The Secrets We Keep(66)

I took his hand, fully aware he was going to pull me into his arms. I let him, burying myself in his chest and holding on like he was the last solid thing left in the world.

“We’ve missed you.”

The whispered words came from behind me, and I lifted my head enough to see Mom staring at me before she kissed the top of my head. I wiggled free, confused as to why they weren’t upset with me. I’d expected anger … for the accident, for lying, for taking what good memories they had of Maddy and destroying them. I was prepared for that, was prepared to accept that. But this, this silent forgiveness … I didn’t know what to do with it.

“You’re not angry,” I said as my head whipped between Mom and Dad. I was waiting, wondering which one of them was going to lose it on me first. Neither did. Mom shook her head, and Dad held out his arms again, offering me shelter and comfort.

“Why? I don’t get it, why aren’t you mad?”

“We’re sorry that you thought you had to do this. Sorry that you ever thought Maddy was more important to us than you. We are confused and angry with ourselves for not recognizing who you were the instant you woke up, but we’re not upset with you, Ella. We couldn’t be.”


Ella. The sound of my name coming from my mother had me shaking, seeking out my father’s hand as the weight of the lie I’d been carrying finally lifted. I sucked in a ragged breath and then another one after that, my heart, my soul, my entire being realigning itself with the truth that everybody now knew: I was Ella Lawton.

I reached out a hand to Josh, pulled him into the circle my parents’ arms had created around me. Somehow I knew it was going to be okay. Everything I needed was here, enveloping me. And as for Maddy, she was my sister, my first and best friend. Here or not, she was part of me and I would carry her with me forever.

Like Molly said, it wasn’t going to be easy—there would be gossip, and questions, and a crapload of family therapy—but I’d take it, because right there, standing at the grave of my sister, my life literally started over.





EPILOGUE

I had a few more boxes to unpack, most of them extra toiletries Mom insisted I needed. The room was smaller than I’d expected—nothing more than a shoe box with two identical beds, two desks, and two closets. I’d managed to jam as much as I could into the small space, even sent a duffle bag of clothes home with my parents, but it still felt overstuffed. Where Mom expected me to hide a year’s worth of tampons, I had no idea. I shoved them under the bed with the seven thousand bars of soap and tubes of toothpaste she’d made me keep.

I’d do anything she asked—keep a lifetime’s worth of toiletries shoved under my bed and call her every night if that’s what she wanted—in the hopes of making up for what I’d done.

According to Mom, this was my chance to start over, to reinvent myself, in a world where nobody knew about my past. But I wouldn’t be alone. Instead of the single room I’d wanted, I had a roommate. She wasn’t there yet. Her name was Sadie Rose, and she was from Austin, Texas, or so the meet-your-roommate e-mail I’d received in July had said. The message even included a picture of her, not that you could tell much from it. From what I could see, she was blond and apparently had an affinity for thick black eyeliner.

We had exchanged a couple of e-mails, mostly revolving around who was bringing the mini-fridge and who was bringing the microwave. She seemed nice enough.

She had texted me this morning. Her flight had been canceled and she doubted she’d be here before tomorrow afternoon. That was fine by me. It gave me one more day to figure out what to say to her in person.

I left her side of the room completely untouched, taking over what I calculated to be my half of the ten-by-twelve-foot space. I hoped she wouldn’t mind which side I’d picked and didn’t have space issues; that would suck.

The door to my room opened, and I didn’t bother to turn around to see who it was. I already knew. He’d been in and out of my room five times in the last half hour, trying to figure out how to make the wooden bulletin board I brought from home stick to the cinder-block walls.

“The guy at the hardware store said this should work,” Josh told me as he held up some double-sided tape. “Although I still don’t get why you didn’t do what your dad suggested and lean it against the window.”

I shrugged. “I like it this way better.”

Mom gave both Maddy and me bulletin boards when we started high school. She said it was the perfect way to show off what was important to us without marring our walls. We’d killed our walls anyway, taping pictures to them and nailing up photos, but that didn’t stop us from using our bulletin boards to tack up whatever memento was important to us that day.

I’d combined the items from our two boards before I left, took an old concert-ticket stub and the picture of her field hockey team off Maddy’s and added it to mine. There was a picture of Molly and me that was taken the day before she left for UNC, the crumpled-up drawing of the tree that had given me away to Josh, and our prom picture—not the formal one but a candid his mom snapped as we were getting into his car. In the center of it all were Maddy’s car keys, the ones to the blue Honda that nearly claimed both our lives, and the appointment card for the counselor Mom had found me here. I didn’t want to tape these things to random spots on the wall. I wanted them like this—smushed together in one contained, controllable spot. It was a combination of the two of us and I now used it to remind me how strangely similar and oddly different Maddy and I truly were.