Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
Elena was left in the room alone to unlock the box and remove its contents.
Inside were three envelopes: one addressed to Rosa’s husband, one addressed to baby Carmen, and another addressed to The Millbrook Gazette.
Elena shook violently. Unsure how to proceed, she carefully placed the envelopes into her bag, relocked the safety deposit box, and returned the key.
Walking swiftly from the post office, she felt exposed and strange, carrying such vital documents.
She decided to go to the newsroom, which she knew would be bustling in preparation for the big-time Sunday paper. She could disappear into the chaos.
Elena hurried to her office, locked the door behind her (perhaps foolishly), and used a letter opener to remove the documents addressed to The Millbrook Gazette.
The envelope contained a short note from Rosa Tompkins.
My beloved paper,
I’ve spent the better part of three years uncovering a massive scandal at the heart of Millbrook and our surrounding counties.
Unfortunately, I’m in too deep. I discovered that several people I love and care about, several people who are responsible for making Millbrook what it is today, are also responsible for said corruption.
Find in this envelope proof of everything I’ve discovered, as well as additional evidence that the houses on Cranberry Cove were built without proper permits and illegally.
Please forgive me for my disappearance. I am frightened for my family. I am frightened for myself.
Yours, Rosa Tompkins
Elena read and reread the letter, then tore through Rosa’s research: paperwork, photographs, contracts, and additional letters, all of which proved what Natalie had proven in Connersville.
Millbrook had been and presumably still was a rat’s nest of corruption.
Money was exchanged on all levels to ensure that heads turned the other way when needed.
Her grandmother’s journalistic work was impeccable and sleek.
But, if what Rosa said was true, the very work she’d treasured had been instrumental in her downfall.
Please forgive me for my disappearance, she’d written.
Did that mean that someone from Cranberry Cove had chased her out of town?
Threatened her in some way? Elena’s thoughts ran in circles.
Eventually, she ran to get Natalie for a second opinion. When Natalie looked through everything, she burst into tears. “She was a brilliant journalist!” she cried. “But she wasn’t strong enough to face them.”
“But why would she join them?” Elena asked, at a loss.
Natalie fiddled with the two other envelopes, one addressed to Carmen, the other to Elena’s grandfather. “Maybe these will answer your questions?”
But Elena was frightened to open envelopes that didn’t belong to her.
“I’ll take them to my mother,” she said, because it was all she could think to do.
She hoped Carmen was up for it —up for reading something so emotionally taxing.
There was no telling these days. Sometimes she was up, and sometimes she was down.
Elena walked back home through the frigid wind, crunching through newly fallen snow. She felt an urgent desire to call James, but she knew he was holding a grief therapy session and couldn’t make space for her right now, no matter how much he might want to. Other people needed him.
And she could handle this herself.
Once back in her mother’s living room, she found Carmen and Jemma playing cards and laughing together.
“I win again!” Carmen cried, shimmying her shoulders.
Jemma threw up her hands. “She cheats,” she told Elena.
“I may be losing my mind, but I don’t cheat,” Carmen shot back. “I resent that.”
“She lies, too,” Jemma said, her smile widening.
Elena sat at the edge of the sofa and tried to smile back, but failed. Should she wait for Jemma to leave before explaining the letters? Weirdly, she liked the idea of Jemma being here, if only because Jemma could help calm Carmen down if things got dicey.
“Mom?” Elena began, her voice pained. “I have something for you.”
Carmen’s own smile fell. “Is it medication? I already took it.”
“No. It’s a letter.” Elena removed the first letter, addressed to Carmen, and put it on the table between Jemma and Carmen.
Carmen recognized her mother’s handwriting right away. “Where on earth did you get this?” she asked, picking it up and turning it this way, then that. She was delicate with it, as though convinced it might explode. Maybe it would. Emotionally-speaking.
Jemma’s face was drawn. She got up and motioned toward the door, suggesting she could go if she wasn’t needed. Elena felt as though she were swimming out to sea. But she nodded, agreeing with Jemma that it was probably best. Jemma donned her coat and was gone.
“I found a number for a safety deposit box in your office,” Elena said, watching as her mother came over to the sofa with the letter.
She sat, her hands shaking. “I don’t know if I want to know,” Carmen confessed. And then she added, her voice weak, “What if I forget?”
“You can read it as many times as you want to,” Elena assured.
Carmen allowed tears to fall, but tore open the envelope and removed the letter within.
Elena watched her mother intently as she read her first direct contact from her mother, sixty-five years after she’d first written it.
Elena burned to know why she’d always told Elena that Grandma Rosa had died, why she’d carried that story for so long.
Had she let herself believe it as well? Had she imagined no other alternative?
When Carmen finished, she handed over the letter and bowed her head in thought. Elena read:
My darling daughter,
If you’re reading this, it means you or someone you know has discovered the safety deposit box that I’ve set aside for you, your father, and The Millbrook Gazette.
I have no way of knowing how long it will take to be opened, nor if you or your father will be willing to read my letters and fully open your hearts to what I have to say.
If I were you, I would be angry. I would be so afraid. Your mother has left you behind, and you can’t fathom a world where that’s the right thing. I would agree with you if it weren’t for the fact that it’s all happening to me.
I am in over my head.
As you know, I am a woman in journalism, a woman during an age when women don’t necessarily leave the house, or have careers, or push against the horrors that men wreak.
Three years ago, I heard about a housing project in my beloved Cranberry Cove —one that would eliminate some of the very best public grounds Millbrook has to offer.
Being a curious person and a journalist, I did some digging—and found myself up against a mountain of greed and corruption.
When I started to push against this mountain, they showed me just how awful they can be.
They’re threatening me, Carmen. They’ve told me that my life and the lives of the people closest to me are in danger if I don’t follow their rules. They’ve told me that if I don’t step away from my life in Millbrook, they will make things terrible for you and your father. They’ll destroy the paper.
More than that, if I write the piece that I truly want to write, I will destroy numerous lives here in Millbrook.
My best friend will lose her father. My colleague will lose her husband.
My cousins will lose their children, and so on.
Exposing such profound corruption will ruin the core of Millbrook as we know it. I don’t know if I’m brave enough.
I can’t tell your father what’s happening, no more than I can tell you. You’re two years old.
It pains me to think of the life of yours I’ll miss.
I pray that one day, I’ll be able to come out of hiding and see you again. I pray that you’ll find this letter in due time and that you'll find a way to find me before it’s too late.
I love you, Carmen.
Your Mother
By the time Elena finished reading, her cheeks and hair were drenched with tears. She looked up at her mother, who wore a look of mysticism. She took Elena’s hand. Elena’s voice shook as she asked, “Did you know?”
Carmen shook her head. “It was always easier to believe my mother was dead than to acknowledge that she’d run away.
But I didn’t know any of this. I couldn’t have fathomed it.
” She swallowed, her eyes on the Christmas tree.
“I knew that my mother was a brilliant thinker. I knew that she’d brought a sharp wit and intellect to The Millbrook Gazette.
I decided to build my mother a new sort of identity so that I didn’t have to fixate on the fact that she left me.
“But despite this letter, and despite what she says about the corruption in this town,” Carmen continued, “I can’t help but blame her. For not coming to find me when the time was right. For choosing everyone else and the town’s safety rather than my own.” Carmen bent her head.
Elena wrapped her arms around her mother and held her for a long time.
More than anything, she felt grateful that she and her own mother had found a way to come back together.
She wanted to believe that everything happened for a reason, but she wasn’t sure it was true.
Her time in Syria had been horrendous, heartbreaking, and lonely.
Rosa’s fight to reveal corruption in Cranberry Cove and Millbrook had been tireless and unrewarding.
Being a mother—a task that seemed at times so beautiful it made your heart hurt—could also be profoundly painful.
Sometimes, mothers weren’t meant to be mothers.
Maybe that was the case with Rosa, who’d decided to leave.
But Elena wanted her mother to know that Rosa had loved her. She wanted her mother to feel her own mother’s love, even from this great distance of sixty-plus years. “Do you feel her, Mom?” she asked, her voice a whisper.
“I’ve felt her since she left,” Carmen said.
“The same way I felt you in the Middle East. I thought of you endlessly. I worried about you every minute.” She turned and gazed into Elena’s eyes.
“I never wanted to be the kind of mother who abandoned her child. But that’s what I did, didn’t I?
” Her lips quivered. “I’m sorry, Elena. I’m so, so sorry. ”
Elena burrowed her face in her mother’s neck and inhaled her perfume, her goodness, her fabric softener, her light.
For a long time, they held each other, their heads churning with all they’d learned.
When they finally got up from the sofa, their hearts aching, they were ready for the next step—whatever it would be.