“They built the whole night to fit the words on page two.”

“They wrote the lie first,” Evan said.

“Then they locked your daughter in the pantry to make the lie look like the truth.”

By four thirty, the sun had sunk behind the peak of our garage roof, turning the snow in the backyard a cold slate gray.

It was twenty-two degrees, cold enough to freeze my breath into pale white clouds as I walked out to the metal burn barrel by the back fence.

Evan came down the porch steps carrying a green plastic storage bin full of cardboard boxes from our hall closet.