“Dad told me he saw you that night,” he said, shaking his head. “All this time, I thought it was you, but I couldn’t turn you in without turning us in, too.”
I think of him slinking back at the vigil; the hatred in his eyes as he found me sitting on his porch. He thought I was a murderer. He thought I murdered my own child and his father was the only person on earth who could prove it. He must have been racked with guilt, watching me get away with it every single day and knowing that he and he alone could bring me to justice—but in the end, he chose family, protecting himself and his father through silence and lies.
And then there’s my own family, too: My parents, who have since reached back out in an attempt to mend the brokenness between us. My mother, and the quiet guilt she constantly carries; my father, and the shame he feels for failing us so badly. They had already lost two daughters, after all. They didn’t want to lose a third. It’ll take time, I know, getting to know one another again—forgiving them for everything they did and didn’t do—but at least it’s out in the opennow: Margaret and Ellie and the terrible things that happened in that house.
The memories that none of us wanted to remember—but, now that I do, will be impossible to forget.
I remove my headphones and watch as Waylon flips the switch, turning the green light off. It’ll be out into the world soon, our story, pulsing through the ears of others—and then it’ll be true. It’ll be true because they’ll believe it to be, bending the facts to fit their feelings. Finding fragments of truth in all the wrong places. Forcing them together to reveal a picture that was never even there in the first place.
“You feel good?” Waylon asks, wrapping the cords around his wrist and nestling them back into the case. “About all of this?”
I glance outside, the setting sun casting an orange light across the sky. Just three weeks ago, the sunset used to signal the start of something—the start of another long, lonely stretch of night—but now it feels like the end. The end of a nightmare that I’ve finally managed from wake up from.
“Yeah,” I say, nodding. “Yeah, I do.”
“Everything you did,” he says, “it was worth it.”
I smile before walking Waylon to the door, opening it wide as we say our goodbyes. Once he’s gone, I turn back around and take in the renewed silence of my house: Roscoe on the floor, napping quietly, dusk streaming through the windows as dinner warms on the stove. I peer into my dining room, thinking about all those names and pictures and article clippings that I’ve since torn down; all the conferences and calls to Dozier. The leads I chased blindly in the dark.
That comment that had appeared and vanished again.
He’s in a better place.
That’s how it all ended: that comment. Even after it was deleted, they were still able to trace it—and it brought them not to Valerie’s place, but to Abigail Fisher’s, a nondescript little rental she had moved into halfway across the country. And that’s where they found her,waiting, almost like she was relieved to get caught: sitting in a little nursery set up with toys and dinosaurs and piles of books.
All the things a child would need to be happy, healthy. Loved.
I still think about how it must have been for her: a childless woman just trying to grieve and move on—but she couldn’t. She couldn’t move on. Instead, she held on to it, refusing to let it go, pushing it around and around until Valerie approached her one night, late, and told her a story.
A story about a boy with an unfit mother. A boy who would be better off with somebody else.
In a way, I understand it. I really do. Nothing about grief makes sense: the things it has us do, the lies it leads us to believe. Valerie simply told her what she wanted to hear, and she let herself believe it—that it was for the best, foreverybody—so she swallowed her guilt and her fear as she met her that night, late, fingers digging into Mason’s little body as he was passed between them in the dark, his stuffed dinosaur slipping from his grip and getting stuck in the mud.
Then she strapped him into her car seat and took off fast, disappearing into the night.
I walk down the hall now, toward Mason’s nursery, and approach the door that I’ve always kept closed. I touch my hand to the knob the way I’ve done so many times before—too afraid to twist it, to peer inside, to catch a glimpse of everything I had lost—but now I do. I open it gently. I let myself look. And there he is, just as I’ve imagined it so many times before: There’s Mason, sitting up in his bed, cracking that toothy little smile when he sees me. He’s holding that same stuffed toy, the mud cleaned off before being removed from evidence and returned back to us, a gentle reminder of the life with me I know he’s probably forgotten.
He was gone for an entire year, after all. An entire year that I will never get back.
And that could have been the end of it: Abigail Fisher driving fast down the interstate, moving them both into a new home. A new life.Mason growing up with another mother, his young memory erasing me completely, little glimpses coming to him only as a foggy dream, a distant echo. Something fractured and broken and warped with time. He might have been happy, even, whatever story Abigail told him planting roots and turning true—until she started seeing me in the news each day, begging for him back. Until the doubts had crept in, forcing her to come to my talks and listen to me speak. Until she started seeing me not as the monster Valerie had made me out to be but as a heartsick mother desperate for her child—so she memorized my speech and cried as I told it, knowing she had made a mistake, but still, trying to convince herself that the story had been true. That she did what was right.
That he was in a better place.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
If you haven’t made it to the end of the story yet,I ask that you stop reading this now and finish first—what comes next will surely spoil everything.
Before this book existed on paper and it was still just an idea in my head, the idea was basically this: What would it feel like to be trapped inside the mind of a sleep-deprived mother who, deep down, believed that the disappearance of her child was somehow her fault? When I started wonderingwhyshe would believe that, it hit me like a truck: It’s because mothers—and, honestly, women in general—are conditioned from birth to feel guilty about something. Wealwaysthink things are our fault. We always feel the need to apologize: For being too much or too little. Too loud or too quiet. Too driven or too content.
For wanting children more than anything or for not even wanting them at all.
I won’t lie to you: I was afraid to write a book about motherhood without first being a mother myself. I make some strong statements in this novel, and I was worried about making those statements without coming from a place of personal experience. There are many thingsabout motherhood that I simply cannot understand, and in those instances, I relied heavily on research, as well as speaking to friends and family members whoaremothers to help me sort through it all. And while I acknowledge that there are certain emotions and experiences that I cannot fully appreciate yet, I also believe that every woman can understand the unspoken expectations of it: theweightof motherhood that seems to be ever-present throughout our entire lives from the very moment we’re given our first doll. Not only that, but because of the judgment that emanates from others once we make a decision of our own, oftentimes, we feel like we can’t even talk about it.
We feel completely alone in an experience that’s shared by so many.
When I came to that realization, I just wanted to stuff this book full of different types of women: flawed, complicated, messy women who will surely draw scorn for their various decisions—but really, that’s the point. Isabelle is, in many ways, my attempt at showcasing the damage societal pressures and expectations can have on a single person. Is she the perfect mother? No. And does she make mistakes? Yes. She struggles, as do all mothers, and feels extreme guilt over thoughts and emotions that she doesn’t even know are normal—but howcouldshe know if nobody ever talks about it? Despite it all, though, she loves her son fiercely—however, that love will never be enough to save her in the court of public opinion…or even in her own mind, for that matter, so accustomed is she to absorbing everyone else’s blame.
When it comes to Isabelle’s mother, I tried to tread lightly and respectfully on a topic so fragile. I did a lot of research on postpartum psychosis, and the character of Elizabeth was informed, in large part, by Andrea Yates. The more I read about her, the more her actions shifted in my mind from horrifying to heartbreaking: She was a mother at the end of her mental rope. She asked for help, never received it, and was villainized for what happened as a result. Of course, what she did was both tragic and terrifying—but at the sametime, it could have been avoided, too, if only the mental health of mothers wasn’t something we so easily shrugged off or pretended not to notice. The same can be said for Elizabeth.