,” he says.

Colette doesn’t hear him as she passionately defends something by Rousseau as being “easily a better foundation for democracy than the Federalist Papers.” Daniel, occupied with listening closely to Colette’s argument and trying to find the holes in it, hears him but doesn’t respond.

“Guys,” Tony tries again.

When neither of them responds, he slides out of the passenger seat and walks up to the door. Masking tape, fraying at the edges, attaches the knife to it—a hunting knife with a flat blade and, from what Tony can see around the tape, a stupidly ornate handle. The kind of thing people who are really into weapons would get, or someone who enjoys the Ren faire a little too much or who genuinely wants to kill deer. The blade is clean, but that doesn’t mean anything.

There’s no note, no cutout magazine letters. It feels much less like a student prank and much more like a threat.

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