It’s still dark out when I get back, close to morning.

I can’t get inside the house like how I get out of it. I go around the back and in through the glass doors off the patio that open into my dad’s old office. I sit in his old chair, at his desk. I lean my head back and close my eyes. The chair is falling apart because he wore it down, got it to fit him perfectly. He refused to throw it out and now I’m trying hard to belong to the space he left behind, but I’m awkward and small and I don’t.

Sometimes, when my eyes are closed, I can convince myself I smell him: old paper and musk and something chemical. I open my eyes, expecting to see him but there’s nothing.

The door creaks open.

My heart stops. I jump out of the chair fast.

Beth. She turns on the light and squints at me.

“I thought I heard someone,” she says.

I don’t say anything. Just wait for her to go. Of course, she doesn’t. She steps inside and moves around the office slowly, taking it all in. I don’t know if she’s been in here since my dad died. She pauses and studies some of the photographs he took that hang on the wall. Leave. I don’t say it, though. It’s a miracle she hasn’t noticed I’m still dressed.

“Such a waste,” she murmurs.

“What’s a waste?” I ask.

She gestures to the photos. “To have that kind of gift … to have people respond to it.” She pauses. “And then to just … stop sharing it.”

My father was famous.

A long, long time ago.

Maybe famous is the wrong word. My father was an artist, and to other artists he was a star. But I only know this about my father so long after it’s been true, maybe star is the wrong word too. When he was twenty, he went by his initials, S.R., and turned an entire city into his own personal art gallery. He spent a year pinning his photos all over city walls, shots of people close and touching everywhere, until eventually, the media noticed. It took six months for them to out him, and when they asked him why he’d done it, he said, I want to share my work with the world. Simple. The world was charmed.

Later, he told me it wasn’t his art or his sincerity, it was just the right time. Either way, he was briefly catapulted into the kind of life I’ve never been able to imagine him living, but spend more and more time trying to imagine him living.

Secrets on City Walls became a book.

His work was in actual galleries, in far more places than he’s ever been.

When my dad was twenty-five, some celebrity of the day announced in an interview she’d started a collection of his work and she wanted them all, every last photo, and then everyone else did too—even if they didn’t, not really.

That was when my father walked away from it all.

He says—said, said—that’s what people remember about him most: he had the world at his fingertips and he walked away. He asked that he be forgotten, so he could give his art back to himself. Somehow, everyone found that message way less endearing.

At thirty, he moved to Branford. Branford is a good place to be forgotten.

To become a reclusive artist who never stops creating, but stops sharing.

He worked in a studio two hours away until he died.

And now he’s dead.

“Oh,” I say. “I thought you were talking about his suicide.”

She gives me this look.

“I don’t need to say that about his suicide.” She points to a photograph next to his bookshelf. It’s of my mom, dad. Me. Family portrait. She points to Mom and Dad and she says, “Twenty. Your mother was twenty when they eloped. He was forty-five.”

“Really?” I ask. “Wow, Beth. I totally did not know this.”

She ignores my tone. “She was only twenty-four when she had you—she was never an adult without your father, Eddie.” She fixes me with one of her trademark looks of superiority. “Maybe you could remember that the next time I’m asking you to do something to make it a little easier for her, like tidying up the living room. Because when you act like that, you’re not making it hard on me. You’re making it hard on her.”

“Good night, Beth.”

She sighs, but she gets the hint. She turns off the light and leaves me in the dark. I sit back down in the chair and close my eyes, trying to conjure my father’s ghost, waiting for the Seth Reeves I knew to feel close.

The Seth Reeves I knew: gentle and quiet. Giving. The man who laughed every time someone mistook him for my grandfather, which happened a lot because, at sixty-four, he looked like one. The man who killed spiders at my tearful requests and tried—and failed—to teach me to drive, danced with his wife in the kitchen and smiled …

That man would never get rid of himself.

So now I am looking for his death in his art.

It’s the thing I know least about him.

I reach across his desk and rest my hands on the note he left, which has stayed there since we found it. I run my fingers over the paper, crumpled from Mom’s grasp before she set it back and smoothed it out as much as she could, pretending it hadn’t been touched or read. All it says is that he had to leave, he loves us both. My mom clutched her chest the first time she read it and I thought she was going to die and I glimpsed a future, myself alone—completely alone—and thought I would die too. But I’m still here. And he’s not.

I need to know why.