The Truth We Had to Face
By evening, Vince was in custody.
Later, Harris told us Vince had never known anything more about Lily than the rest of the town did.
There was no hidden survivor.
No secret family.
No girl waiting to come home.
He’d remembered Patrick’s guilt. He’d heard about the land sale. He’d guessed we might have money.
And he’d decided our grief made us an easy target.
The sunflowers.
The white ribbon.
Emily’s photograph.
The small white box.
All of it, theater.
Cruel, calculated theater.
When I got home, Patrick was sitting beside the ruined garden.
For a long time neither of us spoke.
Then he said, “So she wasn’t Lily.”
I sat down beside him.
“No,” I said softly. “She wasn’t.”
He nodded once, staring at the broken stems.
I waited for him to cry.
I waited for him to fall apart.
Instead, after a long silence, he said, “We need to fix what he messed up.”
