Travis was at the funeral. He cried harder than anyone.
I should have known.
Looking back, I should have known the second I saw him cry that hard. Because Travis didn’t cry. Travis didn’t feel things the way other people did. He hadn’t cried when his mother left when he was eight. He hadn’t cried when his first dog got hit by a car.
He had this thing in his eyes that even Jesse used to talk to me about.
“Something’s wrong with that boy, Mack,” Jesse told me once, after Travis hurt a neighbor’s cat. “Something’s missing in him. I don’t know how to fix it.”
But Jesse loved him. He was his son. So Jesse kept trying.
And then Travis met Sarah.
Sarah was twenty-two when she met him. She had a six-month-old baby boy named Caleb. The father had taken off before Caleb was born. She was working two jobs. She was lonely.
Travis was thirty-one and charming when he wanted to be. He moved fast. Bought her things. Told her he wanted to be Caleb’s dad.
She married him within a year.
