Page 1 of The Cost of Forgetting You

Chapter One

Delilah

Henry Ridgefield has left you a voicemail.

I stare at the notification. For a moment I’m convinced I’m imagining things. But even after I reach for my glass of water and swallow enough to drench the Sahara my mouth has become, the words still read the same.

Unbelievable. My father hasn’t left me a voicemail since my eighteenth birthday.

The memory pulses through my mind. It’d been a year since the affair. A year since Mom and I packed up and moved to South Carolina to live with her parents. My phone rang as the smoke from the candles on my cake was still dissipating. I hadn’t picked up, of course. I never answered any of his calls. That didn’t stop him from making them, though.

Until the letter.

The letter that pulled the wayward string on our already threadbare relationship. I’d written it as a therapy exercise. Filled it with the anger and betrayal previously sealed up in the mausoleum of my heart. After all, I never allowed myself to be angry. Mom was angry. She had every right to be. It was my job to be calm. Levelheaded. I was a lifeboat in tumultuous waters. It was all I could do to keep us both afloat.

I poured my whole heart onto those pages. Questions I never allowed myself to ask came tumbling out. Line after line of Why did you do this? and Why did I have to be the one to pick up the pieces when you did?

The letter sat on my dresser for months, addressed but not stamped. I didn’t know if I even wanted to send it. My therapist, the one my grandparents paid for after Mom and I moved in with them, said mailing it wasn’t the point. It was just about getting it out. About setting a little bit of the weight down.

It was Mom who made that decision for me. Mom, who liked to borrow my clothes. We wore the same size in everything, right down to our tiny size 6 shoes. I suppose she saw the letter on one of her routine closet raids. Or during one of her late-night venting sessions. It wasn’t even the letter I realized was missing, but his voicemails.

“Dad hasn’t called in three weeks,” I’d mused over dinner. I was separating the peas from my pot pie with one of Grandma’s real silver forks. Everything in their house was fancier than it needed to be. Certainly fancier than the things we’d left behind in Alabama.

Mom hadn’t even looked up. “I guess he got your letter.”

“My letter?” Panic like a lightning strike hit my chest.

“Oh, honey,” she sighed, finally glancing my way. “I knew you’d never do it yourself, and I wanted to help. Now you see what I’ve been telling you all along. He never really cared about either of us. He was waiting to be let off the hook—and he finally has been.” She deposited a large piece of beef into her mouth. It was only partially chewed when she added, “We’re on our own, Delilah. Just you and me. But it’s good, because we’re free to have whatever life we want. He can’t hold us back anymore.”

The truth was, I didn’t know that I wanted a life outside of the one we’d had with Dad, but I knew better than to say as much. I couldn’t even find it in me to be angry with her for mailing it, since the lack of notifications had already proven her right about one thing. I was on my own.

He didn’t call again. Not until today.

My thumb hovers over the PLAY button. Do I want to know? Do I even care what he has to say after so many years of silence?

Later, I decide. There’s no time limit on it. He’s given me nothing all these years. The least I deserve is a few hours to process.

“Who are you texting?” Mom asks.

Anxiety bursts like a bubble in my chest. I quickly swipe up and swap back to the screen I was on when his phone call came through. I stared at his name—I’d long since swapped out Dad with Henry—while it rang and rang and rang, finally disappearing, just for the voicemail notification to pop up in its place.

“I’m not.” I unravel my legs and stretch them out under the dining table. The thin gingham tablecloth brushes my thighs. I do my best to look nonchalant when I feel anything but.

Just as I knew she would, Mom kicks her ballet flats off to the left of the archway and pads across the tile to stand behind me. She peers over my shoulder, her breath tickling my neck. “Apartments? Why are you looking at apartments?”

I glance at the Zillow listings on my screen and pinch a sigh off with my lips. Uncertainty takes root in my stomach. I had a laundry list of good reasons for this potential move before Dad’s phone call derailed my train of thought. Now I’m grasping at straws.

“I don’t know, Mom…maybe because I’m twenty-six years old?” I clear my throat. “I make enough money, and with me working from home, it might be easier?—”

“But we have so much space here.” She steps back and gestures broadly to my grandparents’ house. “I’m here. And you don’t make that much money. You really wanna waste it on an apartment and leave me all alone?”

Her voice enters familiar territory—wary and a little bit desperate. It’s the same tone she used with the letter. With my college applications. With anything and everything that’s ever threatened to put more than an inch of space between us since we left Dad.

Before that, she hardly wanted to be around me. I guess having our lives upended really put things into perspective for her. And since my grandparents passed, I’m all she has left. Me and her wayward sister, Helen, whose whereabouts volley between Who the fuck knows? and Who the fuck wants to know? on the regular.

There’s a soft click as I lock my phone. “It’s not that.”

Her hands find the curve of her hips. “Then what is it?”

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