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ahead.
    The photos were clipped from media accounts during the trial, and later painstakingly laminated to keep them from yellowing and tearing.
    Ordinarily, they’re tucked away in a big box, along with some of Jamie’s old clothing. The box is kept in the crawl space beneath the rented duplex; a crawl space that—come to think of it—might just come in handy for other things in the weeks ahead.
    But don’t get ahead of yourself. You don’t know yet how you’re going to do what has to be done, you only know that it’s time to begin.
    Now the box, with clothes inside, sits open on the floor beside the table littered with photographs of Rocky Manzillo and Allison MacKenna.
    And what about the prison guard on duty that night on the cell block, the one who should have been watching over Jerry, making sure he didn’t harm himself?
    No photos of him; no idea who he is.
    But it won’t be hard to find out.
    Meanwhile . . .
    The faces staring up from the table seem expectant, as if they’re waiting for their fates to be decided.
    â€œYou’re going to pay !” With a furious shove, Jamie sends the table over onto its side, where it teeters, then falls flat on the top with a resounding bang.
    Almost immediately, there’s a thumping sound overhead.
    The dour old man who rents the apartment upstairs, the man who complains about the slightest thing, is banging on the floor—the ceiling—with something, probably his stupid old shoe.
    He’s never going to let this go by without further confrontation.
    Dammit, dammit, dam—
    Then again . . .
    Hmm.
    Maybe a confrontation with the old son of a bitch is just the thing to get the ball rolling again after all these years.
    â€œD addy?”
    Startled, Mack looks up from the paint can he’s been staring at for, what . . . five minutes now? Ten?
    His older daughter is standing in the doorway of the sunroom.
    Hudson has long, straight blond hair that people always assume she got from her mother, unaware that Allison’s natural hair color is brunette. Their daughter’s fair coloring comes from Mack’s mother’s side of the family—though he himself has dark hair—and so do the light green eyes that are a mirror image of his.
    But that’s where the resemblance to her dad stops. Hudson has elfin features, a sprinkling of freckles, and is small for her age. She also has an air of precocious confidence she didn’t inherit from either of her parents.
    â€œI don’t know where she gets it,” Allison frequently says, shaking her head over something their firstborn has said or done.
    Mack has a pretty good idea. His own mother, Maggie, had the same strong-willed flash in her Irish eyes that he so often sees in Hudson’s.
    But of course, Allison wouldn’t recognize it because she never knew his mother, who died the year before they met.
    His first wife met her a few times. That was enough for a terminally ill Maggie MacKenna to decide Carrie was wrong for her son.
    You were right, Mom. You were so right.
    Back then, though, I kept thinking that if you just got to know Carrie, just got to know what she had been through in the past . . .
    But Mack never had the chance to bridge the gap between the two women in his life, and he never got the chance to tell his mother that he regretted not having talked to her before he eloped with Carrie after a whirlwind courtship. His mother died a few months later.
    Now, looking back, he knows it’s no accident that after preserving his bachelorhood well into his thirties, he quite literally married the first woman who came along on the very day he got the shocking news that Mom had just six months to live. He was in no frame of mind, at that time, to begin a relationship, let alone take marriage vows.
    He also understands now that he avoided discussing Carrie with Maggie because he was afraid his mother would tell him