Chapter 3
The first time I drove past my childhood home, I didn’t even slow down.
The second time, I pulled to the curb and sat for several minutes, staring through the windshield.
After that, it became a habit.
Whenever life felt too quiet or my mother’s final words became too loud, I drove to the House on Forgotten Hill.
Sometimes I even imagined myself stepping inside again.
I pictured the bedroom where I’d been the night the police officers arrived, the kitchen where my mother once made scrambled eggs, and my father’s office upstairs.
I wondered whether being inside the house again might help me remember the things I had forgotten, and there were days I envisioned going up to the front door, explaining who I was and what the house meant to me, hoping they’d allow me to come in and look around the place.
Something about driving by the house from time to time helped ease my pain, to stop feeling lost and numb all the time. And although it didn’t feel like I was getting a part of myself back yet, it felt like a new part of me was rising in its place.
Several months passed and then one afternoon, as I drove up the hill, I saw something that made me smile for the first time in a long while.
A sign stood in the front yard.
FOR SALE.
I jerked to a stop in front of the house and just stared at it.
Then I reached for my phone and searched the address.
The listing had been posted that morning.
There were twenty-three photographs. As I studied every one of them from the driver’s seat, I noticed the kitchen had been remodeled, and the old cabinets were gone, replaced with white ones and dark countertops.
The living room walls were painted pale gray, and my father’s office had been turned into a guest bedroom.
But the staircase was the same.
So was the dining room window.
And in the backyard, the oak tree still stood.
By the time I finished looking through the photographs, I had already made up my mind. I called the agent listed beneath the property, and she answered on the third ring.
“I’d like to see the house on Forgotten … I mean the house on Mulberry Street,” I said.
“Of course. When were you thinking?”
“As soon as possible.”
She hesitated. “I could meet you there this evening.”
I toured the house four hours later.
Walking through the front door felt like stepping back in time, and I smiled, taking it all in.
The rooms were smaller than I remembered, but as I walked through them, memories began to surface.
The sound of my parents’ laughter rang in my ears as I pictured them sitting together on the couch in the living room or cleaning the kitchen after dinner.
There had once been so much love here.
Love that had been stolen from my mother and me.
Years of my father’s life we could never get back.
When I entered my old bedroom, I stopped in the doorway. The walls had been painted white, and there was carpet instead of hardwood, the window still overlooking the same section of the backyard. I walked toward it and rested my hand against the glass.
I was home at long last.
Turning toward the agent, I said, “I want to make an offer.”
“You haven’t even seen the basement yet.”
“I’ve seen enough.”
I offered the asking price that evening, and two days later, the sellers accepted. Six weeks after that, I moved into the House on Forgotten Hill, only now it no longer seemed forgotten.
The first night, I slept on a mattress in my old bedroom, surrounded by boxes and unfamiliar silence. I expected the house to feel strange given the changes that had been made over the years, but it didn’t.
It felt as though it had been waiting for me.
A few days later, I drove to the storage unit where I had placed everything from my mother’s house. Most of the boxes were labeled in her handwriting. I had avoided going through them after her death because at the time, it felt too painful.
Now they seemed like the only place to begin. If my father had been murdered, there had to be a reason my mother believed it. Somewhere amongst my mother’s belongings, I was certain the truth had been waiting for me all along.