Page 73 of Dying to Meet You

If her mom hadn’t shown up last night, everything would be fine. Great even.

It’s just so mortifying. And this morning, when she’d snuck into her mom’s bedroom to dig her phone out from her mother’s bedside table, she’d found a two-word message from her father.I’m sorry.

She doesn’t even know why he’s apologizing when she’s the one who lied. Unless he’s an even bigger liar. Or a murderer.

It hurts to think about.

She opens the library’s research portal and types in her father’s full name, addingPortland Maine arrestto the query.

It’s been a while since she tried this. When she googled him at home, all the articles about her dad were trapped behind paywalls. But the school library has paid access, and now she can actually read the details of her father’s crime.

The first story she finds is super short.Massachusetts Man Assaulted at the Parker House Bar. Local Man Arrested. There are barely two paragraphs about the fight and her father’s arrest.

She tries again, incorporating the victim’s name into her search, and finds a more extensive story. She hadn’t known that the man her father assaulted was a stranger.

That’s somehow even more disturbing. And the victim’s wife’s statement is downright horrifying:That man was completely out of control. He was terrifying, and I’ve never been so scared in my life.

Natalie has to look away from the computer screen.

When she was little, she used to ask what happened to her father. She knew he existed, because there was a single picture of Natalie in his arms in the family photo album.

Her mother’s answers to her questions about him changed as Natalieaged. At first she’d explained, “He made some bad choices, and he had to leave us.”

When Natalie was in fifth grade, she expanded. “He was taking drugs. And I guess he couldn’t stop. It’s called a substance use disorder. When you were just a year old, he got high and got into a bar fight. The other guy got hurt really badly, so your father had to go to jail.”

A bar fight sounds like an argument that got out of hand. A few punches thrown. But now she knows that the victim—Barry Peterson—suffered a brain injury and spent several months in a rehab unit.

Steeling herself, she rereads Barry Peterson’s wife’s account of the fight.He kept screaming at Barry. Don’t look at her. Don’t (expletive) look at her. Don’t you (expletive) dare.I thought he was going to kill Barry, and then me, too.

She looks away again. Her pencil case is spilled open on the desk, and she straightens it and zips it shut. As if to organize the chaos in her heart.

The problem is that she’dlikedhim. At the coffee shop and at the bar he’d seemed kind. And interesting. And a little tentative—like he cared, but he was still just winging it and hoping for the best. Which is how she feels pretty much all the time. He feltfamiliar.

But the Harrison in these newspaper articles is someone she never wants to meet. He went to jail, and he stayed there a long time.

That doesn’t happen to people who keep their worst urges locked down.

She closes the browser tab and searchesTim Kovak murderas she’s done before. But now she’s reading with fresh eyes. She tries to imagine her father enraged and shooting Tim in the face.

It doesn’t make any sense. Then again, she can’t make sense ofanyoneshooting someone in the face.

Tim stares back at her from the photo accompanying the article. He stands on the deck of a boat with the ocean behind him. He’s smiling faintly. It’s the sort of picture that’s meant to make you thinkNow there’s a nice guy.

But nice guys don’t search through your phone.

“Natalie?” the librarian says. “Don’t you have somewhere you have to be?”

She kills the browser window and leaps to her feet. Her exam starts in two minutes. “Right. I’m going.”

Hurrying down to the classroom, she’ll spend the next two hours writing about the Bill of Rights and the three branches of government.

It will take another twenty hours for her to hear that the police have arrested her father and taken him to the Cumberland County Jail.

27

Friday

Rowan