“Laura isn’t dead. She staged it. The crash, the shoe, all of it.”
“You’re lying.”
“I’m not. I swear on my life, I’m not.”
“Diane, don’t you dare—”
“Laura isn’t dead.”
“She called me three days before. She said she couldn’t fight me anymore, that she had to disappear to protect the girls. She begged me to keep quiet.”
“And you did.”
“I was terrified, Daniel! If I told you, you’d blame me. Everyone would blame me. And they’d be right.”
I gripped the back of the chair to stay standing.
“You let me grieve. You watched me bury an empty coffin. You held my sons while they cried for a mother who was alive.”
“I know.”
“She begged me to keep quiet.”
“You sat in my kitchen on Christmas. You hugged my boys. For twenty years.”
“I know what I did.”
She reached into her purse with shaking hands and pulled out an envelope, yellowed and creased.
“She wrote to me. Once. Two years after she left.”
“Give me that.”
I tore it open. Laura’s handwriting. A coastal town postmark I’d never heard of.
“She wrote to me. Once.”
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