Sweet Water(74)

What did you do, Finny?

I can’t stick my head in the sand anymore. There’ll be no more living in the dark.

Light is where the truth lives.

I suck in a deep breath.

The journal has to be here somewhere; I can almost smell it.

“Where is it?” I ask the house, and I’m not whispering like I usually do so people won’t think I’m crazy. I don’t worry about that anymore. I know now I’m not the crazy one in this fucked-up town.

The wind howls, and our family pictures rattle up the stairwell along with it.

Up the stairs?

I run upstairs. Where do mischievous boys who grow up to become evil men hide their buried treasure?

Perhaps it’s in the same place Martin hid what he didn’t want the authorities to find the last time. Under the mattress. It’s where the boys hid the money in the frat house.

I run to our master bedroom and lift the bedding and then use all my strength to lift up the king mattress. It’s dense with coiled springs, encased in 800-thread-count sheets, heavy, like everything else in this house, weighing me down.

All the weight I need to shed.

It’s weight I put there, though, isn’t it? All the things I refused to see that were right in front of me coming back to bury me.

I drop it. “Oof.” There’s nothing under there.

I check the other side and slide my hand under the mattress again.

“Mom?”

I drop the mattress on my hand. “Shit.” There’s nothing under that side either.

“What’re you doing?” Finn asks me.

My hand is throbbing, and I let it fall to my side. “Changing the sheets, honey. You startled me.” I want to yell at him. Ask him why he didn’t tell me the truth. Ask him if he knows where the journal is. Ask him if he killed his girlfriend. The anger is stifling, bottling, and I must not tip my hand. Not yet. He could be hiding it, and I’ll never find it if he is. My heart shatters a little more.

Finn studies our bedroom with a perplexed look on his face, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that I wasn’t stripping the sheets. The comforter is still on top of the bed, and there’s no laundry basket in the room.

The garage door rumbles. I’ve run out of time.

“I need to talk to Dad and then you,” I say. Finn doesn’t answer, just stares, and his despondency hasn’t gotten any better. I see it now as stunned guilt. I love him, but it makes me sick to look at him now. He doesn’t carry his guilt as well as Martin, cursed because he’s part me, and I wasn’t built to hold secrets either. Carrying the burden of what happened with this dead girl will torture Finn like it’s tortured me, and I need to set him free.

I need to free us both.

We robbed Finn of his chance for truth telling by making him lie, and now I need to make it better.

I race down the steps. “Where is it?” I ask the house again, desperately.

The door to the office slams shut from the wind.

The office?

I close Stonehenge’s front door and then walk inside the office and close those doors too. I have maybe thirty seconds before Martin finds me.

I know he’s looking for me.

When I close the french doors and swing around, I notice that Martin’s office is a mess, very uncharacteristic for him. There’re Post-it notes and copier papers spread all over his desk, an unusual sight for a man who organizes everything in our house, including the sock drawer. “Jesus, Martin.”

The key is hanging out of the middle drawer in the desk, also rare. Usually it’s locked, because that’s where he keeps the checkbook, key stowed away so the cleaners can’t get to it.

Although maybe it’s so I can’t get to it.

I sit down in his leather chair and open the drawer to snoop, but there’s nothing inside but pencils, pens, and blank checks. I don’t know where he has the journal stashed, but when you discover you’re married to a liar, you look for deceptions everywhere.

I need to get Finn away from him, this family, this life, if he’s to have a chance at being a decent human being. They’ve already rubbed off on him, and I realize I’m to blame too. I’m 100 percent complicit in this mess, but I’m also the only one who sees a problem with it.

So much of my life choices have been based on lies, and the only way to move forward now is to scrap my mistakes and start over fresh.

It all seems scripted now—my botched engagement—a means to something else. I agreed to all of it because after my bout of cold feet and my brief moment in Narnia, I didn’t care to acknowledge my separation from Martin, willing to do whatever I could to make it up to him. Josh had up and left me without saying goodbye—again. We’d shared a tender moment, and at the time, I thought there might’ve been a real chance for a reconciliation, but he did what he did best—he left me.

And Martin was there.

He was still there after I’d tried to give him his ring back. That had to count for something.

It had to mean he really loved me and that our union was right.

Or . . . it meant that he’d found a girl he could keep under his thumb, nice and tight.

One who would sit next to him in his kingdom of lies, because I’d done so when Tush had passed away, and then I proved myself worthy again with Livvy and now Yazmin.

Well, no longer. I’m done.