Page 73 of Forget Me Not
I think about finding that article before studying the woman on the porch before me, noting how different she looked after all the years that had passed. Bethany back in that diner, her hair dyed black and that sleeve of tattoos. Her eyes the only reason I recognized her at all.
The only thing on a person that time can’t change.
I reflect back on the diary again, my head rushing as I recall the first entry Marcia had made. Mitchell finding her in the back of that alley, licking his lips as he washed her in praise.
You’re very pretty, Marcia. Especially those eyes.
The very first day she arrived at the Farm, smiling at the girl with bare feet in the grass. Marcia had described her irises as the same color as a summer storm, some curious quality to them she couldn’t explain—but other than that, the two girls had looked so much the same.
“You’re Lily,” I finish, watching as the woman before me blinks like she hasn’t heard her own name in a long, long time.
CHAPTER 48
I see myself standing at the vanity mirror, begging for a reflection that wasn’t my own. Growing up desperate to be someone different and savoring every second I could pretend it was true.
“What did you do?” I whisper, staring at this stranger on the opposite side of the shed as the woman I thought she was evaporates before me, twisting away like a fat plume of smoke with nothing but an imposter left in its wake.
“She wasn’t committed.”
I tilt my head, Marcia’s memories suddenly looking so different as I imagine a teenaged Lily winding through all those houses, flaunting around in heels and fur coats. Trying on lives like masquerade masks, each one infinitely better than her own.
“She had people who loved her,” I say, my mind on that picture of Marcia’s parents in the paper as the search for their daughter quickly turned cold. “A family who wanted her home. You never had that.”
I watch as Lily stands still in a watery pool of the moon and Itry to visualize her as a young girl now, a girl who was lost in every sense of the word. Nowhere to live, no one to love, until a man came along and gave her a home.
A home she would do anything to protect.
A quiver of movement steals my attention and I twist to the side, watching as Mitchell steps through the shadows. The clanking of metal keys as he walks, that silver ring hooked into the loop of his jeans.
“You can thank Liam for insisting we do it this way,” he says as he kneels on the ground before me. Then I look behind him, the first hint of dawn illuming the shed as Liam stares down at the floor beneath him. “It’ll take longer, but it won’t hurt.”
I look down at Mitchell’s hands now, noticing the mug wrapped in his grip.
“Just a little something to take the edge off.”
I hear a hint of a smile as I recall him speaking those very same words as I sat in the main house, Liam casing my ankle in gauze as Mitchell offered my only chance of relief.
The way I had taken it, trusted him. All his little persuasions coaxing me into the palm of his hands before squeezing his fingers and cupping me tight. Snuffing out the small voice in the back of my brain that had been whispering all along that something wasn’t right.
“You killed Marcia,” I say, my voice soaked in disgust as Liam perks up slightly. “The mother of your son. You killed your owndaughter.”
“Blood doesn’t automatically make you a family,” Lily says, and I turn to the side, to the place she’s been standing, thinking about all the things that Marcia had written. The two of them sitting outside of that barn, Lily twisting those plaits through long, tangled hair.
This is my family. The only family I need.
“I never killed anyone,” Mitchell says, his voice firm as he draws my attention back toward him. “And I didn’t even know I had a daughter until she showed up that night, accusing me of murder like you are right now.”
I look back at Liam, his gaze peeled from the floor as he stares at me the same way he had been staring last night, an intimacy between us as I laid it all bare. How he said he was sorry and how, at the time, I had assumed that was a simple condolence, no different than the string of people that summer who came by with their flowers, their hollow words—but now, I realize it wasn’t that at all.
Instead, it was a purging of guilt. An actual apology.
“What happened to Natalie wasn’t your fault,” I say, thinking about how Ryan had said those same words to me, the shame I had felt for doing nothing, for letting it happen, lifting like a weight had been eased from my shoulders.
“Of course it’s his fault,” Mitchell says as he lifts the cup higher. “She wouldn’t be dead if he hadn’t gone against his own family.”
Now I feel my mind bend around every single thing Liam told me last night, his emotion so raw it could not have been faked.
Kids are so vulnerable at that age. Like the concept of mortality doesn’t even apply.
