I wanted this town to heal me. I thought it would feel different by now.
I ran away, but he’s still here.
After sunset Margo insists I eat dinner with her on the deck just off her kitchen. She’s given me two full boxes of clothes, which I take gratefully. Oversized sweaters, cotton shirts, and linen pants that she must have worn in her younger years.
She tells me stories about the town: a history that is riddled withmyth and death and the unknown. And I start to wonder if most towns have their own legends. “Heartbreak is a powerful thing,” she says. “It casts spells and conjures up dangerous magic—I’ve seen it happen. Never stand in the way of someone with a broken heart,” she warns. “It can curse a whole town. Never underestimate what heartbreak can do.”
Heartbreak can destroy a whole family,I think.
I ask her about finding a job in town, but she tells me that most locals are wary of outsiders, and it’ll take some time to earn their trust before they’ll give me work. But Margo offers to pay me to help her in the garden—where she grows produce in a square plot of land, as well as inside a small greenhouse, then sells what she harvests at a weekly farmers market in town. The labor of gardening has gotten harder on her aging joints, so in the morning I work beside her, pulling up weeds, watering, and thinning out the dead leaves until it’s ready to be harvested. One afternoon she eyes me from across an overgrown lavender bush and asks if I have experience tending a garden, because I seem so familiar with the plants. I tell her we grew only flowers back home.
A cursed, awful variety.
On a rainy Friday afternoon Margo knocks on my door and hands me a small package. At first I’m certain she’s mistaken—it can’t be for me—but then I see my brother’s small, abrupt handwriting on the box. I wrote to him after I arrived, mailing the letter to the guitar shop, to tell him where I was. It was a simple letter, not much more than a note letting him know that his twin was still alive, because the betrayal was still heavy inside me.
I’ve tried to imagine Archer returning to our house… to findit gone. Only a muddy scar in the ground where it once sat. The garden flattened. Our lives carried away with the storm. But he is strong, resilient.
Now I carry the box to the kitchen counter and cut it open.
Inside I find a folded piece of paper.
I kept these buried beneath the pine tree where we used to have the rope swing.
I’m sorry I hid them from you.
—Archer
Below the note, held together by a rubber band, is a stack of envelopes and postcards.
All from Mom.
He lied when he said he’d thrown them away, when he said he’d never read them… because every envelope has been opened, every letter pulled out and read in secret. Because even if he hates her, he couldn’t destroy them, couldn’t sever the only connection to her.
He kept them buried in the ground, maybe in a coffee tin or box, because they’re undamaged. Not eaten through by beetles or damp from the rain. They even survived the storm and the flood. Buried beneath the pine in the far east corner of our property, on higher ground, where Dad built us a rope swing when we were five or six.
Staring down at the letters, I wait for the anger to stir up inside me again, but it doesn’t come.
I understand why he did it, and my heart aches, knowing the guilt he’s surely carried—the burden of keeping these a secret—all because he wanted to protect me.
I forgive him before I’ve even climbed into bed and opened the first letter.
With the window pushed up in its frame, listening to the Pacific crash against the sand far below—instead of the awful shushing of tulip stalks swirling in the wind—I start from the beginning, from the oldest letter Mom sent, right after she first left. Slowly I fill in the last three years of her life.
At first, she apologizes often, writing to tell us that she made a mistake, that she shouldn’t have left without a word. That she’ll return home soon.
But then her letters begin recounting her travels—sailing across the Atlantic, perhaps the same route that Fern Goode took all those years ago. She describes eating in small patisseries and wandering cobblestone streets through ancient seaside towns. Sometimes she mentions how muchwewould love it where she is, or that she hopes to return to Cutwater in the following season for a visit, for our birthday perhaps. But then her letters will stray, postcards sent from towns like Marseille and Valencia, or describing the month she spent on the island of Sardinia, and she forgets about her promise to return home. Sometimes she mentionshim. The man she says she loves, who rescued her.
Oak’s father.
But she never says his name. Never reveals the truth about who he is—that he left behind a son who would find himself drawn to the Goodes, just like his father.
She is a woman who got as far away from her old life as she could. She ran from it.
And maybe, in some ways, Oak’s father saved her from a fate even worse if she’d stayed.
Because I think her life in Cutwater was slowly destroying her.
Just like it was destroying me.
