I let her have the silence.
"She was still herself," Olive said finally. "At the end. I've spent thirty years wondering if she was still herself or whether she was already gone before she died." She stopped. "I needed her to still be herself."
"She asked someone if they liked to read," I said. "She said she mostly read about places she hadn't been yet."
Olive didn't answer. I could hear the garden. The shears had stopped.
"Thank you," she said.
"I'll send you Donna's contact information," I said. "If you want it. When you're ready."
A pause. "Yes. Send it."
I hung up and sat at the table for a while. The coffee still cold. The cursor blinking. Outside the windows the afternoon was bright, and warm, and indifferent.
I opened the manuscript and wrote for three hours without stopping. The scene I'd been avoiding wrote itself in forty-five minutes. The scene after that came just as fast.
I didn't think about what I was writing. I just followed the character through what she'd decided, and she was moving now, past the place where the truth had stopped her, and I let her go.
26
JADE
Idrive to the Crawford estate with Donna's second message still on my mind. I've read it eleven times since yesterday. I know what it says. I keep reading it anyway, the way you press on a bruise to see if it’s still there.
The letters. The photograph. A shoebox in Tennessee that has been sitting in three different apartments for years waiting for someone to come looking.
I don't know what's in those letters. That's the part I keep snagging on. Richard sent them the day after Ashley died, which means he was thinking about documentation before her body was cold, which means he knew someone might eventually come looking. Whether that version helps Nicholas or buries him or does something else entirely I can't predict from here.
I pull through the Crawford gates and park in the circular drive and sit for a moment with the engine off.
Olive already knows about Donna. What I'm bringing today is different and I'm not sure yet how Olive will receive it — not the information itself but the fact that I've been doing this without telling Phoenix, without telling anyone, pulling a thread that connects directly to an active criminal investigation while Phoenix's lawyers are counting down weeks to an indictment.
I sitdown at the table and watch Olive set the kettle on and turn to look at me. Then she crosses to the counter where her laptop is open, picks it up, and sets it in front of me without a word.
My manuscript is on the screen. Chapter thirty-four, the one I finished at two in the morning last Tuesday.
I look up at her.
"I found the shared folder," she says, going back to the kettle. "You gave me access when you wanted a second opinion on the opening. I don't think you realized it updated automatically." She pulls two mugs from the cabinet. "I read all of it. In one night."
I look at the screen. At my own words, the ones I wrote around the edges of everything happening in this house and this family, the ones that turned out to be about it anyway.
"I have notes," Olive says.
I close the laptop.
"After," she says, setting a mug in front of me. "Tell me what you came here to tell me first."
Donna messaged me again four days after the first response.
I hadn't expected it. I'd sent my reply thanking her, told her what her message had meant, mentioned gently that Ashley had people who loved her and had wondered about those last days for a long time. I assumed that would be the end of it.
Instead, she sent a second message asking if I was related to the family.
I thought about it for a full day before I answered. Then I said yes, loosely, by marriage. Which is true in the only way that matters.
She said she'd held something for years that she didn't know what to do with. After Ashley died, she'd gone back to the cousins' house and offered condolences and the cousin's mother had handed her an envelope that arrived the day after. From a man she described as a family friend. Inside were three letters — not addressed to anyone specific, just addressed tothe family— and a photograph.
