For the first time since I’d married into the Sterling family, Harold looked genuinely afraid. And I was beginning to understand that my quiet uncle had a history my husband knew absolutely nothing about…

PART 3

Frank kept his eyes on Harold, not on the son who was still breathing angrily beside the window.

I couldn’t hear the words Frank mouthed, because he had deliberately removed the devices that helped him make sense of raised voices.

But I saw Harold read his lips.

I saw something older than anger pass between them.

Harold whispered, “I thought you were dead.” Frank answered aloud, his voice uneven in the way it sometimes became when he couldn’t hear himself.

“You never checked.” Colton stared from one man to the other.

“Dad, what’s going on?” Harold did not answer.

He kept staring at the lighter. I had seen it hundreds of times.

Frank used to place it beside his keys when he came home from the garage, though I had never once seen him light a cigarette.

When I was little, I thought it was an old lucky charm.

He had told me it belonged to a man who had made a promise under terrible circumstances.

Now Harold looked as if he remembered the promise differently.

“Get out of this room,” Frank told him, speaking deliberately.