FOR CHLOE — WITH EVERYONE PRESENT.
GREG’S PROMISES.
Behind me, something hit the concrete floor hard.
I turned. Greg’s phone had fallen out of his hand. The screen had shattered into a spiderweb of cracks, and he was not even looking at it. He was looking at the tapes, and every last bit of color had drained out of his face.
“Greg?” Aunt Sandy said, uncertain. “Honey, are you all right?”
He did not answer. He just stared at those two tapes as if they were snakes.
Ms. Richards stepped into the garage then, the only other person besides me to cross the threshold, and she said, “Byron gave me instructions. If you found the tapes, I’m to play the first one. Right away. In front of everyone.”
Greg took a step backward, toward the driveway. “We don’t need to do this now. It’s been a hard day, Chloe’s exhausted, we should—”
“Why are you frightened?” I asked him.
“I’m not frightened.” He tried a laugh and it came out wrong. “Chloe, come on. Dad just died. We’re standing in his garage staring at baby furniture and a bunch of old tapes. I’m allowed to have a reaction to that.”
Greg had always been good at that. At sounding like the reasonable one. At making his own panic sound like everyone else’s overreaction.
I had believed that voice my whole life.
I looked at Ms. Richards, and I stepped to the side, out of the way of the screen.
“Play it,” I said.
The old set flickered and buzzed and then Dad was there, sitting at his workbench, and the crib behind him was still only half finished, just the frame of it. So he had made this tape early. Years ago, maybe.
He looked older than I wanted him to look. Tired around the eyes.
“Chloe,” he said, and hearing him say my name knocked the wind clean out of me. “I’m sorry this is happening while I’m not there to answer for my own part in it. And I have a part in it. I want you to know that up front.”
My throat closed. Beside me, Greg was staring hard at the floor.
Dad leaned in closer to the camera.
“Greg. I’ve asked you three times now to tell your sister the truth. You looked me in the eye and you promised me you would. So if Chloe is watching this, that means you didn’t. It means you let me die still lying to her.”
“Turn it off,” Greg said. Low. “Chloe. Turn it off, please.”
I looked at my brother. “Why?”
He shook his head, and there was something desperate in it now. “Chloe. Please. Not like this. Not in front of—”
“No,” I said. “I want to hear my father.”
Ms. Richards did not touch the machine. Dad kept talking.
“Since you chose silence, Greg,” he said, “I’ve chosen witnesses. Everybody Chloe loves is going to hear this at the same time. That’s the only way I could think of to make sure the truth got told all at once, before you could get to each of them one by one and shape it. Because that’s what you do, son. You get to people one at a time.”
Greg brought both hands up and covered his face.
“Chloe,” Dad went on, “I need you to know something first, before anything else. You did not abandon this family. You did not ignore anyone’s invitations. You did not stay away.”
Aunt Sandy stepped closer to the doorway. “What is he talking about?” she said. “What does he mean, stayed away?”
Dad answered her, from the past, as if he had known she would be standing right there.
“Greg changed things,” he said. “He’d tell Chloe that the family wanted space from her. And then he’d turn around and tell the family that Chloe wanted space from them. Both directions. For years.”
The garage went very, very still.
Aunt Sandy slowly turned and looked at me.
