Behind Every Lie(58)

My hands were shaking, from fatigue or fear, I wasn’t sure, but I felt a sense of impending doom curling around me like smoke. I closed my eyes and took a few deep yoga breaths. Then I mixed a batch of epoxy with fine gold dust and meticulously applied the mixture to each of the broken pieces, reconstructing the urn like a jigsaw puzzle.

After an hour the urn was back to its former shape, with just one large piece missing. I slid the heart-shaped jade into the hole and smiled. It was a perfect fit. I filled the cracks with more epoxy and gold dust and held the jade in place until it had set, then carefully painted a lacquer–gold dust mix along each crack.

When I’d finished, I traced my fingers over the urn’s surface. It was beautiful. A thick line of gold outlined the heart-shaped jade. Fine webs of gold expanded outward across the curls of pinks and browns. Gold dust sparkled in the air, making the urn shimmer, like a mirage. I blinked as it landed on my eyelashes and distorted my vision, a memory suddenly swirling with the gold dust.

I was reading in bed, Liam sleeping beside me. My phone chimed a text from my mom.

Eva, can you come over? I realize it’s late, but it’s urgent.



I sat up abruptly, the bedcovers falling to my waist. Mom wasn’t one for exaggeration. She must really need me. I checked the time. The ferry was still running for a few more hours. I could probably get to her house and back before the last one returned at 2 a.m.

Ok, but I’ll have to wait for the ferry. Can prob get next one but will still be an hour or so.

I’ll be waiting. Love you.



I sneezed, the gold dust tickling my nose and snapping me back to the present. I stared at the labyrinth of gold on the urn’s surface.My brain jolted, and I inhaled sharply. There was something wrong with the texts. Not just that they were missing.

I closed my eyes, letting the memory replay. I could see the screen hot white in the dim light of my bedroom, the text conversation parading before my mind.

And suddenly I knew what was wrong.

The words. The terminology. It was all wrong.

Mom never signed her texts Love you. She’d never even said it out loud, as far as I could remember. Not that she didn’t love me, just that her love had always been implied instead of explicitly said. Talking about emotions, feeling emotions, was completely off the table for her.

So who’d really texted me?

Because if there was one thing I was suddenly certain of, it was that Mom hadn’t sent those texts.





thirty

eva




AFTER I’D FINISHED the last coat of gold lacquer paint, I set the urn aside to dry. Ginger wound around my leg, her familiar purr filling the room. I scooped her up and set her outside. I didn’t want Liam to see her inside. He wasn’t exactly a cat person.

My phone rang. It was Andrew.

“Are you back from London?” he asked when I answered.

“Just back a few hours ago.”

“Good. We need to meet Mom’s lawyer to go over her will. Are you free next Thursday?” I heard a police siren in the background and the brisk clip of shoes on pavement.

“I think so. Why?”

He didn’t reply.

“What is it, Andrew?”

“It isn’t my place to say,” Andrew said finally. “We have to address everything together at the lawyer’s office.”

I wanted to reach through the phone and throttle my brother. “God, Andrew! You could at least tell me what’s going on before I get there.”

“I can’t,” he said stiffly. “The will stipulates that we read it together.”

“Fine,” I huffed. “Send me the details, I guess, and I’ll try to meet you there.”

“Okay. See you then.”

“Wait! Andrew, I actually wanted to ask you something. Did Mom ever say ‘I love you’ to you? Like out loud or in a text?” I stroked my fingers over the marks on my arm. The electric tingling was gone now. Instead the feeling running over my skin was dread.

“Hmmm.” Andrew paused to think about it. “I guess not that I can remember, no. She wasn’t great at expressing emotions. She was raised in a different era, a different country. You know.”

I nodded. He was right, I did know.

“Why?” he asked.

“I just have this weird memory of reading a text from her that said, Love you, but it isn’t something I can remember her ever saying. I’m probably just imagining the text anyway. I can’t even find it on my phone.”

“No offense, but I wouldn’t trust any of your memories right now. You probably just imagined it.” Andrew’s voice was strangely high-pitched.

I leaned back in my chair and looked outside. Ginger had jumped onto the window ledge and was bathing herself, one hind leg thrown up in the air, looking at me with half-closed eyes. Night was drawing around the house, dark and dreary. Small drops of rain gathered into silver rivers that snaked down the windows.

“Have you remembered anything else?” he asked.

I hesitated. “Not really.” A telephone conversation was not the right time to explain everything to my brother, I decided. I would tell him next time I saw him.

There was silence on Andrew’s end of the phone.

“I miss her,” I said softly.

“Yeah, me too. Remember when we had that garage sale, and Mom made you and me, Jacob and Lily write price tags to stick on every single item we were selling? She even filled out a spreadsheet so she could compare what we’d sold against how much we’d intended to sell it for. But then that kid from your school, his house had burned down and his family was renting an empty apartment—”