“But you didn’t.”
Lena shakes her head, wiping her nose with the back of her wrist. “He wanted his mom to see it. That much was clear. She wasn’t any saint, but she was devastated. She didn’t want a scandal. You don’t understand. The Prices thought Charlie was perfect. They were heartbroken. Their marriage was so screwed up. It was a disaster. His dad was gone all the time, his mom was depressed and drank too much. But they loved Charlie . . . at least his mom did. She funneled all her hope into him. I don’t know how she’s surviving. But at least it gave her closure. Even after they found the jacket with his blood on it . . . she was like me. She couldn’t accept it. But this let her accept it. We organized the memorial service the next morning.”
“Do you still have the note?”
Lena nods, leveling me with a hard gaze. “His mom was looking for it after the funeral. I didn’t say a word. It’s horrible, I know, but I couldn’t give it back.”
I’m silent. I don’t want her to feel judged.
“There was something about it all that felt off,” she goes on. “At first I couldn’t quite figure it out. I kept thinking, maybe it’s part of the act. The letter . . . parts of it were nonsensical. His mom chalked it up to the mental state he must have been in when he wrote it. Maybe he was panicked, or maybe he was high. But in the letter, he said everything would come together on eight-eighteen. That was the day he planned to follow through with it. But August eighteen is still a few days away. Part of me thinks he’s still around, planning something for then. That the rest of it was just a grandiose diversion. I know it’s nuts but it’s my gut feeling. That’s why I’m searching for him. I’m impulsive, Aubrey, but my feelings are so often right. Because why was it so cryptic? He didn’t come right out and say, This is what I’m going to do. And a normal person doesn’t commit suicide by crashing a plane. There are lots of easier ways to go. Sometimes I think I need to forget about it, accept he’s dead like the rest of you. I’ve tried to make myself. I know it’s the smart thing, the logical thing. But I just can’t feel his death. It’s not even that I want him alive. I know everything’s ruined. I don’t want him anymore. I know loving him wasn’t real, because it wasn’t real for him. But I keep thinking, I’ll look, and I’ll find him, and I’ll force him to take responsibility for something. He just can’t get away with this. I can let go of him, but not what he did to us.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you want to make this my fault? Even if I did set something in motion, would you have preferred to go on like we were, in the dark?” This last part triggers it: the tears, the frustration, even relief. And in their wake, guilt.
“I still feel as though telling Charlie about Adam was what set him off,” Lena says after a minute of silence. “Even though I know that wasn’t your intention.”
All of a sudden I know: It doesn’t matter that Charlie was doing the same thing to me that I did to him—a fact I didn’t even know then. It doesn’t matter that he made me unhappy a lot of the time, and that the relationship probably never should have happened in the first place. It doesn’t matter how many excuses I made to do what I did that one night in D.C. with Adam—or the lies I told myself to explain away all the nights after Charlie found out my secret, when I stayed with him out of necessity.
They’re just excuses for a series of awful events that I never, not in a million years, would have thought I’d be capable of. I lied, I cheated, and I played with fire. The reasons that led me to do these things are separate. And now, instead of feeling culpable, I feel overwhelmed by relief. Somewhere, deep down, I worried there was a chance he was alive. Now all I need is the journal to feel truly safe again.
I sink down next to Lena, feeling the full weight of these revelations. Not because of what it might have pushed Charlie to do, but because of what it’s done to Lena and to me—my values, who I am as a person. I think of my parents, and who they raised me to be. I think of the way I’ve pulled away from them in recent months. When stuff like this happens and you make these choices, you can’t go back to the way things were. You’ve changed yourself, and maybe you can never recover.
15
Lena