Were they?
“I know I don’t talk about this much,” Violet went on, “but back when my parents died—” Caitlin stepped through the doorway into the dining room, where it was quieter. To say that Violet didn’t talk about her parents much was an understatement. She never spoke of them. Caitlin suspected that she felt as if doing so would somehow be disloyal to Gram.
“It sounds bad to say this, but I was so young that after a while what bothered me the most was not that I missed my parents specifically, but just that I missed having parents, you know? There would always be these Mother’s Day teas in our classroom, and father-daughter dances around Valentine’s Day, and I would have this crippling anxiety beforehand that I’d be the only one without a mom, without a dad. The teachers always offered to let me stay home if I felt uncomfortable. But Gram made me go. ‘You have to face it, Violet,’ she’d say. ‘You have to face it.’ And you know what? She was right, I did. I had to face it in order to feel better about it. Because actually, those things were never as bad as I’d imagined they would be. Everyone else went out of their way to make me feel included, and it was a little embarrassing sometimes, but overall, it was actually a really good feeling. And if I’d stayed home, I would have been miserable all day. I had to face it in order to feel better about it. And I think that became, like, the way I’m programmed to deal with things now. So here I am in this situation where I just want to face Finn. I need to face him. But he’s not here to face. And I’m so pissed off at him that he didn’t face me, with whatever this is even about. I don’t know what to do with myself.”
Something about Violet made more sense then. Caitlin had always marveled that her friend was a woman who was not only capable of vacationing alone, but content to; who not only followed the woman who raised her to her dream retirement destination, but did it without complaint, even though Caitlin had always suspected that Asheville wasn’t Violet’s first choice of locales. Violet didn’t just face things. She faced them with resolve, with absolution.
And then there was Finn. Caitlin remembered a particular time he had barely left home for months, getting off the couch only to answer the door when she came over with food or a movie. He’d had a good enough reason, but still.
“Finn might not be the best at facing things,” she said cautiously.
“You think?” Violet retorted, and beneath the sarcasm, Caitlin could hear her anger about to boil over.
“Sorry. That was a rather pointless thing to say.”
“You know, the thing is, when he came looking for me, after all that time, I thought, here is a guy who is not going to just accept the hand that fate dealt him. Here is a guy who is going to go out and try to find what circumstances took from him, and make his own fate. I loved that! And then all these years later, for him to turn around and do this to me, as if he’s trying to undo it all…” Violet started to cry. “It’s too late to undo it all! We have Bear—he has Bear! I mean, he has to bring him home. He can’t just disappear forever. Not with my baby boy.”
Caitlin rested her forehead against the cool wall as Violet broke down. What kind of person was she not to tell Violet where Finn was right this instant? Finn wasn’t the only one who was bad at facing things. At this moment, she hated herself beyond recognition.
Her mind raced, searching for a way she could orchestrate having Violet show up at the cabin and discover Finn and Bear on her own without Finn thinking that Caitlin had given him up. If she made Violet promise to tell Finn that she’d had a key all along and had gone there on her own, would he buy it?
That wasn’t a risk she could afford to take.
Besides, she couldn’t tip Violet off even if she wanted to, not over the phone. Surely the FBI had Violet’s line tapped. If a call came in from Finn, they’d need to be ready to trace it. If Caitlin said anything suspicious now, even an offhand remark that would lead Violet to Finn, she’d be implicated immediately. And that, too, would ruin everything.
She heard the muffled sound of Violet blowing her nose. “If he only had come to me about … whatever this is.” She sniffed. “We could have faced it together. Or at least, I could have faced him. If I knew where he was right now, mark my words, Cait, I would make him face me. Whatever it took, I would not let him leave until we talked this through. Until I figured out a way to … at the very least make him give Bear back. Oh God, Cait, it’s so quiet here, it’s deafening, I want to tear my skin off—I just want Bear back.”
*
Awake in bed that night long after George had fallen sleep, Caitlin couldn’t stop thinking about Violet saying that after a while, she hadn’t missed her parents in a very specific way, just the idea of them, the role they had played. If something were to happen to pull Caitlin out of their lives now, would Gus and Leo forget her? They might hang on to a fleeting memory here and there, but she knew there was no way that they’d ever know the depth of her love for them—how they filled up her days and her heart and her mind. How they were her life.
And what about Bear? How long would Finn need to keep him away before he had a hard time conjuring Violet’s face, her smell, her laugh? Caitlin had watched Violet doting on Bear since birth; he had transformed her every bit as profoundly as Caitlin herself had been changed by motherhood. Every day that Bear was apart from Violet was a day that the two of them didn’t have the simple but infinitely deep comfort of their bond. Caitlin knew she could not be complacent about something that grave and face herself in the mirror. And for what had Finn stooped to these depths, anyway? Why was he doing this?
Caitlin didn’t know the answer, but she kept circling back to the way she could find out. She didn’t like it, but there was one solution between sacrificing her own family to restore Violet’s and taking the chance that Finn would disappear again.
If Violet couldn’t track Finn down and face him right now, Caitlin could do it for her. She could find out what was at the bottom of this and make him see that there had to be a better way through it.