He wouldn’t have recognized him now.
And Derek clearly hadn’t introduced himself honestly at first.
I sat down.
Officer Patel was watching me.
So I explained.
Derek had not attended Ryan’s funeral.
Ryan did not want him there.
In fact, during the final months of his life, Ryan had made me promise something.
“Keep Derek away from Ethan.”
He was weak then.
Barely strong enough to speak.
But he made me promise.
I did.
The brothers had stopped speaking roughly a year before Ryan became sick.
Whenever I asked why, Ryan brushed it off as family financial trouble.
He refused to pull me into it.
Then he got sick.
The feud seemed unimportant compared with everything else.
I assumed Ryan simply held a grudge.
Now Derek was near Ethan’s school.
Manipulating him.
Convincing him that his own mother could not be trusted.
A few minutes later, Officer Patel’s partner asked her to step outside.
Then she came back.
“Can you come onto the porch?”
I followed her.
She pointed beneath the edge of the railing.
There, carefully concealed against the wood, was a tiny camera.
It was pointed directly at my front door.
“Is that yours?”
