This time, when Jeremy tried to kick the door down, she didn’t try to stop him.

Chapter Thirty

They sat alone in the ghost of his mom’s kitchen. No Bright Boys. Just him and his father. If it was his father.

If? No, it was. The crow’s-feet around the eyes. The gray patches of hair by the temples. The dozens of healed scars on his arms from a hundred minor workplace injuries. The broad shoulders slightly stooped from a lifetime of manual labor but still strong as an ox.

But it wasn’t his face or his shoulders or even his eyes that told Rafe this man sitting across from him was his real father or the ghost of his real father…

It was the fear, his oldest fear. Not death, not pain, not watching someone he loved suffer. The simple stupid terrifying fear he’d carried like gravel in his guts ever since he was a child. The fear of knowing he was in trouble with his dad.

“It’s all right, son,” his dad said, though Rafe hadn’t apologized for stabbing him with the fork. “I know it’s a surprise. A surprise to me too.”

“You’re alive. You’re…younger. You’re—”

He shrugged. “I’m here. Can’t really explain.”

“Try.”

His father narrowed his eyes in a warning. Rafe quickly adjusted his tone. “Please.”

“I wanted another chance to talk to you. I got it. Sometimes that happens. Don’t ask me how it works.”

“Why did you want to talk to me?” Rafe asked him.

“Why?” He seemed surprised by the question. “Because you’re my son.”

Rafe wanted to scream but didn’t. He knew better, and the unwritten rules were tattooed onto his soul. Don’t raise your voice to your father. Don’t swear in front of your father. If you raise your voice and swear at your father, good night and game over.

“Dad. Please. What’s going on? You’re in Shanandoah’s Ghost Town, and you have Bright Boys calling you the King of Lost Virginia. A king?”

“You call yourself a prince, don’t you?”

“I don’t call myself a prince. I am a prince. You are not a king.”

“You always did think you were better than me.”

“Never, Dad. I never thought that. I knew I was different, that’s all. You’re the one who took that as a personal insult.” Rafe leaned forward, tried to reach out to the man his father used to be, the man who had wanted forgiveness, wanted to make peace. “The Bright Boys are evil. You saw my scars. You saw what they did to me.”

His father actually looked a little sheepish about that. He lowered his voice and said, “It’s getting lonely here. I keep expecting to walk in and see you at the table helping your mother shelling peas or cleaning the tassels off the corn. Those sorts of things you don’t think about when you have them but miss most when they’re gone. My wife in the kitchen. My son at the table.”

“I’m here now.”

“Good to have you. We ought to spend more time together.”

Rafe gave up, lapsed into silence. He used to lose his mind trying to have conversations with his father. Nothing he said was right. He could never crack the secret code to get through to him. Everything Rafe said made things worse, and silence was always the only form of surrender his father would accept.

Now he saw this verbal smoke screen for what it was—a shield. He’d seen his father raise that shield a thousand times and it always worked. Rafe never dared to look behind it. Now he did.

“What are you hiding, Dad?”

His father brought his big meaty fist down onto the table so fast and so hard that the knife fell to the floor and the window rattled in the frame. Rafe jumped.

“I am trying to help you!” The voice. That fury. His father’s shouting had been a weapon, a flamethrower. How many times had Rafe and his mother had to shrink away from it before they got burned?

“What the fuck are you talking about, Dad?”

He waited for the good night and game over, but it didn’t come. His dad only sat there, staring at him, eyes wide with shock. Was that the first time in his life Rafe ever shouted back? Maybe.

After a tense silence, his father picked up the book in front of him. Black leather binding, cracked, faded, but locked up tight with a silver combination lock.

“You know what this is?”

Rafe knew. “My book of memories.”

“That is not what this is.” His father’s tone was sharp as a knife. “This is…misery, son. Garbage. This is…You open this and let all that trash spill out, and you’ll never—never—be happy again in your life.”

“Trash? Are you serious?”

“Everything in this book is poison. It’ll poison you against your home, against your mother, against me. You don’t want any part of this, of what’s in here.”

“Why? Because I’ll remember how happy I was in Shanandoah? I’ll remember how happy I was away from you? Or is it because I’ll remember how happy Jeremy and I were when we were—”

The fist came down again, harder, louder.

But Rafe didn’t flinch. “In love.”

“In love…” His father sneered in disgust. “Two ignorant boys prancing through the woods playing queens and castles. What do you know about love?”

“I know it’s not whatever this is,” Rafe said as he sat back in the kitchen chair. He tried not to look at the book on the table, the book that held the whole lost and beautiful story of his life in Shanandoah, his life with Jeremy.

“You don’t know anything,” his father said. “Nothing. But I know. And you can hate me, you can judge me, but I know what’s best for you, and what’s best for you is getting rid of this thing right now.”

He tapped the cover of the book like it was a bad report card.

“So get rid of it,” Rafe said. “What are you waiting for?”

For one brief—too-brief—moment, his father looked almost scared.

“You can’t do it, can you?” Rafe asked. “You can’t get it open and you can’t destroy it. Only I can. Magic sketchbook. Little bit tougher to destroy than my old sketchbooks, huh?”

“Please, son.” He took a breath. “Ralph, I’m trying to help you. All I want to do is help you. You open this and you’ll never…you’ll never be able to not see what you see in here, and you’ll wish you had. You’ll wish it so hard, but it’ll be too late for you. I want what’s best for you and it’s not in here.”

Rafe waited for more. There had to be more.

His father reached into his breast pocket and pulled out his old chrome cigarette lighter. He held it out to Rafe, who took it, smiled.

“When I was a kid, I used to love the tricks you could do with this thing,” Rafe said. “The way you could flick it open and closed one-handed, make the flame disappear. I thought when I grew up, I’d be able to do it too. Never bothered to figure it out.”