“A few years later, after I won my first election, an administrator from the institution contacted me. The place was closing. I sent them a check and told her to make the necessary arrangements. I kept sending her money, thinking that was the extent of my responsibilities. Sometime later, she contacted me again. My son was dying. By then, I was already addicted to power. And the lies…they were second nature. So, I paid her to stay silent. To take care of things.”
She stared into her coffee as if she could read the past in its dark surface. Several moments passed before she looked up and met my gaze.
“It wasn’t until early this year that I met your mother. I believe you already know what transpired. Local papers picked up quickly on what she was accusing me of, and how hollow my denial sounded.”
Arthur had already filled me in on some of that.
“While my lawyer, campaign manager, and team scrambled to buy her silence and bury the story, I had other thoughts. I went back to the group home where they had placed him.”
Her voice faltered, her eyes glistening, and for the first time I saw the woman and not the politician.
“Those days I spent reading through the caregivers’ records…I saw how he never once had a visitor. No one to hold him. No one to love him. No family ever showing up for him.” She wiped a tear from her cheek, her voice trembling. “No election victory, no amount of power can ever rewrite what I’d done. I gave away a child who needed me. That’s the truth I’ve tried to ignore all these years, Ms. Randall. That’s the horror of my life, not just the dishonesty about my public persona. I’m a mother who walked away from a child she should have loved. Your mother made me see that. She forced me to wake up and face what I had become.”
Hearing her words, seeing how wounded she was, I still couldn’t let it go. The questions pressed too hard against my chest to remain unspoken.
“Did you hurt her? My mother, I mean.” My voice was steadier than I expected. “Would your people go that far? Would they hurt my mother just to silence her, just to protect you?”
“No. No.” She shook her head firmly. “I know they wouldn’t. My people believe money and influence can silence any opponent. That’s their way. But I was already walking a different path.” She drew a shaky breath. “A reporter followed me when I went back to the training school. And from there to the group home. There are already articles in the works, ready to expose my past. Not because of what your mother uncovered, but because of the steps I myself took in trying to learn the truth about my son and his last days.”
I leaned in until our eyes met.
“Then why are you here? What did you hope to accomplish by coming and talking to me?”
I waited for her to ask for the damning folder.
“I know your mother has passed, and I’m deeply sorry for that,” she said. “But I needed to tell you this. To say that I am grateful to her. I’m thankful that she forced me to pull back the curtain and truly see my life for what it has been. She made me grieve. She made me change. And if I can keep walking that path…maybe, just maybe, it will be enough to save my soul.”
Chapter Thirty
Ocean
* * *
Meeting Jo, becoming her friend, and then meeting Henry yesterday gave Ocean something she hadn’t realized she even wanted. A sense of purpose.
In Harbor View, she wasn’t just the kid stuck in the middle of her parents’ unraveling marriage, powerless to stop the shouting or the silence. With Jo and Henry, even though they were dead, she felt like she could make a difference.
Her parents’ relationship had always left her feeling helpless, like she was watching a slow-motion train wreck she couldn’t stop. But here, helping her ghost friends communicate, helping them find each other again across a century, gave her a goal that mattered. A real goal. And that made her happy.
Walking through the neighborhood, Ocean was secretly glad her grandmother’s house was where it was. First Street had a kind of comfortable vibe. Old houses, sure, but the people she passed mostly smiled and said hi, like it was the most normal thing in the world.
It was cool wandering someplace where you didn’t hear constant traffic, where the sea kept flashing between the houses, blue-green and shimmery as glass.
When she slipped out earlier, her mom had still been across the street with Arthur. Most likely, she’d seen Ocean’s door shut and assumed she was still asleep. Shows what she knew. Ocean had been wide awake, hunched over that desk, penning a letter for Jo.
As she walked farther from their house, the homes grew bigger, some of them updated with sleek touches that looked out of place on First Street. She sporadically passed old men and women being dragged around by tiny dogs that barked like crazy, standing on their hind legs with teeth bared. Like they thought they were Dobermans instead of the ankle-biters they really were. The owners weren’t much better. Most just gave Ocean the side-eye, like she was about to mug them before breaking into their houses.
That wasn’t everyone, though. There were some friendly faces, and Ocean stopped to smell roses and tiny white flowers on bushes she never saw in California.
When she reached Fourth Street and the house her mom said had been Jo’s family’s summer place, a couple of workers were climbing into pickup trucks and driving off. They didn’t even glance at her. Lunch break, probably.
A dumpster and a temporary fence blocked the front door. That hadn’t been there yesterday. So Ocean veered across the yard toward the seawall behind the house. The grass looked like it hadn’t seen a mower in years, and the whole place felt like a graveyard for construction junk. Old sinks and bathtubs sat in clusters, surrounded by stacks of wood, snarled wires, bent pipes, even chunks of wall that looked like they’d been ripped out by hand. Total disaster zone.
She was surprised to see that the back of the house was wide open. And the place was huge—two stories, an attic, stretched out so long it felt like a mile. The kind of house where somebody could get murdered at one end and nobody at the other end would ever hear a thing.
It sat right on the water, but even with the view, the place didn’t feel welcoming. The air coming off the walls was damp and cold, the shadows too deep, too still. She could see why Jo had preferred the coziness of the First Street house and her best friend Esme, instead of rattling around in this mausoleum.
Crossing a wide stone patio, Ocean stepped through a gaping hole in the wall. The inside wasn’t any better. Silent, hollow, the kind of silence that made her skin prickle. In the center of the house, a staircase rose to the second floor, and she started to climb.
