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“What?” she asked.

I took her by the shoulders and turned her slightly. With gentle fingertips, I traced the scrape. Poppy winced slightly. “What happened?”

“I think you got tree burn,” I said with a laugh. “It's not bad. It shouldn't scar.”

“I don't care if it does.” Poppy reached around her back and felt the wound herself. “Is it bleeding?” she asked, pulling her hand back to look at her fingers.

“A little, but it's not bad. We should clean it, though. The last thing you need is it getting infected.”

Poppy slipped her shirt over her head and pulled up her pants. Her feet were dirty and scuffed up from walking throughthe forest. I started to unlace my shoes. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Here,” I said as I took them off and passed them to her. “Put these on.”

“Your shoes? Why?”

“Because you need them more than I do. Put them on.”

She slipped her feet inside and giggled. “They're huge on me. I look ridiculous.”

“You look beautiful. It doesn't matter what you have on.”

Poppy grinned shyly as she looked herself over. “You have low expectations of beauty, then.”

“No, I just see what you can't. Beauty is deeper than the clothes you wear or how much makeup you have on. It's not money that makes you beautiful or the kind of car you drive. It's what's in here,” I said as I poked her heart.

Poppy smirked and looked away. “I didn't know you could be so corny.”

I laughed as I wiggled my sock-covered toes in the leaves. “Neither did I. Don't tell anyone,” I said with a grin.

She looked around us and responded. “Lucky for you, there's no one to tell.”

I glanced at the small strip of horizon I could see between the trees. “Come on, we have a ways to go.”

Poppy and I walked for a few hours. I shared stories about my childhood. I told her about my father and how he kept his two worlds as separate as possible. There was the husband and the father, who went to work and came home for dinner most nights. He was there for birthdays and holidays and the family gatherings. My father kept his composure at all times. He never once let his work life spill into his home life.

I found out later on that my mother always knew what he did for a living. I didn't know if she was okay with it or if she hated it because she never spoke about it. When I looked backon my childhood, she never flinched or made a face when he was leaving. There was no outward notion that she cared either way. It wasn't until I hit the age of sixteen that my father really opened up to me about his job. He wanted me to know everything. He had been preparing me to take over the family business since I was a kid, but I didn't have a clue.

All the hunting trips, the target practice, the solitude, and the death were all training for my future. He had wired me to kill. To not feel anything when I pulled the trigger. To see death as normal as opposed to a sadness that consumed your soul.

Even with his death, I felt nothing.

“What about you?” I asked. “Can you look back on anything and see the things you missed?”

“You mean like the memory of my father shooting my mother?”

“I mean the little things. Conversations, actions, things that get overlooked when you're submersed in it?”

Poppy looked at the ground as she spoke. “I think so. It's not so much the things my father said. It's the things my mother said. She would make cryptic statements about him. I never knew what she meant, but now I think I do. Like sometimes, she would take her cup of medicine and pull certain pills out. I caught her once and asked her what she was doing. My mother told me that those pills made her sick. I asked her why my father would give her something to make her sick and not better, and she just said, “Because chameleons change color, Poppy.” She exhaled as she kicked a pine cone and watched it bounce off a tree trunk. “She could see right through him. I was just naive.”

“You were a child, Poppy. Kids trust the adults around them. There was no way for you to know what he was doing.”

“Why did he do it?” she asked. “Why would he make my mother sick and kill her?”

“Maybe your mother knew something he didn't want to get out. Maybe your father was afraid of what she could do to him.”

“Like what? My mother wouldn't do anything to ruin his life. I think she just wanted a life of her own.”

I thinned my lips into a soft smile but didn't answer. “His demons go deep, Poppy. He's not just a pharmacist, he's a damn drug lord. Who knows what your mother knew and what she had threatened. It's also possible he was paranoid. Maybe he just thought she was going to talk. I don't know.”