I wonder what it was like for him, my father, snaking his arm across the bed to find nothing but empty space where her body should have been. Bolting upright, blinking in the dark, instinctively knowing that something was wrong. I imagine him throwing on his robe and running into the kitchen, expecting to find her there: tampering with the stove, maybe, or stalking the halls the way she sometimes did when she couldn’t sleep. Checking outside and hoping to see her standing by the marsh again, barefoot, before coming back in and leaving dirty prints on the carpet. Making the floorboards pop as she roamed around, watching us sleep.
But when he got out there, he realized what had happened.
What he hadlethappen.
He saw the three of us beneath the glow of the spring tide moon: two of us, standing, and the third, the smallest, facedown in the water, still as a piece of driftwood floating with the current.
I turn into Beaufort National Cemetery now, just as the sunrise starts to bleed across the horizon, and pull into the empty lot. The air is dewy, a permanent floral aroma from all the arrangements laid on each grave. I wind my way through the headstones—even though I haven’t been here since the day we buried Margaret, I could never forget where she is—and finally, when I reach her, I kneel down on the turf, feeling the damp seep through the knees of my jeans.
I stare at her headstone, an immaculate white marble, her name, birthday, and death day etched into the surface.
Margaret Evelyn Rhett
May 4, 1993—July 17, 1999
Next to her, there’s another one, nearly identical.
Eloise Annabelle Rhett
April 27, 1999—April 27, 1999
Two pitifully short amounts of time.
I exhale, lean back on my feet, and squeeze back a tear. Everything makes sense now: Margaret questioning me about the footprints that day on the water, her head tilted to the side.
“Is it because of what happened?”
I had started sleepwalking right after we lost Ellie, the trauma of what was going on in our house triggering something inside me that I could never understand.
Margaret understood, though. Somehow, she knew.
“We’re not supposed to talk about that.”
Because we weren’t. We never talked about anything. Even to thisday, my parents prefer secrets and silence to uncomfortable conversation. They never even mentioned it to us. They never even explained what happened; never allowed us to understand or grieve. They simply closed the door to her nursery and continued on as if everything were fine, letting my memory wash her away.
I think about how my mother couldn’t look at me the morning after Margaret died—or any daysincethat morning—and the man who came to the house and talked to her. Let her cry. The way my father had held out Mason, and the way she had just stood up, walked away, like she didn’t feel she deserved it.
Last night, as we were making dinner.
“You know I love you. You know that, right?”
My mother never hated me; she never blamed me. She hated herself. She killed Margaret, her own daughter, and she had tried to kill me. And because of that, she wouldn’t let herself near me. She wouldn’t let herself be my mother again.
I suppose I should be grateful my father got there in time—that he ran into the water and scooped Margaret into his arms, putting himself between my mother and me before she could do it again. That he had cleaned me, changed my clothes, and led me back to bed the way he had done so many times before when he found me wandering around the house at night. That he had coached me in the morning, told me exactly what to say.
That he had quit his job, gotten my mother the help that she needed—but only behind the fortressed walls of our home.
Only in secret, where nobody else could see.
It would have been the end of him, after all. Everything he and his father and his grandfather had worked toward would be gone in an instant if the world found out what my mother had done. The Rhett name would no longer be cemented in history as something regal and refined; instead, it would be synonymous with death, just like the house itself.
I think about the way Chief Montgomery had barely even pushedme that morning, like he only needed me to recite a few lines. How he and my father had huddled together after, whispered on the porch steps, crafting the perfect story: just a tragic accident. A summer drowning. The wrong side of the statistic. Deep down, the chief must have known it wasn’t true, but still, he let himself believe it. It was the story he had wanted to be real. The one that was easier to accept. And so my father had nodded, sniffed, and created an alternate reality that was just easier for everyone to swallow. Then he held on tight to his secret, his lie—not to protect me, though, but to protect my mother. Himself.
All of us.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
I stay at the cemetery until the legs of my jeans are soaked through with damp. Then I stand up, make my way back to the car, and unlock it, sliding into the driver’s seat.