Callie had askedDella again what she knew the day she put the Post-it with Sabrina Riley’s name on it on the bathroom mirror.
“I didn’tknowanything, other than something bad had happened to those girls. I had no idea Annabelle… no idea what would happen to her, of course.”
Della, it turns out, was the one who sent the file on the Baby Doe case up to Healy’s team, hoping they might take it upon themselves to find out where the Riley girls had gone. She hadn’t wanted to do it while Frank was still chief. She knew there was something off about the way the case was handled, but it was a hard time for her family. She had just found out she was pregnant again, and her husband had been laid off. They needed her job, she couldn’t rock the boat. But she admitted to talking to her girls about the case a little. About the itch it left behind. And in the end Callie is grateful for Wren, for the publicity she’s stirred up. There’s a huge movement online of people who are rallying behind Annabelle, a fervor to see Luke punished. Callie declined to be interviewed by Wren but she was relieved to find out that the DA was working on charging him. That the tides were finally turning against him.
Callie braces herselfto find Annabelle with more injuries the next time she visits, but she appeared unscathed. She had started working in the prison kitchen. Through a letter she wrote and circulated through her husband, she had quadrupled the prison library’s stock of paperback books via donations from their town.
“What’s with you and libraries?” Callie asks, aiming for lightness,though of course everything turned so quickly after their first meeting among the knitters.
Annabelle offers her a thin smile but soon the look on her face turns thoughtful. “I thought for so long I was trying to be good, to atone, but it’s different. Maybe there’s a part of me that’s doing that. But I think what I want most is to feel like I belong somewhere. It feels… dangerous, not to belong. You know people are helping Ben with the kids? Driving them to sports practices and school? There’s a few former friends who cross the street when they see Ben, but mostly people are trying to be kind. Maybe that’s what I was doing all this time. Creating spaces where I belonged, where I would never feel like I wouldn’t have help.”
Callie recognizes the impulse. After all, that was part of becoming a cop. A uniform that meant she was claimed, sanctioned, by the rest of the group. Even Damien acted the way he did because he was trying to belong. In a moment of desperation, Annabelle had no one to keep her from the worst, most base, version of herself. No one to claim her as theirs. The girl whom so many people failed or harmed in order for her to do what she did. And the same with Jenna. Her mother’s treatment, her father tending to her day and night, and then working double shifts to pay off the medical bills. It left Jenna on her own without anyone to keep her safe. Left her to fend for herself against Luke, the Caputos. A battle she was always going to lose.
“What will you do now?” Annabelle asks her.
“I have absolutely no idea,” Callie says, the admission making her edgy. She’s been in touch with Chelsea about the Luke Caputo case. Luke had been arrested the week before. She thinks of what Jenna said to her that day in the cabin. Callie has, for so long, defined herself against the messiness and pain of her upbringing. Her legacy was darker than even she could have guessed. But Jenna had also given her the gift of a lineage. Of people who were willing to start over, their own way. And that’s what she’ll do, too. Over and over until she gets it right.
ANNABELLE
For a long time you thought that the truth coming out would be the hardest part. You thought it would hurt to be called a monster. For the world to know how you had failed the baby. Your baby.
But what you could not have known until after the news trucks left your street, after your husband came to you in tears at the edge of the bed, after your daughter returned from school quiet, ashamed, after the trial and the sentencing, was that when the fear was gone, there was only grief left.
Grief that bent you in half on the thin mattress of your prison cell cot. Grief that made your stomach empty itself. Grief that you gagged on when there was nothing left for your body to rid itself of. You had kept it at the edge of your mind for so long that you did not understand how total it was. How the fear of being revealed was only the smallest part of it. A single raindrop in a storm.
As a part of your probation you speak to a counselor every week. Her name is Laura, and she is your age, with bright blond hair and a beaded glasses chain that she runs between her fingers when she’s listening.
“I don’t have the words,” you told Laura, after spending the first four sessions staring out the window. “I’ve never been good at it. Telling the truth about how I feel. I never had to. Sabrina always knew. And that was enough. One person, who understood me perfectly.”
Laura had smiled at you, and you detected real, true kindness in it. “Well, now. That’s where we start.”
They found Sabrina’sbody in the water. Divers brought her up from a grave of wreckage. You had never learned to swim as girls. Later, you took lessons after you married Ben, in the brisk chlorinated rectangle of the local YMCA, while Blair was in preschool on the other side of the building. You learned to float and to kick and get from one end of the pool to another with a decent freestyle. You learned that you liked the backstroke best. You had the opportunity to learn that about yourself, and even that felt like a kind of betrayal at the time, even more so now that you know what happened to her in the end.
Callie had watched as the divers went down, and down again, and down another time, until they could bring Sabrina up from the depths, release her from a tangle of machinery. You were glad there had been someone there to bear witness. Someone to watch over Sabrina, so she would not be alone.
She told you about the case against Luke Caputo, about the other girls and women who had come forward. Nine of them in all.
It was strange, after all these years, learning the Coyote’s name. Son of the former police chief, sure, but in the end, with a name, he was just another man. You saw it before that, in the photos Blair had developed. He was younger than you are now. And you could finally see something small about him. An ugly need, a weakness, that warped him and diminished him.
You had been the strong one. You know that now. You and Sabrina both.
Callie had been pregnant—early enough that there was just a slight swell under her shirt, easy enough to miss if you didn’t catch the way she would let her hand rest on her belly for a moment, protecting it. Just married, in law school. Would finish that year, take the Bar. She had apologized to you for how things had gone, and you hadn’t known how to say it. That the truth coming out had been the beginning of something.
Your life. Your two lives. Stitched together at that ugly seam, at last.
You stare outthe passenger seat window as Ben drives, the smell of cedar and pitch pine seeping into the car. Feel the shadows of the trees fall over you as you drive deeper into the woods.
The house is yours now, no one else to claim it. Ben has asked what you want to do with it. Raze it to the ground, restore it to its former splendor. Neither feels honest. In the fall, you will sell the house but keep the land abutting it. The woods, the factory ruins. The places you and Sabrina used to hide.
The trail behind the house is overgrown, but your feet lead you. Ben and Blair and the boys follow—Blair home from college for the week on spring break, your sons with their newly broad shoulders and deep baritone voices of men. Margot is with you too, bearing a bouquet of pale pink roses shrouded in cellophane that crackles in the silence.
The rubble of the factory looks so much smaller than it had been in your mind. It was bigger, you want to tell them. Towering. But that must not be true. It must have been this small all that time.
How impossible, to tell the story of how it had been to anyone else, who wasn’t there at your side. Still, you have been trying. Your promise to all of them. As much truth, the best you can.
There’s the clearing just behind it. Callie did it, Ben tells you. Made sure the weeds were pulled, any debris removed before you came.
Two headstones stand side by side.
