I went back that night with a shovel from her garage. Three feet down, wrapped in layer after layer of plastic, was a rusted strongbox. Inside were a revolver, a wallet, and a man’s driving licence issued in 1994. The name was my biological father’s, and I had been told my whole life that he left before I was born.

He had come back that summer. He had put my mother in a hospital twice before, and when he broke in a third time, Curtis was twenty three and there and it ended the way it ended. My mother chose the tree. Curtis dug the hole. Neither of them ever forgave the other for what the night had made of them.

The detectives took eight months. The medical examiner’s old file, her hospital records, and the neighbour who had heard him at the door in 1994 were enough. No charges were filed against my husband.

I sat with Curtis on that porch for a long time afterward. He said he had spent three decades certain that if I ever knew, I would look at him differently.

I do look at him differently now. I finally see the whole of him, and I have never once wished to unsee it.