I looked at my wife as if I had never truly known her.
“You knew?”
Barry answered before she could.
“She told me after the second week I worked here,” he said. “She confronted me in the storage room. I begged her not to tell you until I found the courage to do it myself.”
I sank back into my chair because my legs no longer trusted me.
“What happened?” I whispered.
Barry’s hands began to tremble.
“We were stealing apples from the stand near the river,” he said. “Your son saw us. The older boys dared me to push him, just to scare him.”
His breath caught.
“I shoved him once. I didn’t mean…”
He stopped, his face folding under the weight of memory.
“I didn’t mean for him to slip.”
The words struck me like stones.
I sat there, staring at him, while fifteen years of grief cracked open all over again.
