EPILOGUE
Read With Me
SERENITY
[3 months later]
The last text I got from my mother was three months ago.
Once everything settled and there wasn’t rows of caution tape at our house, Lake and I went over to my parents’ place. I told them the truth about Lake. I confessed the entire last year. The struggles, the lies, and the truth.
Lake was livid when he discovered my parents knew everything about Delilah’s scheme and the situation that landed me in. He hasn’t left my side, and he would not sit out on supporting me in front of my family, so he stuck an entire pack of gum in his mouth to prevent him from raging.
It’s nice that I’m no longer doing things alone anymore.
I told them the most insane part, that my boss, a known—and for whatever reason, respected doctor—was running a drug ring. He and his business partner held me captive. I’m only alive because my husband, a recovering addict, shot my boss in the spine. Nobody died that day, and Lake is the reason we’re breathing.
I confessed the entire story because of my new initiative to be a truthful person. I never lied for my own gain, but my lies still hurt me and kept me distant from myself and the people I love. Honesty is my new way of self-care.
Regardless of how other people may feel.
But that’s when I came to terms with being over my parents, and I would not feel rotten about it. At least, I was going to try my hardest not to.
“This story has been all over the news. I can’t believe you were in the middle of it.” My mother shakes her head. “Very insane.”
I take a deep breath, gently smiling. “I know. It’s been crazy.”
“Delilah was having a rough time.” She waves her hand. “You should’ve never taken her in, I warned you, Serenity.”
The smile falls from my lips, and I grip Lake’s hand a little harder under the breakfast table. He lets me, because we both know that Delilah receiving some love before her death, instead of being alone and homeless, was a much better alternative.
“And marrying an addict?” She scowls at Lake, then shifting to me. “How could you let yourself fall so far?”
My father grunts, nodding his head at my mother’s statement and eyeing down my husband. Lake keeps chewing on his gum while offering dad a sly smirk.
But my hand squeezes his harder again. “Excuse me?”
“Well.” My ma flips her hair. “I mean, it’s not anybody’s fault but yours that this happened.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Lake’s eye twitching. He tightens his grip this time, and his chewing grows louder.
“Me almost getting killed because Delilah framed me is my fault?”
She shrugs her shoulders, and my dad just huffs.
They miss the point. I should’ve expected them to reject to acknowledge the part their golden child played in this. Even though I know the police spoke to them about it. I didn’t come in here awaiting an apology, either, but I hoped for some sympathy.
My parents held every means to help me, but they refused to. So I had no other option than to marry a man I only just met. His addiction and recovery have nothing to do with any of this, though. He was and is a great man who saved me. Addiction doesn’t change his goodness or his worth. So we fell in love, and my parents should show him grace. Not just because he is my husband, but because he’s kept me safe when they chose not to.
I will not argue with them. It’s not worth my time to convince them that Lake and I are worthy of their comfort and understanding when they possess none of it.
I suck in the smell of my childhood home one last time. The stuffiness of it, the dim scent of hot coffee mixing in. Somehow Lake knows what my plan is, so he rises from his seat and smooths his hand along my shoulder, ignoring their stares. He’s letting me speak for myself.
The whicker chairs and old wood turn smothering, and I spit out what I know will be the last thing I tell them.
“You wanted Delilah to be perfect so badly, you drove her away. She was never meant to be perfect.” I press my lips into a flat line and shrug my shoulders. “And neither am I, but I know when I have children of my own, no matter what flaws they have, they will be perfect in my eyes, because they’re just kids.”
“I tried my hardest raising you two.” My mother gives me a dirty look and straightens her back. “I guess I’m just a horrible mother.”
“That’s your burden to carry.” I tip my head. “You are both the reasons I’ve felt mature since childhood, but still don’t know who the hell I am.”
My father shouts my name and his tone strikes me, but I push forward. “Delilah is gone. It’s tragic, horrible, but you had another daughter to love even before her passing, and you never did.” I fix my purse strap and push myself to my feet. “So I hope you both have a glorious life. I’m no longer going to be a part of it.”
Lake and I left after that. My mother sent me a text about how distraught she was that I’d be so cruel to her. I blocked her. Then I cried about it for three hours on my sofa while Lake tried to predict movie scenes. I only mellowed out when he reached for a book and begun reading to me instead.
Now, three months later, Brooks and I are on a mission of our own.
Lake has no idea what we’re up to. He’s back at the house packing up our stories, because we’re finally well enough to do so. We gathered up all our necessities and left to our own apartment shortly after the incident. It’s a temporary fix to get out of the place we almost lost our lives in. But now we’re ready to collect the rest of our belongings and leave our first home for good.
I told Lake I picked up a day-shift at the ER. He wasn’t happy about that. I’ve only been working part time since the incident, considering the immense trauma and court dates—part time was all I could handle. Now the waters are settling, so it’s not super suspicious of me to take an extra shift with a clearer focus.
“So you keep her occupied, and I’ll be as quick as I can,” Brooks says.
I nod along. “We’ve got this. For Lake.”
Once Dom was out of the hospital and transported to jail, he was only there for a few days before he agreed to a plea deal. In twenty years, he’ll have the possibility of parole, but he had to explain the truth in exchange. It’s exactly how my friends, my husband, and I pieced it together.
He was threatening Mancini, waving a gun in his face, and demanding money. He knew Mancini had the money, so his refusal to pay up made Dom angry and careless. When the argument escalated, Dom fired on accident, right into Mancini’s wrist.
Eddie Mancini tried to run for his life, but Dom panicked and shot again into the back of Mancini’s head. My sister didn’t know. She was heading to visit Dom, and he acted like everything was fine as he lured her to room 106. He used her shock and fear to manipulate her.
Delilah and Mancini’s shirts were used to tie around Mancini’s head. It absorbed most of the blood. She loved Dom, so they bickered outside about what to do, and Delilah’s the one who suggested Mexico. In his hysteria, Dom agreed.
Brooks grumbles to himself as we turn onto a gravel road. He spots me glancing at him from the corner of my eye and sighs. “For my brother,” he repeats.
I pat Brooks on the shoulder. “I promise it’ll go smoother than you’re picturing.”
What also went smoothly is the careful plan my sister constructed. My ID was left in the room on purpose. She had also stolen my car to see Dom, and she suggested they used my car to dispose of Mancini. In whatever high state she was in, she had a brilliant idea to cut strands of hair and left them with the bloody clothes.
Then my future husband crawled into the backseat of my car—unaware of the body in the trunk—he got high, fell unconscious from the amount Delilah gave him, and that’s when Mancini was buried deep in a forest.
They rented a room in a different motel. The plan was to execute the final details before they fled, like returning my car without me noticing it was gone. But while Dom was orchestrating how he’d continue life as a dealer in Mexico, my sister brought people into the motel room. Strangers. Everyone was getting high together, and Delilah overdosed. The stress and drugs weren’t a pleasant mix.
Mancini’s death was not an accident, nor was almost killing my husband, but Delilah’s death was unintended.
Caleb also didn’t die from that bullet Lake fired. He is paralyzed from the waist down, but luckily for him, that reduced his sentence, and he’s not expected to stay paralyzed forever.
It’s been a month since they were convicted for some of their crimes. Investigators are still discovering the scale of damage their drug ring inflicted around Boston, but all the crimes committed between Mancini and under my roof are finally settled.
Lake testified in court. I watched it online and Brooks was struggling not to cheer in the crowd. I didn’t watch long enough to hear my
testimony, though. It was put through with evidence, but I wasn’t comfortable seeing Dom or Caleb again.
That’s my life’s puzzle. The big mystery was explained in nothing but a few paragraphs from Dom’s plea statement, but there’s still one puzzle piece Brooks and I need to handle.
Brooks drives over flat grass, stopping across the way from Lake’s supposed childhood home. The grass surrounding the trailer looks like hay. Yellow and straw-like. It’s similar to my hair after I tried to dye it copper when I was sixteen.
The actual trailer itself has a rim of mold along the bottom of its withered walls. It has a white aluminum door that’s rusted except for a few spots. The exterior is decaying. I can’t imagine how the inside looks.
“Sure you’re ready for this?” Brooks turns off his car, dropping his arms next to him.
I nod and smile. “Oh yeah, I’m ready.”
We hop out of the SUV and Brooks charges a few steps in front of me. He doesn’t even bother knocking on the door. In all fairness, Lake’s father never bothered to pick on someone his own size.
We’re not planning to be reasonable today. That’s obvious as Brooks kicks his foot at the bottom of the door, grips onto the handle and shifts it up, yanking it right open—clearly a trick he learned growing up.
“What the hell?”
I hear his mother’s voice for the first and likely last time. I will never hear this woman over thanksgiving dinner. She won’t be seen at any important events in my husband’s life. She will not exist in our histories, especially not Lake’s, ever again.
Her husband isn’t a nice man, but he never went beyond yelling at her. Yet, she watched and blamed her kids for being abused. Then she played the victim every chance she got. She’d look at their toothless, wonder-filled smiles, only to stick with their abuser, anyway.
I enter the trailer, and the first thing I see is her rising from the couch. She’s shorter than me. Lake gets his wavy brown hair from her. I meet her wide eyes, and I see the blue color she didn’t give to her son.
“Hey Ma.” Brooks says, but he gets ignored.
I’m taken aback by everything surrounding her. There’s a torn up pair of leggings on the coffee table that’s used as a band, yellow stained walls, and holes in the couch. There are holes in every surface I study, and trash lingers everywhere. The mess from Lake’s break in, including the broken dining table, is still here. Months later.
I learned all the details of Lake’s last visit. He confessed it to Brooks and me. So, one night, I gave Lake a bunch of sweets and waited for his sugar crash. Once he fell asleep, I called Brooks, and we conspired the same way we used to in Boston Hope.
That’s why we’re here.
I whisper to Brooks, “is this why Lake’s such a clean-freak?”
He laughs. “Yeah. Definitely.”
Mrs. Phoenix throws her arms in different directions. “Brooks! What the hell are you doing here? Who is this woman? Get her out of my house!”
“Hi Ma, nice to see you too!” Brooks waves. “We’re here to grab anything that belongs to Lake and me, and River.”
The woman flicks on like a light. Her voice snaps from confusion into one of sorrow. She scrunches up her face, pretending to cry and trying to force tears out of her eyes.
And I can’t say why, but that makes me furious. “What are you doing?” I question, stepping over empty beer cans, containers, and clothes.
Her eyebrows fall. “Who the hell are you?”
“I’m Lake’s wife.”
Brooks giggles from behind me. Then he passes by, exploring the ruined kitchen and filtering through the debris. He goes unnoticed by his mother. She’s just staring at me with her jaw on the ground.
She brings her jaw back upward and says, “Lake! Where is he? Bring him inside. I haven’t seen him in forever.”
From my understanding, Lake was always the child that was easiest to manipulate. Brooks’ father got custody of him at an early age, so he ended up with a better education. River grew out of being manipulated, but Lake had too much empathy for his mother, and a bundle of hatred for his father. He was always their primary target.
She hears Brooks’ rummaging and spins, finally acknowledging him. “I will get my husband here! You’re not taking crap, Brooks!”
“Why do you need things that belong to your children?” I cut in, attempting to keep her attention on me.
She scrunches up her face again, putting on her sob voice. “They’re my children!”
I cross my arms over my chest and squish my lips together. I peer around the living area of the trailer. Meanwhile, Brooks wanders and disappears behind a door.
My job during this plan is to keep her distracted. Lake’s father spends his weekend evenings at a bar. We have some time until he returns home, but if Mrs. Phoenix calls him back early, it could end in violence. Violence will bring Lake here to make up for it, so we can’t have any violence.
She reaches for her phone, so I speak. “I don’t see anything about the boys or River anywhere. Not a single photo, award, art or craft.”
Her mouth spasms around, but no words come out.
“Why isn’t there a single thing of them?” I lean forward and lower my voice. “Since you love them so much.”
Nothing. She doesn’t utter a word, because this woman doesn’t love her children. It’s a complicated, twisted story, but regardless of what she named them, she never intended to have them. She never wanted them. She knows she’s a rotten person who’s trying to pretend to she’s good.
“I think your husband wants nothing of them, does he?”
She exhales, piercing me with beady eyes. “That’s not true!”
“Oh, it isn’t? I thought he was the one who constantly reminded your children that they were mistakes.” I squint and tilt my head. “And that the two of you only used them for government checks.”
I point to the coffee table, littered with needles, baggies, and loose papers. “So you could get high.”
She breaks her eyes away from me, looking at the ten-year prison sentence sprawled across her table. She pushes her matted hair out of her face, draws back her palm and watches it jitter.
Brooks is whistling, dragging and throwing stuff around in whatever room he is. He’s calm and unbothered, but when there’s a loud crash, Mrs. Phoenix snaps out of it.
She grabs onto her phone and fires off a message before I can draw her attention back to me. She smirks, like her husband is some hero, about to save the day.
We stay in a staring contest, and I call for Brooks without blinking. “Brooks!”
“They were never meant to be here,” she snarls. “Sometimes children need to endure for the sake of family.”
“This was never a family.” The heaviness from the shock I feel takes hold of me and weighs on my folded arms, so I let them fall back to my sides. “What you put them through was abuse.”
Her painfully decaying teeth grind tighter. “I endured for my father—”
“I’m sorry you lost yourself to these generational curses.” My tone softens along with the rest of my posture. “I hope you find peace in knowing all this hurt ends with your children.”
Mrs. Phoenix suddenly charges at me. Her hand stretches back to slap me, but I grab her by her wrist mid-swing, and my nails dig into her skin.
She screams, “burn in hell, you bitch!”
I don’t say another word because Brooks strides back into the living room, two containers in hand. “I filled these with everything I could find.”
I watch this poor woman break her neck sideways. She lunges at Brooks, her son, like a demon just possessed her, but he maneuvers out of her grasp.
“Give it back, you brat!” she hisses.
“You deserve nothing of us, Ma.” Brooks sighs, holding the containers steadily in his palms. “You sat on the sidelines because whatever you were snorting and that man-child you’ve been sucking was more important than your children.”
The last bit comes out angry and broken. I wish Brooks could get out more of what he’s bottled, but we only have a few minutes until Lake’s dad busts in. The bar he usually goes to is only down the road. It’s time to go.
His voice cracks. “You’re not a mother, and you never were. You’re a fraud, dragging that title through the mud.”
Mrs. Phoenix doesn’t force more crocodile tears. She turns off her facade, and I catch a piece of a woman I haven’t seen this entire encounter. Her shoulders fall, and she gives her son a look that radiates a broken compassion.
“Brooks—” I exhale. “We need to go.”
Addiction isn’t a simple thing. Being a mother isn’t an easy thing. Especially not in a relationship with a psycho, but Mrs. Phoenix never tried. All she did was offer false hope and mental torture. It is not all her fault, but it was all hers to change, and her lack of change will not hinder her children from staying stagnant with her.
It is stopping here.
I take a container from Brooks’ arms, returning to the messed up front door.
Brooks, with genuine tears in his eyes, takes a moment to view his mother and his early childhood home.
He cut her off years ago. He attempted normal conversation for a few months, but it proved impossible with her. There was no choice but to leave, but for the sake of his brother, Brooks’ eyes are capturing everything again, facing the pain, and I’m proud of him. He didn’t turn to addiction, but that doesn’t lessen the trauma he holds, too.
He spins on his heels, meeting me.
“Brooks, no!” Mrs. Phoenix hollers. “Don’t leave. I won’t ask for money again!”
“Ma, you might wanna clean up the meth lab in the kids’ room.” Brooks mutters, not looking back as he pops open the door. “Wouldn’t want the cops finding out.”
***
I find Lake in his room. He’s packing up his clothes. All in his own style, and I’m glad that question is answered. Lake loves his cargo pants paired with a muted-color crewneck.
“Lake.” I smile. “Almost ready? Brooks is waiting outside.”
He raises an eyebrow high on his forehead, and it disappears under his waves. “We’re moving out, Angel, not in. What’s with the containers?”
He looks so handsome. His hair has gotten longer and thicker. Thanks to his sobriety, every part of his body is much healthier. His muscles are fuller, and his growing brain is preparing to complete his last couple of college credits, because he doesn’t want to be a nepo baby. His words.
My favorite part of it all, he’s gotten more tattoos. He copied my breathe tattoo to match the one on my wrist, and he got a second one his shoulder. It’s an anchor with an S tied through it, and a blazing sun behind it. I didn’t know it was to represent me until he told me.
In half a year, my husband became himself.
I can’t curb my excitement. “We got everything.”
Just one second of eye contact, and he understands my meaning. He leaves his box of clothes on the bed and steps toward me with wide eyes. He grabs the top package, dropping onto his knees and opening it like it’s Christmas.
I cover my face with my palm as his hands gravitate towards the picture on the top, a picture of River. Her first ever school photo in kindergarten.
He reaches up his arm and grabs onto me. “Serenity.”
“Are you okay?” I lower the second container and sink next to him.
I let him scoop me closer. He turns his head so I can see his face. His eyes are bright with honey, that honey fills his waterline in a transparent form. He doesn’t respond, but I know he’s alright.
The honey falls from his eyes, and he returns his attention to the photo.
Instead of burn marks, her photo is covered in gentle teardrops. River smiles with chubby cheeks, her eyes are scrunching at the corners, and her nose scrunches too. We’ll take care of all her photos. I’ll make sure Lake displays as many as he wants.
“Honey, I have something else for you.” I open the top of the second container, and my hand is shaking as I pick them up. “Brooks wanted you to have these.”
His eyes turn to pure gold, a burst of hope pulsing through him. He’s right to be hopeful.
It’s a month before he’s meant to get them, but Lake’s sobriety, working full time, and his plans to finish college—Brooks managed. The lawyer finally accepted it as enough.
He takes the bundle of letters out of my hands. “I’m gonna have a heart attack.”
“Don’t you dare, Phoenix.” I break out laughing and drop my head on his shoulder. “You’ll need to see me dance again.”
He rests his head on mine. “I wouldn’t mind that.”
We slip into silence with nothing but oxygen passing through.
Lake is grasping the letters, not opening a single one. He’s just grazing over his titled name, in her handwriting. His leg bounces against the floor, rocking the both of us, and making a gentle smile spread across my face.
“Lake, she’d be so proud of you,” I say. “And now everything she wanted to tell you, it’s all yours.” I travel my finger through his waves, nudging them away from his face. It’s a peaceful attempt to soothe him, but I seal my effort with a kiss on his cheek.
Then he whispers, “Angel, read them with me.”