When I open the door, Tim is standing there holding a few wooden boards in his right arm, and a thick hardcover book in the other. He looks over my shoulder. “Josh is upstairs?”
“Yes.”
He nods and leans in to kiss me. We have been making an effort not to let Josh know we are more than just friends. We’ll have to tell him eventually, but the thought makes me anxious. I’ve never had a relationship important enough to let my son know about it. This is a big deal.
Thankfully, Tim gets it. He’s fine about waiting.
He pulls away from me as soon as we hear Josh’s eager footsteps on the stairs. A second later, Josh bursts into the room. “We’re going to make a birdhouse!”
“You got it!” Tim dumps the wooden boards on the ground, then holds up the book in his other hand. “But first, I have a surprise for you…”
I get a good look at the book that Tim is holding. When I see the cover, my stomach sinks.
It’s our high school yearbook.
Why on earth would Tim bring that over here? I don’t even know what happened to my copy—I don’t think I even saw it, since I relocated before the end of the school year and was homeschooled for the remainder of the year. But our high school yearbook is the last thing I want to look at. And it’s the last thing I want Josh to see.
Oh my God, what if he sees a photograph of Shane and notices the resemblance?
“This is our high school yearbook,” Tim says to Josh. “Want to see how dorky your mom and I looked when we were kids?”
My panic level shoots up. “Tim…”
“Don’t worry,” he murmurs in my ear. “He’s not in it.”
Oh. Well, I guess it makes sense that they would leave the student responsible for multiple murders out of the yearbook. That part is a relief, at least.
Josh is weirdly eager to look through the yearbook. We sit at the kitchen table while he flips right to the portrait photo of me, which had been taken about one month before my life changed forever. It’s not a bad picture. I didn’t have an embarrassingly cringy hairdo, and the white shirt my mother had me wear for picture day looked crisp and professional. There’s a softness to my face that I don’t see anymore when I look in the mirror. Not since that night.
“Look! It’s Tim!” Josh cries. He holds the yearbook up near Tim’s face. “You look so different! You were so skinny!”
“Yeah, yeah…”
I manage a smile. “You were cute back then.”
“Oh yeah?” Tim squeezes my knee under the table. “I didn’t realize you thought so.”
He was cute. But he wasn’t hot in the same way Shane was back then. Between the two of them, it was obvious which one the girls went crazy over.
Josh continues to flip backward through the pages, studying the pictures with surprising intensity. When he gets to the N’s, I hold my breath. But Tim is right. They left Shane out of the yearbook.
I look over Josh’s shoulder, at all the old faces. Flipping pages backward, he passes Brandon Jensen and my chest tightens at the words “In Memoriam” under his name. That should never have happened.
“Wait,” I say. “Stop.”
Josh freezes on the page with the H names. I slide the book away from him and look down at the page on the right. I stare at the photograph in the bottom right-hand corner. The name underneath is written in bold capital letters.
Marcus Hunt.
Oh my God, it’s Officer Hunt.
I would never have recognized him if I didn’t know it was him. He had hair back then—fine and golden, like on a baby chick. I recognize him vaguely, remembering him as being a tall and gangly boy with thick glasses.