Verity(77)

I searched for her with everything in me, Jeremy. You have to believe me. Every part of me drowned in that lake with her.

I didn’t blame you for suspecting me. I probably would have allowed my mind to explore every possible scenario if the roles had been reversed and she drowned under your supervision. It’s natural, to assume the worst in people, even if that assumption is only for a split second.

I thought you’d wake up the next day after our conversation in the bed and you would realize how ridiculous your indirect accusation had been. I didn’t even try to change your mind that night because I was too full of grief to care. To argue. It had only been days since she passed, and I honestly just wanted to die. I wanted to walk out into the lake that night and join her, because her death was my fault. It was an accident, yes. But if I’d made her wear a vest, if I’d been able to grab her and Crew together, she’d still be alive.

I couldn’t sleep, so I went to my office and opened my laptop for the first time in over six months.

Imagine it for a moment. A mother, grieving the loss of both of her daughters, writing a fictional work-up that accused one of them of murdering the other.

It was beyond disturbing. I realize that, which is why I cried the entire time I typed. But I thought, maybe, if I released my guilt and my grief onto this fictional villain I had created, it would somehow help me in a twisted way.

I wrote all about Chastin’s death. I wrote all about Harper’s. I even went back to the beginning of the manuscript and added foreshadowing so the entire thing would match our new grim reality. And in a way, it did help ease a small fraction of my guilt and pain, being able to blame this fictional version of myself rather than accept the blame in real life.

I can’t explain the mind of a writer to you, Jeremy. Especially the mind of a writer who has been through more devastation than most writers combined. We’re able to separate our reality from fiction in such a way that it feels as if we live in both worlds, but never both worlds at once. My real world had grown so dark that I didn’t want to live in it that night. It’s why I escaped from it and spent the night writing about a world darker than the one I was living in. Because every time I worked on that autobiography, I found relief in closing the laptop. I found relief in walking out of my office and being able to close the door on the evil I created.

That’s all it was. I needed for the imaginary version of my world to be darker than my real world. Otherwise, I would have wanted to leave them both.

After spending the entire night and some of the morning working on the manuscript, I finally reached the last page. I felt the manuscript was done at that point because, really, what more could I have added? It felt as though our world was over. The end.

I printed it out and stuffed it away in a box, thinking one day in the future I’d get back to it. Maybe add an epilogue. Maybe I would burn it. Whatever the plan was, I was not expecting you to somehow read it. I was not expecting you to believe it.

After being up all night writing, I slept most of the day. When I finally woke up that night, I couldn’t find you. Crew was already asleep, but you weren’t up there with him. I was standing in the hallway wondering where you had disappeared to when I heard a noise in my office.

The noise was you. I’m not sure what kind of sound you had made, but it was worse than either of the days we found out the girls had died. I walked toward my office to console you, but I stopped short before opening the door because your cries had turned into rage. Something crashed against the wall. I jumped back—wondering what was happening.

That’s when I remembered the laptop. The autobiography was the last file I had opened.

I swung open the door to explain what I knew you had just read. I’ll never forget the look on your face as you stood there and looked at me from across the room. It was complete and utter…misery.

Not like the sadness of someone who just found out one of their children died. It was a consuming sadness, like every happy memory we had ever had as a family was erased with every new word of that manuscript you had read. Gone. There was nothing left inside you but hatred and destruction.

I shook my head, tried to speak. I wanted to say, “No. It’s not true, Jeremy. It’s okay, it’s not true.” But all I could get out was a fearful and pathetic, “No.”

The next thing I knew, you were dragging me by my throat to the bedroom. I was no match for your strength as you held my arms down with your knees and squeezed my throat even tighter.

If you’d given me five seconds. Just five seconds to explain, I could have saved us. I tried so hard to say, “Just let me explain,” but I couldn’t breathe.

I’m not sure what the sequence of events was after that. I know I passed out. Maybe you panicked because you realized you had almost killed me. If I had died on that bed, you would have been arrested for my murder. Crew wouldn’t have a father.

I woke up in the passenger seat of my Range Rover and you were behind the wheel. There was tape on my mouth, and my hands and feet were bound together. Again, I just wanted to explain that what you read wasn’t true—but I couldn’t talk. I looked down and realized I didn’t have on a seatbelt. And in that moment, I knew what you were doing.

It was one simple sentence in my manuscript, about how I should turn off the passenger airbag and drive my car into a tree while Harper was unbuckled so her death would look like an accident.