Alice
From: [email protected]
Subject: re: checking in
Date: May 16, 2025
Alice,
If you’re reading this, it means I’m dead. Excuse the melodrama. I would like you to speak at the funeral – you’ll know what to say.
Be good to B, she’s going to need you.
Love always,
S
Chapter 30
Briar
Briar woke up in a tent, bracketed by her sisters. Hazel’s arms were a vice grip around her waist, and Laurel’s breath was hot against the back of her neck. Smelling bacon, she disentangled herself carefully and unzipped the tent.
She found her father hunched over a camp stove.
‘Wow,’ Briar said. ‘I didn’t know you could use one of those things.’
‘I’ll have you know,’ her dad said, ‘that I was the first person to bring your mother camping.’
Briar snorted, sitting next to him. ‘So, what? Everything she knew, she learned from you?’
He squinted at her. ‘Absolutely not; she surpassed me immediately.’
‘ThatI believe,’ Briar said, wrapping her arms around herself for warmth. Her dad shucked off his fleece and offered it, and she took it gratefully.
‘Breakfast’s almost ready, if you want to wake them,’ he said, pulling sausages off the griddle.
They ate breakfast in silence, then tidied the campsite and set off to do their mom’s favorite hike.
Trudging down the trail, Briar couldn’t stop thoughts of Alice from flooding in. There had been a time when she had come on these trips too. Susan had welcomed her into their family like one of her own.
Her mind went through the emails, over and over. She thought about Alice across the ocean, lonely and desperate, writing to Susan for news of Briar. And Briar had never known.
When she’d first stumbled across the emails, she had assumed they would be proof that Alice had never really cared about her, that she’d easily moved on. This time, she’d been searching for any shred of evidence for what Alice had declared that morning. The thing Briar had refused to let herself believe. She wondered now if she should have heard her out instead of shutting her down.
She tried to picture what Alice was doing at that moment, probably acing her interview. Despite everything, Briar hoped Alice would be happy in her new role.
The hike was five miles out and back, but they’d been doing it for so many years that it felt like it took them no time at all to make it to the lake.
They reached the familiar beach, staring at the placid water, feeling the absence of Susan acutely.
‘This blows,’ Hazel said.
‘Totally blows,’ Laurel agreed.
RJ and Briar exchanged a look, but it was their father who spoke. ‘Yes, well. I know that this trip was always your mother’s thing, but I thought…’ He cleared his throat roughly, seemingly at a loss for words. No one spoke.
