You went in there?” Drew asks, pointing through the sheets of rain at the pond behind us. “You brought him out? What is wrong with you?”
I blink, and it is as if this moment, his words, what I have done, it all merges to lift the veil. I see my father’s face again. But his eyes are not flat and piercing. No, they are wide and bulging. And his mouth is not thin-lipped and pursed. It gapes so widely that I swear I can see his dark soul deep in the pit of his being. I feel the warmth on my hands. Up my forearm.
And I see the fingers, bloodstained, wrapped around his throat. Tightening. Squeezing the life from my father.
“Maybe you’re not as weak as I thought.”
Drew’s words tear the image from my mind. I blink and see him just as clearly. He means what he says. He looks at me with a respect I have never seen before.
“You dove down there and brought him back up, huh? I assume the Explorer’s still at the bottom. What about the knife? You bring that up, too?”
“I didn’t do it,” I say.
He laughs again. “Shut up, Liam.”
My eyes close. I see the fingers choking my father to death. But they aren’t mine. They weren’t mine.