*
Once Lexi started walking down the beach, she couldn’t stop. She was going in the wrong direction; her bike was parked in the public area at the end of the dead-end road. But she couldn’t turn around, couldn’t watch Jude bundle Grace up and take her away, as if it were dangerous for Grace to know her own mother.
A cool summer breeze plucked at her hair. Her eyes watered in the wind. Still, she put her hands in her pockets and kept walking. She turned and looked back down the beach. Jude was still there.
Lexi wanted to be tough and hard, to feel that she was justified in coming here and wanting her daughter back, and she did feel it—justified, for all the reasons she’d given Jude. Mostly because the Farradays had had a chance to make Grace happy and they’d failed.
But Lexi’s guilt and remorse, always floating inside of her, were rising now. She had destroyed the Farradays. In the beginning, she’d hoped that her years in prison would heal them somehow, but she knew better than anyone that time and distance didn’t heal you. It had been na?ve to assume that Grace could be raised as Mia and Zach had, in the bosom of love and happiness. So in a way, it was Lexi’s fault that her daughter was unhappy now.
All of that was true, and all of it weighed heavily on Lexi, but there was something else too, a lightness that she hadn’t felt in years. It was hope—a bright beam in the blackness of her guilt.
She could lift Grace up. She could be the kind of mother she’d dreamed of having. Maybe they wouldn’t have money or a big house or a new car, but Lexi knew better than most that love could be enough. Eva had proved that. She hated to hurt the Farradays—and Zach—again, hated it to her marrow, but she’d paid enough for her mistake.
The decision anchored her. Wiping her eyes, she looked around, surprised to see how far she’d walked. Behind her, the public beach was a gray comma of sand tucked tightly against dark woods. She couldn’t tell if people were still there or not.
She started to turn back when a flash of hot pink plastic caught her eye. She paused, looked up the beach.
It was the playhouse, with its fluttery pink pennant and mock stone turret.
She didn’t really make a decision to go that way. Rather, she just found herself moving toward it, walking, walking, and suddenly she was standing there, on the sandy beach, in the shade of a giant tree, looking at a little girl’s playhouse.
But in her mind, she was on another beach, years ago, standing under a different tree, in the glow of distant house lights, with her best friend and the boy she thought she’d love forever.
We’ll bury it.
A pact.
We’ll never say good-bye.
How shiny their na?veté had been, like polished silver, glinting in the darkness. She had never believed in anything as much as she’d believed in the three of them at that moment.
She bent down, peered through the small, plastic-shuttered window to the castle’s interior. Several Barbies lay in plastic beds, their clothes scattered around. An open Dr. Seuss book lay beside an empty juice box.
Here was where Grace played alone.