Page 80 of Forget Me Not
“I wrote you a letter,” she says, a stitch in my chest when I remember what Ryan had said a few days ago, flipping through my mail to find my mom’s name. “After you left, I realized I was going to lose you for good if we couldn’t start being honest with each other. So, I tried,” she says, dropping her gaze to the ground. “The best I could, at least, to get all these things out that I never knew how to say out loud.”
I nod, tears filling my eyes as I glance down at our hands.
“I just need a minute,” I say, pulling back as she smiles softly. Then I let myself take one last look around before making my way toward the barn doors. It’s midday now, the summer sun singeing the nape of my neck, and I pull out my phone, snapping a few pictures of the barn, the brook. The weeds and wildflowers andsweetgum sprouting its spiny gumballs, a drowsy willow weeping at the edge of it all.
I walk back to the car, sliding inside. A blank stare as I peer through the windshield. Then I twist around, eyeing my bags I had grabbed from the guesthouse floor.
My brown briefcase slumped on the seat, the maroon spine of the diary peeking out of the pocket.
I reach out and grab it, draping the book across my lap. I have five pages left, and while I’m going to turn it in, its contents corroborating all the evidence I’ve collected, giving credence to the things I know Liam will say, right now, I can feel the temptation to finally learn how it ends vibrating my bones like a rattling wire.
I crack the spine and stare down at the words, that familiar blue script faded and worn as the ink starts to run dry. Then I take a deep breath and lean back in my seat, allowing myself to live the last moments of Marcia Rayburn’s fleeting life.
CHAPTER 52
SEPTEMBER 1984
Marcia stretched out at the edge of the marsh, her baby boy asleep at her side. Her diary was propped up on her knees, only a few pages left until the whole thing was full, and she rolled the pen between her slick fingers. A smear of blue ink staining her skin as she gazed out at the dock just ahead.
A sound from behind stole her attention and she spun around quick, recognizing the slap of the screen door in the distance. Then she watched as Mitchell emerged from the main house before making his way into the budding vineyard beside it.
She turned back around and eased down on her elbows, reliving the day they arrived in this place. It was a moment that would be forever ingrained in her psyche, a moment that would mar her dreams and mold her nightmares: standing in that house, five months ago, a pregnancy test hot in her pocket as she looked down at the body on the bedroom floor.
“Come on,” Lily had muttered as Marcia stared down at the eyes starting to glaze, crimson blood seeping into the carpet as Lily held that gun in her hand. “We have to go.”
Everything about that day had taken on a foggy quality like submerging your whole head underwater and hearing nothing but the thump of your heart in your ears, blinking to find all your surroundings blurry and bent. It happened so fast it felt impossible to process—she and Lily were alone, then they weren’t; that woman had been alive, then she wasn’t—but there was one thing Marcia could remember perfectly, one little thing that seemed to transpire in slow motion: looking around the room in a faraway haze until her eyes landed on that film Lily had dumped on the bed. Her mind rewinding to the flash she had seen when she walked out of the bathroom, her face frozen for one single incriminating second as the camera’s timestamp placed her smack in the center of a crime.
She remembered walking to the mattress in a numb detachment, cupping the roll in her damp hands before sliding it into her pocket. Then she had turned around, trailing Lily as they tore down the stairs, their bodies bursting through the front door.
“What did youdo?” Montana had hissed, eyes swelling as he saw them both coming. The gun was still clutched in Lily’s right hand, the metal bouncing back and forth as they ran.
“Drive,”Lily had said, Montana cranking the camper before they could even climb in the back seat. “Just drive.”
Marcia took a deep breath now, the salt air cleansing her system as her eyes stared down the length of the dock. It was understood immediately they couldn’t stay at the Farm. Lily had killed a cop—a cop who had been watching them, learning them, who knew where they lived—so they left that afternoon, the four of them piling into the camper before driving three hours south. She could still feel the bounce of the tires as they took their last turn, the tangled trees surrounded by a moat of a marsh and a large whitehouse standing tall in the distance, an identical cabin just beside it and acres and acres of untouched land.
“Where are we?” she’d asked as a man appeared on the porch. Mitchell didn’t answer; she knew he wouldn’t. Instead, he simply parked at the base of the stairs just as the man started to descend—and that’s when Marcia realized she knew him. He was familiar, a face she had seen so many times before, but it was primarily his posture she recognized: the way both hands were punched in his pockets as he watched them all stumble out of the camper, dirty and disheveled without a possession to their names.
The way his shoulders stayed slouched like he was trying to make himself small, the same twitchy demeanor as all those times he had waited for Mitchell to slide inside of his car.
That’s one of our regulars,Lily had told her.Some rich guy who just inherited a fortune and doesn’t know how else to spend it.
Steven had welcomed them in without question, droning on about how his father had passed, how he had moved onto all this land by himself because there was no one else in his family alive to claim it. He didn’t know anyone on the island and he had clearly been lonely, inviting Mitchell to visit during all the times he had stopped by the Farm. Those little bags that he bought the only things to keep him company, the drugs blunting his boredom like a dull blade.
“What are you doing?”
Marcia snapped her neck up at the sound of a voice, Lily making her approach from across the grass.
“Nothing,” she said, slipping the diary beneath her legs as she pictured Lily bursting into the guesthouse the day they arrived. Opening up closets and pulling out drawers before grabbing a knife from a block on the counter and scratching that sentence in the depths of a desk.
Mitchell, of course, had set his own sights on the property’smain house. Then he had started planting things, picking back up on his business. Slowly spreading his tentacles wide as his fingerprints touched every inch of the place until it started to feel more like his every day.
“Pretty eyes,” Lily said as she sat down beside her. Marcia looked down, realizing her son was awake, staring up at them both. “He got those from you.”
She smiled, taking in their deep, cerulean blue.
“How are you feeling?” Lily asked next, long fingers playing with the thin strands of his hair. “All healed up?”
“Getting there,” she said, crossing her legs.
