My stepdad raised me after I lost my mother — just hours before he d*ed, he gripped my hand and whispered, “There’s something I’ve hidden from you your entire life.”

The coffee shop was warm.

Someone at the next table was laughing at something on their phone.

“You want me to sit across from the man who may have k*lled my mother,” I said, “and my father, and act like I don’t know.”

“Yes.”

Gerald suggested we meet at the house — Frank’s house, the one I had grown up in, which Gerald had a key to because Frank had trusted him with one years ago and never asked for it back.

I arrived first.

I stood in the kitchen and looked at the apple pancake pan still sitting on the drying rack from the last time Frank had made them for me, three weeks ago, before he was too weak to stand at the stove.

I didn’t touch it.

Gerald knocked even though he had a key.

A small performance of courtesy.

“Sweetheart.” He opened his arms in the doorway.