Author: Harlan Coben
Twenty years ago, four teenagers disappeared in the woods at a summer camp. Two decades later, everything changes...
Paul Copeland's sister was one of the missing teenagers. Now raising a daughter alone, after the death of his wife, he balances family life with a career as a prosecutor. But when a body is found, the well-buried secrets of the past are threatening everything.
Could the victim be one of the missing teenagers?
Could his sister be alive?
Cope has to confront so much he left behind that summer twenty years ago: his first love, Lucy; his mother who abandoned the family; and the secrets that his parents have been hiding...
Twenty years ago, four teenagers disappeared in the woods at a summer camp. Two decades later, everything changes...
Paul Copeland's sister was one of the missing teenagers. Now raising a daughter alone, after the death of his wife, he balances family life with a career as a prosecutor. But when a body is found, the well-buried secrets of the past are threatening everything.
Could the victim be one of the missing teenagers?
Could his sister be alive?
Cope has to confront so much he left behind that summer twenty years ago: his first love, Lucy; his mother who abandoned the family; and the secrets that his parents have been hiding...
I see my father with that shovel.
There are tears streaming down
his face. An awful, guttural sob forces its way up from deep I his lungs ad out
through his lips. He raises the shovel up ad strikes the ground. The blade rips
into the earth like it’s wet flesh.
I am eighteen years old, and this
is my most vivid memory of my father-him, in the woods, with that shovel. He doesn’t
know I’m watching, I hiding behind a tree while he digs. He does it with fury,
as though the ground has angered him and he is seeking vengeance.
I have never seen my father cry
before-not when his own father died, not when my mother ran off and left us,
not even when he first heard about my sister, Camille. But he is crying now. He
is crying without shame. The tears cascade down his face in a freefall. The sobs
echo through the trees.
This is the first time I’ve spied
on him like this. Most Saturdays he would pretend to be going on fishing trips,
but I never really believed that. I think I always knew that this place, this horrible
place, was his secret destination.
Because, sometimes, it is mine
too.
I stand behind the tree and watch
him. I will do this eight more times. I never interrupt him. I ever reveal
myself. I think he doesn’t know that I am there. I am sure of it, in fact. And then
one day, as he heads to his car, my father looks at me with dry eyes ad says, ‘Not
today, Paul. Today I go alone.’
I watch him drive off. He goes to
those woods for the last time.
On his deathbed nearly two
decades later, my father takes my hand. He is heavily medicated. His hand are
rough ad calloused. He used them his whole life-even in the flusher years in a
country that no longer exists. He has one of those tough exteriors where all
the skin looks baked and hard, almost like his own tortoise shell. He has been
in immense physical pain, but there are no tears.
He just closes his eyes ad rides
it out.
My father has always made me feel
safe, even now, even though I am now an adult with a child of my own. We went
to a bar three months ago, when he was still strong enough. A fight broke out. My
father stood in front of me, readying to take on anyone who came near me. Still.
That is how it is.
I look at him in the bed. I think
about those days in the woods. I think about how he dug, how he finally
stopped, how I thought he had given up after my mother left.
‘Paul?’
My father is suddenly agitated.
I want to beg him not to die, but
that wouldn’t be right. I had bee here before. It doesn’t get better-not for
anyone.
‘It’s okay, Dad,’ I tell him. ‘It’s
all going to be okay.’
He does not calm down. He tries
to sit up. I want to help him, but he shakes me off. He looks deep into my eyes
and I see clarity, or maybe that is one of those things that we make ourselves at
the end. A final false comfort.
One tear escapes his eyes. I watch
it slowly slide down his cheek.
‘Paul,” my father says to me, his
voice still thick with a Russian accent. ‘We still need to find her.’
‘We will, Dad.’
He checks my face again. I nod,
assure him. But I don’t think that he is looking for assurance. I think, for
the first time, he looking for guilt.
‘Did you know?’ he asks, his
voice barely audible.
I feel my entire body quake, but I
don’t blink, don’t look away. I wonder what he sees, what he believes. But I will
never know.
Because then, right then, my
father closes his eyes and dies.
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