Me.
I push that thought away and carry the box up to the second floor, shifting it onto my hip as I reach up to pull down the attic stairs.
As they thump onto the carpet hallway, heat rolls down from the attic, and I grimace but start climbing up anyway.
The heat and humidity are a physical thing, a crushing weight as I flail around for the light switch that turns on a bare bulb overhead.
I hardly ever come up here anymore. I look around, taking in the broken deck chairs, the covered pieces of Grammy’s old furniture from the ’70s, a giant console stereo with a turntable, extra sandbags, all the flotsam and jetsam of a building that’s both a business and a family home.
I let the box thump to my feet, sending up a cloud of dust, and even though it’s hot as hell and I’m sweating everywhere a person can sweat, I sit down and start digging through the box yet again.
This time, though, I’m not looking for anything about Lo.
I’m looking for Landon.
And holy shit, do I find him.
Looking at this collection now, knowing what I know, I understand why there’s nothing really about the trial, or even the investigation.
This was never meant to be a record of Gloria Bailey—Mom’s old friend who became infamous overnight and who,possibly, committed murder.
No. Instead, it’s a memorial to a man she loved—and lost.
I see it now, in the creases of every glossy magazine page thathas Landon’s face on it. I see it in the way the articles aren’t just about him, but about his family. His wife, his father.
And yes, his sister, Camile. Her engagement announcement is buried toward the bottom of the box, something I’d overlooked the first time I’d gone through it because a small column of newsprint with no pictures didn’t warrant a second glance.
I now see what August, with his keen and skeptical journalist’s eye, must have seen when he reviewed everything my mother had saved, and it breaks my fucking heart.
Somehow, even with the picture of Camile, even with the “L” bracelet on Mom’s wrist, I still wanted to believe it couldn’t be possible.
Yet it is, the truth so undeniable that it’s now slapping me in the face. Landon and my mother slept together. And Landon is my father.
But why did she hold on to all of this, for her entire life? Given the pains she went to in getting her affairs in order after she received her diagnosis, why didn’t she destroy the box and its damning contents? Was she saving it for me to discover one day?
Was that what this was all about?
I wipe sweat from my forehead with the hem of my T-shirt, then paw through the box all over again, like I’m missing something, like there will be some hidden message from Mom explaining everything, or a hidden diary that I somehow missed but was tucked inside a glossy magazine all along.
Of course there isn’t. Of course it’s just the same magazine pages as always, but then something catches my eye.
It’s a black-and-white shot of Landon standing by a lake, majestic mountains rising in the distance. He’s wearing a short-sleeved button-down and aviator sunglasses, his grin wide as heposes with his hands in his back pockets, one foot resting on a rock in front of him.
I get it, looking at that picture, why my mom and Lo both would’ve gone so crazy for this guy. He’s good-looking, sure, but it’s more than that. He radiates a kind of confidence and ease that would draw anyone in, and his smile looks so… kind. It’s a good smile.
It’s my smile.
And then I see the caption beneath the photo.
Fitzroy in 1976, while studying in Geneva, Switzerland.
My name has always been a bit of a weird one, even in the South, where people are routinely named things like Hilliard or Sterling. I asked Dad where they got it from once, and he said he thought Mom had read it in a book. But when I asked her, she said,A friend of mine said Lake Geneva was the prettiest place he’d ever seen, and I thought it was the prettiestnameI’d ever heard.
I think back on that moment now, trying to remember it clearly, trying to visualize Mom’s face as she uttered those words. I know that whatever my brain is conjuring—a wistfulness in her tone, a dreamy look into the middle distance—is just my imagination, not an actual memory.
But if I needed any more proof, this does it for me.
By the time I come down from the attic, I’m sweaty and red, my eyes stinging from the crying jag I had as I slid the box on top of an old chifforobe up there, the highest place I could find, just in case.
