Page 75 of In All My Dreams

I lost my mother today. Not only did I lose her, but I also lost the person I had always known her to be. I’m not sure which one hurts worse. My mother knew Auden was my daughter, and she chose her own sick, twisted revenge over me.

I know that tidal wave of anger and soul-shattering grief is waiting to pull me under, but it can wait.

Because right now, at this moment, my girls are safe.

My girls.

I clear my throat and pick Auden up. She wraps herself around me, fitting perfectly in the crook of my neck. I look at Georgia, hoping to convey all my emotions through my eyes. The same eyes she’s always called her own galaxy. What she doesn’t know is that she’s always been my entire universe, too.

I’ve always been hers, and I know now that she’s always been mine.

“Let’s go home,” Auden says, smiling at both her mother and myself.

“Home,” Georgia mutters, a small smile peeking through her lips. “Yes, let’s go home.”

The three of us stare up into the dark windows of Crane Manor, and somehow, I know that it’s smiling back at us.

Epilogue

Georgia - Three Years Later

“How are you feeling there, Georgie?” Ian asks, his voice soft and full of emotion as he rubs his thumb softly across my knuckles as we make the short drive back to Crane Manor.

I can’t answer him, so instead, I give him a sad, small smile.

The grief in my heart is too big, and forcing words out means I’ll dissolve into another puddle of tears.

We just got done burying my father.

Auden is quiet in the back seat. Her black dress makes her look so pale, almost like the night Lydia tried to take her from us.

It’s been a long three years since that horrible, fateful night.

Ian and I spent months traveling back and forth between Crane Manor and my apartment in California as we tried to work through our issues. I wasn’t ready to uproot my entire life, especially when Ian and I had so many secrets and lies to navigate through together.

So, he would fly to California and stay with us whenever he was able to take some time off from the hospital.

When he brought up the idea of going to therapy together as a family, I brushed off the idea quickly. I didn’t need someone to psychoanalyze us. I already do enough of that myself, but at the end of the day, Ian talked me into it.

And I’m so glad he did.

Therapy ended up saving us, and it definitely saved Auden.

She had nightmares for months after what happened with Lydia. I can’t count the amount of times she woke up screaming in the dead of night, shaking and unable to vocalize what she was feeling.

Ian and I both agreed she needed to speak to someone. Maybe we could help her before any lasting negative damage impacted the rest of her life.

Maybe her ghosts wouldn’t haunt her the way mine did if we got her help early on.

We had countless sessions, together as a family and individually, the summer after the lake incident. Most of them ended in tears. But those messy sessions helped us navigate our new family dynamic. I had a hard time letting go of my single-parent role, while Ian had a harder time adjusting to the fact that he was a father to a child he never got to know.

Auden, being as young as she was, loved the idea of having both a mom and a dad. Her sessions were mostly her telling the therapist about the nightmares she had until she finally stopped having them all together.

That was a very happy day in our household.

Auden finished out the school year in California before we finally decided that Crane was where home was.

My father got really sick six months after Auden and I officially moved into Crane. Multiple hospital visits and invasive tests later, he was diagnosed with lung cancer.

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