Page 75 of Forget Me Not
I watch as Lily stares straight at him, marbled eyes asking him to end it all. Mitchell’s lifeless body beneath her and any desireshe might have had to keep living without him leaching away like blood from a wound… and then Liam deflates, lowering himself off the shed step before closing the doors and threading the padlock back through the handles. Bolting Mitchell and Lily inside.
My body is reeling from shock, adrenaline seeping from my pores like sweat as a complete exhaustion slips in instead. Then Liam turns to face me, Lily’s screams muffled from behind closed doors.
I look down at the gun hanging limp in his grip, a cold terror starting to climb back in, until he tosses it onto the ground between us, the metal landing with a wet thud.
I stare at the gun, then back at him. This person who, just a few hours ago, was holding that very gun flush to my back. Then I charge forward, grabbing it from the mud as I attempt to steady my shaking heads, wondering what I said that finally changed his mind when it hits me hard, the moment his demeanor started to change.
I think about looking at Michell as I hissed those words—You killed the mother of your son—just before Liam had winced, the accusation stinging like a physical slap.
“You didn’t know,” I say slowly. “This whole time, you thought—”
I stop, thinking back to the diary I know he must have read, too, as he and my sister sat in that camper, learning more about the man who fathered them both—but now I understand that the only reason I realized the woman living at Galloway wasn’t the same woman who wrote those words was because of that film I developed.
That picture of Marcia that they never saw, the final piece he and Natalie never had.
“She was never much of a mother,” Liam says to me now. “But somehow, I loved her, because I thought she was mine.”
I loosen my grip on the gun, looking intently at the lines of hisface. For the very first time, I can see the subtle little features he and Natalie share and I wonder if that’s why he always felt so familiar. Why it seemed like I knew him the second I met him, my subconscious perpetually searching for her.
He drops down to the grass, his head falling into outstretched hands.
“I told her things,” he says, turning to face me as his fingers pull through his hair. “Out in that camper, I told Natalie things I’d never told anyone. How I was born on the property, lived here my whole life. How I never went to school because I don’t even have a birth certificate.”
My mind flips back to the diner again, to all the things Bethany had said; assuming that Natalie was seeing someone older because he wasn’t in school, because they spent all that time in his car.
“I never even realized how strange it was,” Liam continues. “I never knew anything else, but then I started to grow up, started meeting people my age when they worked in the vineyard, and it began to sink in. How different I was from everyone else.”
I feel a squeeze in my chest as I think about the kids who used to come here that summer, imagining as Liam would watch from a distance like they were some strange species he couldn’t understand.
As he would bring them out to that camper, his secret little spot tucked deep in the trees. A meager attempt to try and fit in.
“So, what happened?” I ask, talking a tentative step closer. “That last night—?”
“She went to the police,” he says, a single tear springing into his eye. “She told them everything. About how she suspected there was a missing person on the property, that she could connect Mitchell to another from 1983.”
I blink, thinking about how I went to Chief DiNello myself and relayed all the same information, though he had acted like he was hearing it for the very first time.
“She told them about me,” he continues. “That I was practically a prisoner in my own home. The night she died, she was coming to get me. She brought a bag with her so I could pack my things.”
“But if she went to the police, how come they never did anything—?” I start, though the thought screeches to a halt as I think of Chief DiNello again, his fingers twisting in knots as I spewed out all those things that I knew. The way he demanded my proof, dismissing it all when I couldn’t provide it.
The only time he paid me any attention at all.
“Montana,” I say, the new revelation settling in as I think about how Eric DiNello grew up with my mother, how they all went by some nickname that wasn’t their own.
Those pictures I saw framed in his office, the one of him riding a horse with rolling hills in the distance.
He moved here from Missoula a few months back.
“He told Natalie he would go with her,” Liam continues, and I think about my sister hoisting up her window, sliding off the ledge and getting into that car—but it wasn’t Jeffrey’s car, not like we’d been told, but Eric DiNello’s. Cruiser doors locking from the outside. “He promised to keep her safe and she trusted him,” he says. “She believed him. He was a cop, but instead, he delivered her directly to them.”
I exhale, pushing stale air out through gritted teeth. Then I turn toward the water, watching the sun appear on the horizon as it casts everything in an orange glow.
“Did she suffer?” I ask, thinking of what Mitchell had said in the shed.
Twenty minutes, it’s over. It’ll be like falling asleep.
“No,” Liam says, and I bow my head. Relieved, at least, that he was telling the truth about that. “But I wasn’t there when it happened. I was still waiting for her in the woods like we had planned.”
