“How are you doing this?” Dad asked finally when Ty took his queen.

“I’ve been playing a little on the computer,” Ty confessed. He sat back. “Checkmate.”

Mom and I crowed. “Oh, how the mighty have fallen,” Mom said, and I think she got a little too much satisfaction out of Ty winning, because she also had lost a hundred games to Dad.

“I have to get a picture,” she said. So that’s when the photo happened.

In the picture, Ty has just won the game and he’s practically glowing, he’s so happy. Dad is looking down, beaten, but he is smiling, too.

He was proud.

“Well done, son,” he said. He clapped his hand on Ty’s shoulder and squeezed. “Want to go again?”

Ty shook his head. “I better quit while I’m ahead.”

The power came back on. We all blinked in the sudden brightness of the room. Ty grinned over at Dad. “I have this new game on the Wii. Tennis. Do you want to try to beat me there? Loser buys McDonald’s?”

“Sure,” Dad said. “You bet.”

Sucker.

It was a good day. A good memory.

I don’t want to be the kind of person who hates my dad.

29.

THAT MORNING I WATCH THE SUN RISE, and then I get in my car and drive. I know the way to Megan’s house like I’ve driven there a hundred times—straight down 27th Street to the south part of town, where the houses are old but expensive and well maintained. Wrought-iron fences and such.

Her house is a small tan-and-green one near the zoo. It has a red door. Christmas lights are still strung along the edge of the roof. A black-and-white cat stares at me from the window.

Dad’s a dog person, by the way.

I tuck Ty’s collage frame under my arm and make my way carefully up the uneven sidewalk. I climb the steps onto the porch, take a deep breath, and ring the bell.

It’s warmer today, I realize. Water drips off the roof. The snow is melting.

Megan answers the door. She is blond and bobbed and dressed in a little navy blue suit dress. When she recognizes me her face becomes the quintessential picture of surprise, her burgundy-lipsticked mouth in a perfect O shape.

Behind her I see Dad, dressed for work, wearing a similar expression.

“Hi,” I say, moving past Megan and into the house. “Do you have a minute? We need to talk.”

22 March

The lie I told Dad:

The frame was behind the door.

There’s an empty space in the frame, a picture missing.

By complete coincidence I discovered this photo of Dad and Ty (not in a frame) on the floor behind the door.

Therefore: it must have fallen out of its frame somehow.

Therefore: Ty meant to put that photo of Dad in the collage.

Therefore: Ty didn’t leave Dad’s picture out on purpose in order to hurt Dad.

Therefore: It’s possible that Ty forgives Dad.

I don’t know if he actually believed me, but it’s a fiction I think we both can live with.

30.

“THAT,” DAVE SAYS, “is what we in the business call a ‘breakthrough.’ Good job.”

“It was no big deal.” I fiddle with the edge of the rug. “I was only there for ten minutes.”

“It’s a very big deal, Lex.” Dave smiles. “How long has your father been gone?”

“Three years.”

“And in all that time, you’ve never gone to his house?”

“Megan’s house,” I correct him. “No. I’ve never been there.”

“Why?”

“Because . . .” I don’t know how to explain my reasons so that they seem rational. Perhaps they aren’t rational.

“Why yesterday, I mean,” Dave says. “Why go to Megan’s house now?”

I shrug. “I finally had something I wanted to say to him.”

“And what was that?”

“I wanted him to know that his picture belonged in Ty’s frame. That’s all.”

“How did he react when you told him?”

He cried. I’d never seen Dad cry before, not even at Ty’s funeral, so it shocked me. He didn’t make a big show of it; he put his hand to his eyes for a few minutes while his chest heaved and his shoulders shook, and then finally he dropped his hand.

Then he said, “I’m so sorry, Lexie. I know what I did hurt you and your brother, and I am sorry for that.”

I wanted to hold on to my anger when he said that. I could have answered that his sorry wasn’t good enough. His sorry can’t bring Ty back. Which is true.

But my anger was a slippery thing, like a fish I was trying to keep hold of, and it wiggled out of my grasp.

I looked at Dad, and he looked at me with his hazel eyes, Ty’s and my eyes, and he said, “I would have stayed. If it could have stopped Tyler from doing this. I would have come back.”

I shook my head. It’s too confusing, too hard to think about the what-ifs. I have my own personal list of what-ifs, without having to deal with Dad’s.

He whispered again that he was sorry, and cried some more, so I laid my hand over his on Megan’s kitchen table. He put his other hand over mine and squeezed, and we stayed that way for a few minutes, until I slid my hand away and told him I had to get going to school.

“Thank you for coming,” he told me as he walked me down the driveway. “For telling me about the picture. It means a lot.”

It didn’t matter that almost everything I’d told him about the photo and the collage was a total fabrication on my part.