“You’ll text me?” Marin pressed.
“Later. I can’t think right now. Please just go.”
“Charlotte ...” The slightest pleading note entered Marin’s voice now, as if she’d realized Charlotte’s panic was about more than her dad finding out she had a girlfriend on the same day he found out his wife was dead.
As if she’d realized Charlotte was spinning out, questioningeverything. The urge to run was so strong, but she couldn’t ... not yet, not until she’d seen her dad.
“Please go.” Charlotte’s voice broke.
“I’m going.” Marin’s voice was heartbreakingly soft, gentle. “But it feels like you’re pushing me away, like youalwayspush me away when you’re upset about something. This isn’t how two people in love handle a crisis. We should be leaning on each other right now.”
That made sense. It did. In the tiny part of Charlotte’s brain still processing rational thought, she could see Marin’s point. But Charlotte had always handled difficult things alone. It was the only way she knew how. Right now, talking was justtoo hard.
She turned away. “And I’m telling you I need space.”
A few seconds later, she heard the car start, and she watched through her tears as Marin drove away.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“In some ways, it’s a relief.”
It had been two days. Two days since Charlotte had learned her mom was dead. The sheriff’s department had been able to track down her dental records, confirming that the remains in the car were Terri Danton. Charlotte and her dad had spent a lot of time together, grieving.
She’d spent even more time falling apart on her own. Charlotte had come to Vermont to find her mom, and she’d done that, but in the process, she seemed to have lost herself. What was she supposed to do now? What came next? She felt as if she’d come untethered.
Marin had sent so many texts, checking on her, and Charlotte had ignored them all. She wasn’t handling this well. She knew she wasn’t, and yet she couldn’t seem to do better. She just wanted to be alone. Instead, she was propped at her kitchen table, sitting across from her dad.
“A relief?” she repeated, staring vacantly into her coffee.
He sipped from his own coffee. “In the sense that we finally know what happened. Now we can lay her to rest. For me, that’s a relief.”
“I guess.” She knew what he meant, even if she didn’t like to admit it. Itwasa relief to have answers. To know her mom hadn’t abandoned her. But she couldn’t say it was a relief to learn that her mother was dead.
Truthfully, though, deep down she’d always believed her mom was gone. It wasn’t until her conversation with Bev that she’d seriously started to consider that her mom was still alive, living her life somewhere without Charlotte. And now, Charlotte had to consider that maybe she didn’t know who she was without the search that had defined so much of her life.
The urge to flee was overwhelming, but at the same time, she felt rooted here in Middleton in a way she’d never felt in the other places she’d lived as an adult. All her life, Charlotte had been looking ahead toward the next move, the next step in her journey. Now she had no idea what to do with herself.
“I can’t help wondering . . .”
Charlotte looked up, her heart clenching as she saw the tears in her dad’s eyes. “Wondering what?”
“If your mom and I had been more open with each other, would she have felt she could tell me where she was going that weekend? Might I have been with her in the car? If I’d been there, maybe I could have saved her. I could have saved us all this anguish, all the years of not knowing. You’d still have your mom.”
“The not knowing ruined my childhood.” Charlotte pressed a fist against the tabletop as tears ran down her cheeks. “The rumors at school, the things the other kids said about her, about you, aboutme. It was hell, Dad.”
“I know.” He rubbed his brow, his expression full of the same anguish she felt. “I heard the whispers from students in my classes. I saw the accusations in their eyes. People looked at me like I was a murderer.”
Charlotte didn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry too.” He stood and pulled her into his arms. “I feel like such a failure when I think about what you went through as a child and how I wasn’t there for you when you needed me. I was hurting, too, but that’s no excuse.”
“I was angry at you for so long.” She clenched her fingers in his shirt, furious and heartbroken and desperately needing the comfort of her father. “She disappeared, but you left me, too, even though you still lived in the same house.”
“I did a terrible job of managing my grief, and I’m so sorry. Now that you’re back in my life, I want to be a father to you, the way I should have been back then. I want to try ... if it’s not too late?”
“I want that too,” she whispered. “I just ... I don’t know how.” All her happy family memories felt like they were from another lifetime. She’d been on her own for so long ...
“I’d like to keep doing what we’ve been doing the last few months,” he said. “We’ve done a pretty good job of getting to know each other again, but maybe now it’s time to get more involved in each other’s lives than just meeting for lunch once a week.”
