"We've gone over the watcher's tape frame by frame. No cuts, no splices, nothing doctored. If you didn't drown the boy, then who did?"
Yeah. Who exactly killed my son and pinned it on me? The question had haunted me across two lifetimes. Even lying dead on the floor of the Joint, I never found the answer.
Seeing me lost for words, the crowd surged into another wave of venom. "Nothing to say now? Guilty conscience finally caught up with you?"
"You drowned your own blood and you've got the stomach to stand there like a victim? You make me sick."
"That sweet little boy, so well-mannered, and he got saddled with a monster of a father like you."
"His wife and her mother, God help them, tangling their lives up with filth like this."
Even the feeds carried the curses, the whole territory watching, condemning me as unrepentant, wishing the worst end on me. In the middle of the storm, the lead detective lifted a hand. "Take him in."
At his word, two men cuffed me and hauled me toward the car. In my past life, it happened exactly like this. Framed, sent to the Joint, beaten to death by a crew someone else had paid.
Not even my parents were spared. They were named, hunted, driven into hiding. Every time the old Don or my mother dared step past the door, they were met with slurs, with garbage, with funeral wreaths left rotting on the threshold. In the end they died wretched deaths inside our own walls, their bodies left to spoil before anyone thought to look.
Was I truly doomed to walk this same road again? Would my son die for nothing a second time, his killer never named? My mind churned, a tangled mess of confusion and fury. Where had everything gone wrong?
In my past life I had brought my son to the handler myself. Yet every soul who should have seen us that day swore we never came. In this life I had kept him home, close, watched. Still he vanished into thin air, only to surface dead in the pond behind the house.
I had done nothing wrong. And yet the tape showed me committing the crime, plain as daylight. Why? Why was this happening? Who killed my son?
A thousand questions swirled through me, clouding everything. I knew something was deeply wrong. I just couldn't put my thumb on it. I combed through the memories of both lives, hunting for a single thread, one loose stitch that might unravel the whole nightmare.
Then, just as they moved to shove me into the car, the realization struck like a round fired point-blank. I pressed my thumb hard into the center of my left palm, into the phantom ache the cuffs had left there once before, and my eyes went wide. I spun around and shouted at the top of my lungs, "I know who the killer is!"
