If only Emma could have jumped back in time ten minutes, she would have waited to head for the bathroom herself until she was certain Pam was nowhere in sight. The whole ugly mess could have been avoided.
“Okay, out with it,” Sylvia said bluntly when Emma climbed into the driver seat. “What the heck is going on? Your mother left in a rush with her sexy author, and now you’re hustling us home like you just stuffed Barbara’s polished silver in your purse and are trying to make a fast getaway.”
“No stolen silver,” she assured her grandmother. “I’m sorry if I dragged you away when you weren’t ready to leave yet. I just... couldn’t stay.”
She started the car, hoping her grandmother would let the matter rest.
She should have known better.
“Something’s happened,” Sylvia said as Emma pulled out into the street.
She thought about denying it, but what was the point? Sylvia would find out eventually. Emma nodded, feeling tears burn as she drove toward their house.
“The worst something,” she admitted. “Mom knows about Pam.”
“How didthathappen?”
“She overheard me fighting with her. I thought we were being quiet, but Mom happened to stumble into the hallway where we were busy having it out. And at the worst possible moment.”
“Finally!” Far from looking horrified, as she should, Sylvia looked relieved. “It was high time you told her the truth.”
“I didn’twantto tell her the truth. I never wanted her to know.”
“I know you didn’t. If you had followed my advice, you would have told her a long time ago.”
“Why? What possible benefit would come from Mom knowing Dad might have been having an affair and at the very least he was making out with another woman an hour before he died?”
Sylvia was silent. When she spoke, her voice was quiet and filled with a compassion that made Emma want to cry.
“For a decade, my daughter has been grieving your dad like he was some kind of saint. Gary was a good man, don’t get me wrong. But clearly he was human, too. He made mistakes. Maybe hearing the truth will finally help your mom move on.”
“And maybe it will only hurt her and cause a whole new kind of grief.”
“Maybe. That’s up to Rosie, I guess.”
“I wish I’d had a chance to tell her under better circumstances.”
“You’ve had ten years, honey. I’ve been trying to convince you to tell her since I found out myself.”
Emma had tried to keep the truth from everyone, including Sylvia. She hadn’t wanted to tell her grandmother either. Better if she hadn’t. But one night about a year after her father died—a few months before she had run away for the final time—everything had spilled out.
She had been hanging out at Orca Park with friends, drinking, smoking a little weed, when they’d been caught by the police. She and her friends had been arrested, since they were all sixteen at the time. She could still remember the mortified fear.
As wild as she had been that last year, Emma had escaped any brushes with the law until that night. Knowing she couldn’t call her mom to get her, in desperation she had reached out to her grandmother. Sylvia had rushed down to the station, of course. Emma never would have expected anything else.
After they were back at Sylvia’s place, her grandmother had been supportive but blunt when she told Emma she needed to get her act together or this wouldn’t be the last time she ended up in trouble with the law.
Emma remembered bursting into tears of humiliation and pain. As her grandmother held her, gently asking what was wrong, all of Emma’s turmoil—the months of pain and guilt and grief—tumbled out. Before she quite realized she had done it, she was spilling everything to Sylvia.
“I couldn’t tell her,” she said now to her grandmother, as she had said that night. “She was grieving Dad so hard, and I couldn’t make things worse for her. I had killed him. I couldn’t ruin his memory, too.”
Her grandmother made a small sound of disgust. “First of all, you did not kill your father. I’ve told you that more times than I can count. It was an accident.”
Intellectually, she might know the accident hadn’t truly been her fault and that only sheer luck had saved her from dying alongside her father in the wreck.
That didn’t ease the guilt that ate away at her like termites in a pine forest.
“Second, you keeping the truth from your mother has only driven a wedge between you that widens with each passing year. All you’ve achieved by your silence is further pain on both sides.”
