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“You need to know the truth I’ve been hiding for 20 years.”
I pulled my hands back. “H-how do you know that?”
Callahan turned toward me. “Because there’s something you don’t know.”
A chill ran through me. “What are you talking about?”
He took off his glasses. For one frightened second, I thought he was about to tell me he could see, that everything had been a lie.
But then Callahan looked straight toward my voice and slightly past it, and I understood. He was not looking at me; He was staring into the darkness.
“I was there that afternoon, Merry,” Callahan finally whispered.
I sat down on the bed because my legs no longer felt trustworthy.
For one frightened second, I thought he was about to tell me he could see.
“I was 16,” he added. “My friends and I were there to visit Mike. He lived two doors down from you.”
I knew that name at once. Mike had been our former neighbor’s son, the one with loud music and walls so thin we heard everything.
“We were careless boys doing reckless things we never truly understood,” Callahan admitted.
He told me they had been messing around near the back of the building, siphoning gas, daring each other, and showing off with the careless confidence boys that age can have. Then one mistake led to a spark, and a leak no one took seriously became something far too big to stop.