Desmond Achebe's mother lived in a small house with a garden out front that had clearly been someone's careful project for years — flowers in neat rows, a bench near the door that looked recently painted. Her name was Grace. She answered the door in an apron, flour still on her hands from something she'd been baking.
"Can I help you," she said, polite but wary in the way people get when strangers show up unannounced.
"My name is Hunter," he said. "I need to talk to you about your son. It's not going to be easy to hear, and I'm not going to make it easier than it needs to be by softening any part of it."
Grace's hand went still on the door frame. "Desmond's been gone four years," she said quietly. "What could there possibly be left to say."
"I don't think the accident happened the way y
