with a desperation I had never heard. He wasn’t mourning; he was negotiating.
“It wasn’t supposed to go that far,” his voice crackled through the speakers. “I just wanted to scare them into staying. If they left the country, I’d lose everything. I just wanted to stop the car.”
The realization hit me like a physical blow. My parents hadn’t died because of bad luck or a slick road. They had died because the man I called my hero was obsessed with keeping them—and me—near him at any cost.
The
