For two decades, I mourned my missing wife and daughters, until my son tore open a basement wall and found the chilling truth she hid from me.
The room tilted.
“What did you say?”
“Laura isn’t dead. She staged it. The crash, the shoe, all of it.”
“You’re lying.”
“I’m not. I swear on my life, I’m not.”
“Diane, don’t you dare—”
“Laura isn’t dead.”
“She called me three days before. She said she couldn’t fight me anymore, that she had to disappear to protect the girls. She begged me to keep quiet.”
“And you did.”
“I was terrified, Daniel! If I told you, you’d blame me. Everyone would blame me. And they’d be right.”
I gripped the back of the chair to stay standing.
“You let me grieve. You watched me bury an empty coffin. You held my sons while they cried for a mother who was alive.”
“I know.”
“She begged me to keep quiet.”
“You sat in my kitchen on Christmas. You hugged my boys. For twenty years.”
“I know what I did.”
She reached into her purse with shaking hands and pulled out an envelope, yellowed and creased.
“She wrote to me. Once. Two years after she left.”
“Give me that.”
I tore it open. Laura’s handwriting. A coastal town postmark I’d never heard of.
“She wrote to me. Once.”
Diane, please. Just give me time. The girls are safe. I’ll come home when I can. Don’t tell him yet. I need to be strong enough first.
My eyes blurred.
“She never came home, Diane.”
“I don’t know why. I waited, I kept waiting, and then too many years passed and I was too afraid to—”
“Where is this town?”
“Daniel—”
