“I promised.”
“Why did you stop looking?”
My instinct was to defend myself.
Instead, I sat.
I saw my little girl.
“Tell me what you remember.”
She remembered Clara crying at the motel, Gwen saying I had chosen another woman, and Shaun asking when I was coming. Clara’s car overheated near the bridge, so Gwen drove them away in hers.
That night, Clara suffered a stroke that damaged her speech and memory. Gwen moved them to another state, controlled Clara’s calls and letters, and said I knew where they were but wanted nothing to do with them.
They used Clara’s maiden name, which Aria legally adopted as an adult. No one connected them to the family presumed lost in the river.
Clara suffered a stroke.
Aria waited for me.
I never came.
“When I got older, I remembered the mattress,” she said. “I knew you’d never seen the note.”
Her voice broke.
“It was my fault.”
“No.”
“I hid it.”
“You were nine.”
“Being nine doesn’t change what I did.”
“I knew you’d never seen the note.”
“It changes who was responsible. I hid the truth too.”
She stared at me.
I told her about Sarah and Clara’s questions.
“You hid a letter because you were scared,” I said. “I hid behind silence because I was proud. Only one of us was an adult.”
