“You were never supposed to find it.”

Chapter 7 — The Staged Death

My father died when I was nine.

A drunk driver, a closed casket, a funeral where my mother did not cry once.

For twenty-six years I had carried his photograph in my wallet — Emmerson Marsden, smiling in a faded denim jacket, dead and gone and untouchable.

I had grieved him my whole life, the gentle father taken too soon, the one warm thing in a cold house.