Excerpt

You can't change the past. But you can suffer it over and over again.

I taste smoke in the back of my throat. I must be in bed on the brink of enduring this horror yet again—quick, get up, your boy's still alive—and though I know it's only a nightmare, my boy is already dead, I also know he's going to keep dying again and again because there's no end to the smoke-filled hallway with that green nightlight, the CPR performed between the coffee maker and the toaster, the coffin lowering into a small hole as I rub at the skim of soot on my face that's been scrubbed clean and as Melissa collapses to the grass in a dead faint.

You expect your wife to stay on the couch day and night with the TV flickering across her. You expect her to grieve for weeks, months. To barely eat. Or bathe. Perhaps she'll try to drink herself to death or swallow a bottle's worth of Xanax.

What you don't expect is her to get up early and jog, to be fresh-faced and smiley. You tell yourself she's still in shock and refusing to accept what happened.

Days go by and she's Mrs. Homemaker, the house scrubbed and vacuumed, the kitchen table a spread of pancakes and bacon in the morning with fresh-baked cookies in the afternoon and Betty Crocker diners at night.

You try to talk to her about it but her smile cuts toward her ears.

Unhinged, you think. She's going to snap.

You imagine discovering the bathroom door locked with the fan droning on inside and you shoulder-pop the lock and find her in the tub, one arm dangling off the edge, blood still dripping off her fingertips.

Instead, she talks about Father Benjamin Reed, a priest you didn't even know until he officiated your son's funeral and burial.

He's been so helpful.

Our boy is in Heaven.

God has a plan, and we must have faith that He knows what is best.

You grunt in response and scrape knife and fork across the dinner plate.

She'd been flighty before, but since your son's death she's attending all the self-improvement seminars she can, each one in some hotel conference room, and she's disappearing for days at find-yourself retreats that are always in the woods or by a lake.

One day she says that's it, she's done; in fact, she's been cheating on you and even got knocked up—marriage over.

It's over for you, too; you just don't know it yet.

You'd been following a lead on a string of petty robberies, mid-day house break-ins, theft of jewelry, watches, loose change, and you had enough information to put together a sort of sting-operation.

But then you get thinking about Father Benny.

You go there. Block the driveway, red-and-blues spinning, and you grill him but he won't give you anything, not even after you punch him a few times.

Cops watch from the street.

Someone might have intervened if you'd kept going, but Hey, his son just died and this priest talked his wife into leaving him so a few punches will be good for both of them.

Any man would agree.

Even after Father Benny makes a formal complaint, no one really cares.

Until you catch the house robbers in the act.

They are a couple of strung-out twenty-somethings who'd been stealing whatever they could to hock at various pawn shops to get money to score smack.

You tackle a skinny guy in black jeans. Necklaces, bracelets, and rings erupt out of his hands. You flip him over. He's blinking nonstop, completely confused, fear-whited face.

You hit him. And hit him. And hit him.

That's how you get put on leave.

You need to relax, Rowe.

Then you walk out of the police station, get the 9mm you keep in your glove compartment and fire it at the chief's cruiser.

That's how you get fired.

This is bullshit, you say.

The chief nods, says something about not letting your feelings cloud your judgement, that you need to focus on getting better and coming back, but you're never coming back. This is bullshit. My son is dead and I'm being punished for it.

That's true. You weren't the one who left the Afghan blanket draped over the space heater.

You didn't cause the fire.

But you're the one condemned to wake with smoke in your lungs and the hall stretching all the way to a hole in the ground.