They Buried Our Father, We Buried Their Son

§PROLOGUE

The lie came easy.

Seven years in a cell, and it became a kind of prayer, a mantra whispered into the concrete sweat of the walls.

My name is Morgan Hemlock, and I killed Colt Redfield.

I was nineteen.

It was the year of our ruin.

§01

1988.

Coppercleft, West Virginia, wasn't a town so much as a wound that refused to heal.

It clung to the side of a mountain like a scab, breathing in coal dust and exhaling despair.

Our family, the Hemlocks, grew in its shadow like the stubborn, poisonous plant we were named for.

My older sister, Meredith, was the first to bloom, and the first to be crushed.

She was being fitted for a wedding dress she never wanted, to a man who had stolen something from her in the damp darkness of an abandoned mine entrance.

Beau Redfield. The name tasted like rust and cheap whiskey on the town's tongue.

He was the son of the man who owned the mine, the town, our very lives.

He was a prince in a kingdom of soot.

And he had put his hands on my sister.

The family, our parents, chose silence.

They chose survival.

A wedding was arranged, a shameful truce to keep us from being starved out, cast out.

Meredith’s sacrifice was a quiet, suffocating thing.

On the day of the wedding rehearsal, a humid afternoon thick with the promise of a storm, a pair of new figures stood by Meredith’s side.

I was nineteen, and my younger sister, Tierney, was seventeen.

We were to be her bridesmaids.

§02

The rehearsal was at the community hall, a rickety building that smelled of stale beer and regret.

Beau Redfield, flushed with victory and bourbon, swaggered through the small crowd.

He was trying to make a toast.

"To my beautiful bride!" he slurred, raising his glass to a pale, trembling Meredith.

I stood beside her, my knuckles white as I gripped the small basket of fake flowers.

My lips were bitten raw, tasting blood.

"I object!"

The words ripped out of me, a bolt of lightning in the stuffy room.

"Beau Redfield is a rapist. He is not my brother-in-law!"

Every eye in that hall turned to me.

It was the gaze of a mob, hungry for a spectacle, laced with a cruel, knowing pity.

They all knew. They just wouldn't say it.

"You goddamn bitch," Beau snarled, his eyes bulging. "I'm marrying your sister. What the hell does it have to do with you?"

His hand flew, a blur of motion.

Crack.

The sting on my cheek was electric.

Crack. Crack.

Two more slaps. My head snapped back with each one.

Red seeped from the corner of my mouth.

I stumbled and fell, pressing my lips together to keep the blood in.

But the red on my face was nothing compared to the crimson fury in my sister’s eyes.

Tierney’s eyes.

I watched, helpless from the floor, as Tierney pulled the hunting knife from inside her worn denim jacket.

I didn't have time to move, no time to stop her.

"He’s dead!" someone screamed.

"The Hemlock girl killed him!"

§03

Scarlet sprayed through the air, painting a stripe across my dress.

The so-called brother-in-law was on the floor, his skull a canvas of red and white.

He clawed at his head, a grotesque symphony of screams, gurgles, and curses.

It took less than a minute for him to die.

For me, it was a lifetime.

The moment Tierney’s knife fell, the Hemlock family was damned.

"Run," I whispered, the word sticking in my throat.

"Run where?" Meredith choked out, her face a mask of horror.

"I don't know."

The three of us stared at each other, our minds blank voids.

Tierney still held the bloody knife, crimson drops tapping a rhythm of doom on the dusty floorboards.

§04

"Tee," I said, my voice shaking. "Dad's pickup. The keys are in it. Drive south. Don't look back. Get on the interstate and just… go. Never come back."

"No, Morg. I killed him. If I run, who do they take?"

I stumbled towards her, my legs feeling like they were filled with wet cement.

I took the knife from her hand.

It was heavy, a pound and a half of cold steel.

In that instant, memories flashed—the three of us as kids, running through fields, helping Mom bake cornbread, fighting over the silver dime hidden in the Thanksgiving turkey.

There was no time for memories. Only for a choice.

"This way you're free, Tee," I said, my voice low and urgent. "Now go."

Tierney just stared, her eyes wide, her feet rooted to the spot.

I kicked her, hard, in the shin.

She yelped and stumbled back into a pile of stacked chairs.

In the distance, I could see the flashing blue and red lights of Sheriff Purnell's car approaching.

"Go!" I screamed, the sound tearing from my soul.

The scream broke her paralysis.

Tierney scrambled up, ran out the door, and I heard the roar of our old Ford F-150 starting up.

Its tires squealed on the gravel as it sped away, a fading silhouette against the setting sun.

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