Chapter Two: Twenty Years of Blank

Caine drove her back into town.

The wipers swept across the windshield, clearing one small strip of glass, which the fog immediately filled again. Lila had driven this road ten thousand times: left was the café, right was the pier, straight was the cliff. She could name every mile marker along it, but only today did she dare ask herself the question she had buried for twenty years.

“What did you actually see, that night?”

Caine’s grip on the wheel tightened.

He did not answer at once. The wipers made another pass. “I told you part of it.”

“You said you saw a truck.”

“I saw that truck parked at the old pier.” Caine’s voice dropped. “I saw two men drag something long out of the bed. Wrapped in tarpaulin. I was eleven years old, Lila. I thought it was bootlegged liquor, or some kind of cargo that couldn’t see the light. I was terrified. I ran home and didn’t dare say a word.”

“Something long,” Lila repeated.

“I only found out later what it was.”

Silence settled in the car for a long time. The fog crawled along the window, as if something outside were watching. Lila turned to him and saw the line of his jaw clenched tight — the look he got when he was pressing down on some old thing.

“There’s more you haven’t told me,” she said. It was not a question.

Caine pulled over at the overlook beside the cliff. Dozens of feet below, the black reefs stood in a silent row in the surf. He cut the engine.

“I saw their faces,” he said.

Lila’s breath stopped.

“One was Shaw. One was Pruitt.” Caine finally turned to look at her, his eyes red. “I’ve known them ever since that day. In the tavern, at the general store — I brushed past them every single time. I pretended I didn’t know them. Because the thing I didn’t say when I was eleven, by the time I was thirty-one, it had grown too heavy for me to carry.”

“So all these years —”

“I’ve thought about your sister every day,” he cut her off. “Every single day.”

From the fog came a distant sound, like metal scraping. Both of them looked up at once. The overlook was empty — nothing but the wet guardrail and the churning white surf.

Yet Lila saw it plainly, on the slick asphalt: a fresh set of footprints.