Sweet Water(108)

But the cops aren’t done here.

I expect my sons to rush into my room at any moment, and I can’t wait to see them. But when I see Finn floating by my hospital room, he’s not there to visit me.

He’s in handcuffs.





CHAPTER 29

There are many things I learn in the next few days as I’m stuck in the hospital room with nothing but my smartphone to keep me company—because one of my sons is in jail.

And my husband is absent, fighting with an army of lawyers to get him out.

Spencer has gone back to school early at the advice of the Ellsworths, but not before telling me he loves me no matter what happens. Someday I’ll tell him Josh is his father, but we have a lot of healing to do as a family before we can open any fresh wounds.

As I seek to understand, I’m overcome with so much grief that I lie to the nurse about my pain level to get more morphine, anything to numb myself after all my wrongdoings. I think about all the things I’ve pushed aside so I didn’t have to see them—Tush’s death, my first pregnancy, how we handled Yazmin’s tragedy. I went on a blind pursuit to become one of the lucky ones, using my mother’s death as a crutch, a way to assuage my part in it all, my ugly truths. And now I understand what it’s like to have demons roaring so loudly in your head, only medication can quiet them.

Stuck in my hospital room, in purgatory, I begin to research who the Veltris were.

Jimmy Veltri died on a snowy December evening on a windy stretch of Route 51 that was commonly traveled, but not that evening, because motorists were warned to stay off the road. When another car hit Jimmy’s sedan, it spun around, flipped, and skidded to the shore of the river, which couldn’t be seen in plain sight from the road. Yazmin was in the passenger seat, helping her father look for her little brother. He had run away from home.

There’s a drastic difference between the social media posts before the accident and after.

Before: Jimmy, an avid fisherman, reeling in trout with Cash.

Camping trips. October—hunting season. Cash with a buck. Jimmy empty-handed but obviously thrilled for his son. Rite of passage. Becoming a hunter like his old man.

Winter—Yazmin and Jimmy at a Penguins game. #LetsGoPens #DaddyDaughterDate

Another post—Yazmin made honor roll again. Jimmy is so proud, he posts a picture of her award. She’s smiling, but everything about her is softer than the Yazmin I knew. Alisha too. Her smile is bright, her skin less worn.

After the accident is posted, there is a funeral announcement with a little quote from Alisha that says: “When I worried about Jimmy on the road for all those days driving a truck, he told me not to, because anything that came up against his tractor trailer would likely lose. We never factored in what could happen on his day off, just a few miles from home.”

There was a GoFundMe page set up by a friend to help cover funeral costs. The goal had been $5,000 and they’d reached only $3,000. This makes me sadder than all the other posts.

The Veltris had very little support. No family or friends who could help with the funeral expenses. I think about how much the haircut went for at the gala and how much I wish it could’ve gone toward Yazmin’s funeral costs instead.

Why didn’t I question more why Yazmin didn’t have a father?

The punishing thoughts are endless. Martin feels none of this suffering, and there’s no way back to him, to the old us.

We are no longer Martin and Sarah Ellsworth of Blackburn Road.

There is no house on Blackburn Road.

Martin would have to do the full research on Yazmin’s family and read her journal to understand why I’m leaving him. But he’ll do neither of those things. He’d rather stay in the dark, slap a Band-Aid on it, move forward. We almost lost my father because of it, and I can never forgive him for that.

Telling the cops the truth was freeing. Detective Monroe fought surprise at my admission. I still don’t know why I’m not handcuffed to my hospital bed by now like they do in the movies.

My only guess is, Martin hasn’t wavered from his stance that I wasn’t in my right mind with all the medication I was on. Additionally, there is no evidence that we left a dead body. If I said I did and Martin said we didn’t, his version wins out, because there’s no proof.

Detective Monroe alerted me that he is also going to look into the hit-and-run that killed Yazmin’s father and almost killed her. It’s then that I know the piece of the puzzle that I’ve been missing. The reason that Yazmin was staring so crazily at our windows with the family crest.

It was all in the entrance essay to the Academy that Yazmin vividly described in her journal. Yazmin wrote about the accident—she’d said so in the journal—and William was on the board for the scholarship program, one of the largest contributors. Of course he recognized the last name of the daughter of the man he’d killed. And the girl he’d almost killed.

William was the one driving the car that killed Jimmy Veltri. He granted Yazmin the scholarship because he felt guilty about killing her father.

Yazmin said in her journal entry that she saw something at the scene of the accident, a reflection in the window. It could’ve been on anything William had that night—a cuff link, a hubcap, who knows.

The only thing I do know is that when Yazmin walked into my house and saw that symbol on my windows—she recognized it. And then she told Cash, and he walked into our house and he smashed those windows out, the ones with the family crest.