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Moscow, Idaho

I t’s around four or five a.m., pitch-black outside, but the Chapin parents don’t even try to sleep. They just lie on the bed and watch as Hunter and Maizie finally pass out from exhaustion. Eventually, Stacy gets up.

She wants to go for a walk. She needs to do something.

Jim immediately says he’ll come with her. He wouldn’t dream of leaving his wife alone in this moment.

It’s freezing, and they are bundled up. For once this couple doesn’t speak. There’s no need. They simply stride.

They exit their hotel and head north, toward the water tower and the Kibbie Dome. Past the golf course that Ethan so loved and the arboretum where he went for runs.

They go to the Sig Chi house, like they often do, expecting to be able to turn the doorknob, go in, walk through the house, and go back across the Lower 40.

But the door is now locked. So they walk around the place.

And somehow, Stacy doesn’t remember how, they wind up standing outside the King Road house.

All the cars and law enforcement officers—they are gone.

There’s just one cop standing in front. It’s eerily silent.

Were it not for the yellow tape, one wouldn’t know anything had happened here.

“My son is still inside the house,” Stacy says to the officer, who isn’t sure how to react. In fact, the bodies are no longer there. They’ve been taken to Spokane to be autopsied. But Stacy doesn’t know this. “I just wanted to see it. I don’t know.”

There, with the first light streaking the sky, as Stacy holds Jim’s hand, she realizes this is it.

This is goodbye to her beloved elder boy, a prince of a young man.