Page 34 of The Guilty One
“We know you do.” She squeezes my hand.
“I actually have a question for you,” I tell her, pulling the photo from my pocket. It’s slightly crinkled now.
“What’s this?” She takes the photo, staring down at it, then chokes back a sudden, unexpected sob and runs her finger across the paper. “Oh. Oh.”
“I found it in Tate’s things. These were the boys you said he was close with in college, right? Bradley, Dakota, and Aaron.”
She nods with fat tears in her eyes. “I didn’t know Tate still had this picture. They were all like sons to us. They were at our house all the time. Holidays, school breaks. Oh my gosh, they were all such pains, but…it was the closest thing we ever had to feeling like a complete family. I lived for times they were all there.” She sniffles again, lost in thought as she stares down at the photo.
“What about this boy?” I point to the unnamed boy in the center of the picture. “Do you know who he is?”
She looks closer at the picture, lifting it toward the light and her face. “I don’t think so.” She hands the photo to Lane. “Do you recognize him?”
Lane hardly looks at the photo before shaking his head, hiding tears in his own eyes. He can’t seem to look at the photo of his son.
“We aren’t giving up on him,” I promise them. “We’re going to find Tate. He’s going to be okay.” I want that more than anything, for their sakes as much as mine. Even if he has stolen from me, even if he’s leaving me, I just want to know he’s okay.
A somber thought occurs to me then. If I lose him, if he’s leaving me, will I lose his parents, too? Will they stop coming around as much? Will the boys lose them?
“Where did you find this anyway?” Daphne asks, tapping the photo in her hand.
“It was in a box of old photos we keep around. I figured out who the other boys were, but I couldn’t place the fifth one.”
“The three other boys were the friends we knew. The ones Tate was always hanging around with. But it doesn’t surprise me that he included someone else in this photo. He was always so kind.” She sniffles. “You know how he is. Makes friends everywhere he goes.” She grabs a napkin from the holder in the center of the table and dabs her eyes, then her nose.
That does sound like Tate. He can make friends in line at the grocery store. I’ve literally seen it happen. As in, ‘let’s go out to dinner, come to our house for a cookout Saturday’ kind of friends.
“Do you mind if I keep it?” she asks, holding her hand out. “I would—I mean, if you don’t need it, I would really like to have it.”
I hesitate, not wanting to give up even a tiny piece of my husband, but at the end of the day, I have no real attachment to the photograph, and it’s clear my in-laws do. “Of course,” I assure her. “It’s yours.”
Her chin quivers again as she looks down and dabs her eyes. “Thank you. I can’t believe they’re gone. My boys. My sweet boys.”
She clutches the photo to her chest just as my father-in-law says, “We should get going, I think. Let the kids get some rest.”
As soon as the words leave his mouth, he hesitates in his movements, as if he has glitched, and I know exactly what happened. Usually, when he says anything about ‘the kids,’ he’s referring to Tate and me, and that weight sits in between us, heavy on his expression before he continues to stand up.
Losing one person is hard enough. Losing an entire photograph’s worth of people, an entire group of people you love without having any answers—I don’t even want to imagine.
Once we’ve said our goodbyes and they’ve left for the night, I find my dad in Ryker’s room, reading to him, while my mom rocks Finley to sleep across the hall in the rocking chair we’ve had in his bedroom since before he was born.
I wave to them, letting them know I’ll be right back, then head to my room to brush my teeth and change into my pajamas. It’s weird here without Tate. I feel his absence in every part of the house and every moment of my life.
If he was here, he’d be stretched out on the bed, telling me about his day. Or staring at me in the mirror while he brushes his teeth, trying to make me laugh.
If he was here, it wouldn’t hurt like this.
When I’m done, I grab the box of photos from the bed—still waiting for me to slip the photo I no longer have back inside of it—and move to put the lid back on, but something stops me.
It’s a photograph I looked at earlier, one I assume was taken on the same night as the photo I gave Daphne. I’m only just noticing the jackets slung across chairs in the background, and the fact that three of them are letterman jackets.
My eyes scan the familiar names. Thompson. Jennings. And then the final name, one I don’t recognize: Acri.
My heart stutters, and I grab my laptop, typing in his last name and the name of their school: Highland University.
The first few results don’t give me much, but finally, I see an article that catches my attention. The coverage is small, just a paragraph, but it’s enough to make my chest tight.
Local Boy Reported Missing From Campus