I closed my eyes.
“When he found you with it?”
“He didn’t yell,” Levi said. “That was worse. My dad almost never gets scared. Not normal scared, anyway. But that day he looked like someone had walked into our house with a gun.”
“What did he tell you?”
“That Jesse Whitaker was who he used to be. That he had to leave because he saw something dangerous. That the people involved could have hurt him and anyone connected to him.”
Levi’s voice dropped.
“He made me promise never to search the name online again. Never to say it at school. Never to tell my mom’s family. No one.”
“Your mother knows?”
“Some,” he said. “Not all. She knows he had another name. She knows he was relocated. She knows there was danger. But I don’t think she knows he left a whole family behind thinking he was dead.”
