Before I Let You Go(112)

“She couldn’t even tell me,” I whisper back. “He told her that she deserved it, and she believed him, and then this thing defined her entire life. And it happened in your house—under your roof. How could you not have known? You should have seen it.”

“I would have seen it,” Mom says flatly.

“She had no reason to lie, Mom.” I’m pleading with her to look past what she wants to be the true, to see just how many questions this god-awful discovery answers. “The journal was for her therapist—she just wanted to be understood.”

“They were never even alone together, Lexie. He was at work during the day, and then at night, I was home.”

“He went to her room at night after you went to bed.”

I feel Mom’s arms stiffen over my shoulder, and I turn toward her. Her face is frozen in the moonlight. Uncertainty has crept into her expression.

“What is it?” I prompt, and now I see guilt in Mom’s eyes and I shake her hand off my shoulder. “Did you know, Mom?”

“No! No. But—” She hesitates, and then I see her start to shake. She steps toward the headstone, away from me.

“Mom.”

“He started getting up to pray for her in the middle of the night,” Mom whispers. She turns back to me, and presses her hand over her mouth. “He told me that he had to go to her room, to lay hands on her—he had to try to drive the demons out.”

Now, Mom’s eyes are wild, and by the time she finishes speaking, her voice is high and strained. We are only beginning to understand the immensity of this thing we have missed, but the guilt hits me immediately, and I know it’s risen for Mom, too. Annie is right there with us—the third member of this triad. She is the missing piece of our family, and we finally understand her . . . but it’s come far too late for us to ever be whole.

“Oh God.” Mom dissolves before me, but I will not comfort her. My mother needs this pain—she has avoided it for twenty years. I watch as Mom falls to her knees in front of Annie’s headstone, and then she turns and crawls toward it, pressing her face into the cold stone as she wails. I sit behind her on the fresh earth, and we are both sobbing in the darkness for what might have been, and for all the ways that we let our Annie down.

Several hours later, the text comes from Sam.

Are you okay?

Mom and I are sitting on opposite sides of the grave by the time he messages me. We talked quietly for a while, then we ran out of words, and have been sitting in silence. It’s so cold that I’ve been trembling for hours, but whenever I felt the urge to retreat to warmth, I remember that Annie is cold, too. And so we stay.

But after I read Sam’s text, I whisper to Mom, “We need to go home.”

Mom doesn’t say a word as we walk back to the car, and although her sobs have settled, I can hear how tight her chest is from the cold, and how congested her sinuses are from the crying. I feel like I have a nasty case of tonsillitis—my throat is sore from the sobbing, from the yelling, from the tension of it all.

And yet even in all of this, there is something of closure. I didn’t expect it, but now that Annie’s secret is out in the open, I feel like all that is left are memories of love and regret, and a promise to Annie.

I’ll do better for her daughter.

One day, when the time comes for me to tell Daisy about her mother, I will say in earnest that Annie was a troubled woman who was abused and beaten by life. I can tell Daisy that her mother never got the help that she needed or deserved, and that a system that only wanted to protect Daisy managed to drive her mother to the brink.

I can tell Daisy that it’s brutally unfair and wrong, but that at least on some level, the story of Annie’s life makes sense.

When we get home, Mom immediately walks to her room. Sam is sitting on the couch, Daisy sound asleep in his arms.

“I guess you talked to her?” he whispers, and I nod, and I release an exhausted sob.

“I feel like I can breathe again,” I whisper back, and then I start to cry all over again. I take Daisy into my arms. In her sleeping face, I see all that’s left of my sister.

“Come on, sweetheart,” Sam says gently. “Let’s go to bed.”

“There’s something we have to do first.”

We walk up the stairs, and I crawl onto the bed with Daisy still in my arms. Sam has read my mind somehow—he walks to my side of the bed, withdraws the journal and then passes it to me. I open it to the final pages.

“Will you read her last note with me, Sam?”

“Of course I will,” he says.

“Good,” I whisper. “Because I really don’t think I could do it without you.”





40


ANNIE


Dear Lexie,

I have been agonizing over how I could possibly give my daughter the life that she deserves. I have such high hopes for that beautiful girl. I want her to have the life that we would have had if Dad hadn’t died, and I just realized today that I can’t do that. At least, not right now.

But you and Sam can. I came to your house today—I know you will be mad about that, and I’m really sorry, but I just wanted to see her so badly. At my core, Lexie, I’m a selfish, impulsive person. I wanted her, and I went to her, even though I knew it was the wrong thing to do.