Dad asked to see me. Rachel said I didn’t have to go. For three days, I refused. Then I agreed to a supervised visit at the detention center. I didn’t go to forgive him. I needed to hear whether he could tell the truth when he had nothing left to gain.
He sat behind the glass in a plain jumpsuit, unshaven, his cheeks hollow. He looked smaller than I’d ever seen him.
“Lauren,” he whispered into the phone. “I never wanted any of this.”
“Did you tell them where Mom was going?”
A long silence. “Yes.”
“Did you know they might hurt her?”
“I thought they only wanted the documents.”
“Did you follow her?”
He looked away. “Yes.”
“Did you see the accident?”
He nodded.
“Was she alive?”
He covered his face. I waited. Finally, he whispered, “When I got there, she was still breathing.”
The room seemed to disappear.
“Did you call an ambulance?”
“I tried. Arthur said if I involved the police, the girls would be next.”
“So you left her there?”
His silence was unbearable.
“YOU LEFT HER THERE?”
He flinched. “I was scared.”
I looked at him through the glass, the man who made pancakes every Saturday after the funeral and held her sweater against his face on the kitchen floor.
“Mom was scared too,” I said. “She still tried to save people.”
I hung up the phone. He shouted my name as I stood, and I didn’t turn around.
For weeks afterward I barely functioned. I started therapy and walked for hours. One Sunday morning, Tessa found me sitting on my kitchen floor holding Mom’s yellow mug, which Dad had given me months earlier.
“I used to think Dad was the good parent,” I whispered. “Every Saturday after she died, he made breakfast. I thought it meant he loved her.”
Tessa sat down next to me.
“Maybe he did love her,” she said. “But loving someone doesn’t make what you do to them okay.”
For once, she wasn’t performing wisdom for a camera. She was just telling me what she’d learned. I rested my head on her shoulder, and we sat there until the sunlight moved across the floor.
Adrian Hawthorne is a celebrated author and dedicated archivist who finds inspiration in the hidden stories of the past. Educated at Oxford, he now works at the National Archives, where preserving history fuels his evocative writing. Balancing archival precision with creative storytelling, Adrian founded the Hawthorne Institute of Literary Arts to mentor emerging writers and honor the timeless art of narrative.