For a moment June said nothing, then she put her hand on the car door handle. “I need a minute. I won’t break any other rules, I promise.” She opened the door, got out of the car, and began walking toward the edge of the ruin.
Nicky asked when they were leaving.
“Very soon, hon,” Melanie said.
The two women watched in silence as June stood at the rim of the remains of Elwood’s house. Watched as she gazed at the three rosebushes beyond that were boldly extending their branches to the sun.
June looked old and worn and defeated, standing there with her back to them.
But no time machine in the world could have prevented this,Melanie thought.Not this. You can’t go back in time and stop a fire from coming.
Honestly, whatcoulda person actually stop from happening?
Even the strongest of hopes were still as delicate as paper outside the confines of the heart. Choosing to do something differently if she could crawl inside a time machine still meant she’d have to wait to see if messing with the past had been worth it.
And what would happen to the lessons learned from a past she’d erased? Would she get to keep them? Would she be willing to lose them if she couldn’t?
If she could go back to the moment she agreed to become more than Carson’s costar and decline to do so, would she find herself just wishing for another time machine somewhere farther down the road?
Would the rest of her life just be one constant stretch of regrets and disastrous attempts at do-overs?
What was the good in that? A time machine would be a portal to hell if that’s what would happen.
Which meant…the past had to amount to more than just the spent years of that one life each person gets. Something weightier.
Maybe the past’s allure wasn’t that it could be changed if time machines were real but that it begged to be remembered. Maybe it was the ability to hold on to all those years—to remember where she’d been, the choices she’d made, the paths she’d chosen—that made the future something she was capable of stepping into.
Maybe it was the only thing that did.
“Do you think June will be all right?” Eva asked, as though reading Melanie’s thoughts.
“I don’t know. I guess that depends on her.”
“Melanie?” Eva asked a moment later. “Would you mind very much taking me to Yvonne’s after this?”
Melanie swung her head around from the front seat to face Eva. “What for?”
“I don’t want to live like this. Like she has been living. Is still living.” Eva nodded toward June. “She lives now with the fear of being discovered, every day. I have, too, for so many years. I do not want to live that way anymore. I don’t want to live afraid. I want to talk to those men. If I must face what I have done to not be afraid anymore, then I will.”
Melanie regarded her. “If you’re sure.”
“I am sure.”
29
Eva spent the forty minutes heading back into LA preparing her heart and mind to meet head-on what would come next.
If Ernst’s remains had been discovered in ragged woods rather than at the bottom of a lake, the authorities would reopen his case file. Of course they would. They would probably see his crushed skull and have no trouble redefining Ernst Geller’s death as a probable homicide.
A homicide meant there was a killer.
Someone with a motive to kill.
Ernst Geller had been a wealthy man. And who benefitted most from a wealthy man’s death? His surviving spouse.
Louise.
They’d be at her door, ready to arrest at the slightest discrepancy in her recalled events of that day Ernst failed to come home.
