“Mm-hmm,” Matilda says, and I can hear in her voice how much she’s enjoying this. She’s not a bad person, but she does love being the one to pass along anythingjuicy—frequently without considering how her news might be received. She’s not mean, she’s just careless and self-centered. “There was a note.”
If it were anyone else telling me this, I might stay quiet, assuming they were naturally going to tell me what the note said. But I know Matilda; she’s going to wait for me to ask. And I want to know badly enough that I’ll humor her.
“What did it say?” I drape my legs over the arm of the chair, still trying to find a position that’s comfortable. How does Aiden sit in this thing all the time? It has no lounging capabilities at all.
“Among other things, he said he was distraught over the death of hislifelong love.”
“His lifelong…?”
“Yes!” she squeals, so loudly that I yank the phone away from my ear. “That has to mean your mom, right?”
“What?” I say as my thoughts spin. “No. That doesn’t make sense. He was married to someone else. He hadn’t seen my mom in?—”
“How do you know?” she cuts me off. There’s a challenge in her voice, one that I don’t have the energy to deal with. “How do you know he wasn’t at least in touch with your mom? She wouldn’t have told you. She never told you anything about her past.”
“What about the other things in the note?”
“Right, yeah. So he said his lifelong love had died and he’d never gotten to atone for his sins against her and he couldn’t stand the guilt.”
My brain continues to hum with every piece of new information she feeds me, my thoughts becoming louder and more tangled until I shake my head violently—like that’s going to help.
This all feels too…neat, I guess. Too perfect.
Was my mom in touch with her old boyfriend? What were his sins against her?
Or—or—did Thomas Freese even kill himself at all? Did someone murder him and try to make it look like a suicide? Why?
“Juniper?” Matilda’s voice yanks me from my thoughts.
“Yeah,” I say.
“So you don’t know anything more about this guy? Or where you could find more information about him, or about your mom?”
I sigh. There’s a little thought eating at the edge of my mind, a caterpillar nibbling on the edge of a leaf. But that thought worms its way in, further and further, until it’s all I can see.
“I might be able to,” I say with another sigh. “Thank you so much, Matilda. I appreciate all the trouble you went to.”
“No problem!” she says cheerfully. “You know I love hot goss. Anything else?”
“Uh, maybe,” I say. “If you’re able to find anything about someone named Cam Verido, that might be helpful?”
“Spell it.”
“I’ll just text it to you.”
“Sounds good. This is fun; I feel like a PI or something.”
I have no response for this, so I just thank her one more time and then hang up, texting her Cam’s name and then setting my phone aside.
My eyes drift up, up, up, until I’m staring at the ceiling, as though I can see through it and into my room. As though I can spot the small cardboard box on the floor of my closet, the one that contains my mother’s few remaining belongings…
And her laptop.
I’m not ready. I don’tfeelready. That box has been living an out-of-sight-out-of-mind existence, and I’m happy to leave it outof my mind. Thinking about the stories my mother told herself in feverish bouts of writing…I don’t want to know more.
But I’m not sure I have a choice. So up the stairs I climb, a woman in a trance of dread and anticipation. I think I probably look possessed or something, but I can’t bring myself to snap out of it. I’m building last-minute reinforcements in my mind, patching the roof before the storm hits. When I arrive in my room, I stare at the closet for a good five minutes before finally moving forward and opening it.
Pull out the box. Remove the lid. Shuffle past old legal documents and folders until my fingers meet cool plastic casing wrapped boa constrictor style by a charge cord. Heft it out, plug it in, and wait. Pace restlessly. Wait. Pace some more. Until finally the welcome screen pops up, the tinny sound of that opening chord filling the room.
