“Like you already know who I am and I don’t.”
His eyes filled.
That frightened me more than the letter.
Ben had always been the steady one. When we were children, he climbed trees first so he could tell me which branches were safe. When Rosie got lost during a crowded Fourth of July festival at age eight, Ben found her sitting beneath a lemonade stand before the police did. When my mother died, he slept on the floor outside my bedroom because I was afraid to be alone.
Now he looked as lost as I felt.
I grabbed the letter from him.
There were four handwritten pages, all in Rosie’s careful print. Her letters were rounded and deliberate, each word spaced evenly. As a child, she had pressed so hard with pencils that she tore holes in notebooks. Even now, she wrote as though every sentence deserved to be carved into stone.
I began again.
Claire, if you are reading this, I may be dead. Dad killed Mom, and without knowing it, you gave him the perfect alibi.
My stomach twisted.
I kept reading.
You were sixteen, and none of this was your fault. You believed what he told you because he was our father and because you were scared. I believed him too. But I remember more than everyone thinks I remember.
My vision blurred.
A memory rose from somewhere deep and sealed.
Rain beating against the kitchen windows.
My father coming through the back door with blood on his shirt.
His voice shaking as he told me there had been an accident at the workshop.
Me handing him the keys to my mother’s car because he said she had forgotten them.
But that made no sense.
Her car had been found miles away.
At the bottom of Bellweather Ravine.
I read on.
The night Mom disappeared, Dad asked you to say he had been home since nine. You did. You told the police he was upstairs taking a shower when Mom called to say she was driving back from Aunt Lydia’s house. You thought you heard the shower. You did not know he had left it running.
My hands began trembling.
The memory changed.
My father in the kitchen, soaked from the rain.
The wall clock behind him.
Not nine fifteen.
Eleven forty-two.
I had lied to the police.
I had told them he had been home all evening because he took my face in both hands and said, Claire, your mother may be hurt. The police cannot waste time questioning me.
I had repeated his story word for word.
A sixteen-year-old girl trying to save her mother.
