Chapter 44
TWO MONTHS LATER
The cemetery was frigid this time of year, just days before Thanksgiving, the grass around Emmy’s grave stiff with frost.
I reached down and placed the tender pink carnations against the tombstone, assuring my baby that once I was settled in the South Carolina town Mary had chosen for us, I’d have her moved near me.
It was surprisingly inexpensive to exhume a casket and relocate it.
Not that money was a problem anymore.
Annie had settled the details of my mother’s estate for me, once she returned what she’d stolen.
Saving her life, and disposing of Tim’s, which had freed her to be with Jeffrey, had prompted the change of heart and established our circle of trust.
She knew I’d keep her secret, and she’d keep mine—for a price.
Murder, after all, carries a much harsher penalty than embezzlement.
And Annie was a businesswoman through and through.
Like it or not, the lawyer and her exorbitant fees would be with me in perpetuity.
The other professionals in my life would have to go.
Dr.
Ellison and Tasha Turner knew me too well to remain my head doctors.
Mary explained it was just a matter of time until they figured out what had actually happened to the woman I’d seen in the window, and my role in it.
Even keeping connected through Zoom was out of the question.
But my mental health advocates both wished me well and recommended colleagues in the area where we were relocating.
All Mary and I had to do was call the movers and head out of town.
We’d already packed our belongings.
I’d reluctantly agreed to my neighbor’s plan, still amazed she’d want anything to do with me.
I murdered a complete stranger, I’d reminded her.
What was to stop me from killing a friend? But Mary wasn’t worried.
She’d explained she believed it was the rage against Tim deep inside me that had taken over.
She wasn’t going to do anything to incite such deep-seated fury.
I looked around the barren cemetery.
Not a living soul in sight.
The trees breaking up the endless rows of marble markers appeared as nothing more than massive sticks, adding to, instead of relieving, the starkness.
The wind whipped my hair wildly around my head and sent a chill into me that my wool coat couldn’t protect me from.
Could I do it? Walk away from the chaos I’d created and start a new life elsewhere? It was so selfish of me.
So wrong.
I’d taken a life.
Two lives, really, if you counted Tim, but I didn’t.
Mary helped me realize how much toxicity my husband had injected into our sham of a marriage.
His bargain with my mother had perpetuated the myth she’d created and carefully maintained over the years: that I was unable to make good enough choices to have a successful life on my own terms.
Knowing all I did about my mother now, I realized her choices had screwed me.
Her decision to take away my loving father—and even my memory of the event—and to one day replace him with a self-involved narcissist.
I stood and, wiping frozen grass from my knees, looked up the hill.
There was one more grave I needed to visit.
I trudged up the asphalt path, head down, careful to avoid random ice patches.
When I strolled around the bend and looked up, I saw him.
I paused, toyed with the idea of turning around.
But he saw me too.
He lifted his hand in a tentative wave.
As I plopped to my knees beside Tyler in front of Ava’s gravestone, I tried to think of something to say, but nothing came to me. I fought the urge to prostrate myself and beg her forgiveness.
“It’s her birthday,”
he said simply, explaining his presence among the stoic slabs. “It’s the least I can do for her.”
“More than I’ve done for Tim,”
I said, recalling how I’d let his parents handle the burial arrangements. I secured a funeral home to contact them and made sure I wasn’t around when they flew in from Seattle to claim their son’s body.
“How does life get so off course?”
he asked, still looking at the marker with Ava’s name and statistics spread across its surface. “She’d been suffering, and I’d only made things worse, hooking up with Jane. I’d let my loneliness replace common sense. Jane Brockton is a rather horrible person.”
I couldn’t disagree with him, but my opinion hardly mattered. I was the worst person I knew. Yet something he’d just uttered struck me.
“Suffering?”
I repeated. “How so?”
I looked at him. The woman dancing with him in Annie’s empty house seemed happy, even carefree.
“Ava was the only daughter of people with immense wealth,”
Tyler said, shrugging. “She was coddled, catered to, spoiled, even after her parents died. When she started our decor and renovating business, her brothers funded it. Even our success couldn’t temper her restlessness. The result of always getting what she wanted, I guess. She tired of me, the business, and our life together.”
He ran a hand through his hair. “She began drinking. Heavily. One night she blacked out behind the wheel and hit a driver head-on, killing her.”
My hand went to my mouth. Ava had killed someone too.
“The older woman, a retired nurse I think, died instantly, but Ava received little more than a bump and scratch on her forehead.”
Tyler looked at me for the first time, his eyes mirroring the agony I tried to blink out of mine.
“For the past four years, she couldn’t live with herself. She stopped drinking and threw everything she had into work, but human interaction was tougher. She’d let me touch her when we danced together, but that was it. Ballroom dancing was her passion and the only time I’d seen her happy these past few years. The dizzying speed and rotation of a Viennese waltz or the intricate footwork of a foxtrot took all her concentration. Let her forget everything else.”
“That’s so sad.”
I blinked the stinging moisture from my eyes away.
“She tried to kill herself—twice.”
My entire body stilled.
“She didn’t think she deserved to live?”
I asked, already knowing the answer. I had, after all, spent endless hours trying to justify my own life after my child’s ended.
“No, not after she took that woman’s life. Lilith, I think, her name was.”
“Lilith?”
My heart twisted. The only woman I’d ever known by that name had been my mother. I couldn’t breathe.
“Yes, a local woman named Lilith Messier.”
Tyler sighed, got to his feet, oblivious to my shock at hearing my maiden name cross his lips.
“Ava’s family connections got her out of jail time, but I often thought she’d have fared better if she’d had to pay for what she’d done, with her freedom. She was chained by guilt—a prison she locked herself into each and every day.”
He looked down at me. “Are you ready to go?”
I stared at him for so long as I processed the ramifications of Ava’s actions that he looked away, uncomfortable.
Spots of frozen cold pecked at my cheeks, nose, and the backs of my ungloved hands.
It was snowing.
Eventually, it would cover everything in a layer of clean, pure white, hiding all that had been before, turning the landscape into something foreign and fresh.
My mother hadn’t escaped the consequences of her actions after all.
Fate had waited patiently to exact retribution.
Things were suddenly clear. I didn’t have to go to South Carolina or eschew my mental health professionals. My place was here. I stood and began walking next to Tyler, halting after a few steps. He paused and looked at me.
“I have to go somewhere,”
I said, horror mingling with certainty in my chest. “Would you come with me?”
His face screwed into confusion. “Where to?”
“The police station.”
Tyler stared at me, saying nothing, but another voice came to me.
It’s going to be all right, Caroline.
My father’s voice, as clear as if he were standing next to me. As if I’d been hearing it daily for the past twenty years. He’d been with me all along.
I looked into the swirling flakes billowing between Tyler and me and thought about Ava’s apology as I’d watched the life bleed out of her.
She’d known who I was and why I was there.
We’d both known.
But now I’d do what she could not: confess to the life I’d stolen and pay the price with my freedom.
I couldn’t live with the same atrocious lie my mother had.
Emmy’s memory deserved more than that.
It was time to break the cycle.