I heard a sound come out of me that I didn’t recognize.Lily’s hand landed on my arm. I barely felt it.
Ryan continued, looking into the camera with the steady, careful look of a man who had rehearsed this and still didn’t have the right words.
“By the time you see this, you probably won’t forgive me. Maybe I won’t deserve it. Everything has gone beyond my control now.” He stopped. “Tell Peanut I love her.”
The screen went dark.Lily was crying. I was somewhere past crying — in the specific, cold place that opens up when something so large happens that your body doesn’t know how to categorize it yet.
“Mom?” Lily said. “What do we do now?”
I stood up.
“We go find out the rest.”
The Drive to Andrea’s House — and What Was on the Walls When Anna Walked In
We drove two hundred and thirty miles the next morning.
I had spent most of the night doing what you do when you have the kind of information that reorders everything — sitting very still, going back through years of memories and re-examining them in light of the new fact, finding all the places where the story had been wrong.
Andrea had been Ryan’s ex-wife. They divorced before I came into the picture. Ryan had full custody of the boys after a difficult period in her life, and I had never had reason to question the arrangement. She had been a background fact — someone who existed in the legal history of my family but not in its actual daily life.
