“I assumed they would have gotten rid of all of Henry’s pictures,” Verity said.
A small, sour fear at the back of Sorrow’s throat subsided. That wasn’t a denial. It wasn’t a refusal to talk. It was, perhaps, an opening.
“Julie said they still have boxes of them in the attic,” she said. “I don’t even know who he was. I’ve never heard anything about him.”
“You remember Eli Abrams, right?”
“Their grandfather? Ethan and Julie and Cassie’s? Yeah. A little. Patience called him Mean Old Eli.”
“Henry was Eli’s younger brother.” Verity traced a fingertip over the photograph, the pressure so light it barely bent the paper. “They weren’t anything alike. Henry was this bohemian hippie type. He traveled a lot. He’d gotten arrested protesting Vietnam. That kind of thing. Eli considered him an embarrassment.”
Sorrow heard the fondness in her mother’s voice. “You liked him.”
A small, sad smiled played over Verity’s lips. “Your grandmother liked him. A lot. They were going to be married.”
“What?” Sorrow’s voice rose so loud the orderly across the room gave her a sharp look. “Are you serious?”
“I supposed it does seem hard to imagine,” Verity said. “But my father had been dead for more than a decade by the time Henry moved back to town, and my grandmother for a few years. Mom and Henry were both in their forties. They weren’t kids. They were doing what they wanted, never mind what anybody else said. Eli hated that they were together, of course, but they didn’t care. They were in love.”
Verity hadn’t once taken her eyes off the photograph.
“That doesn’t explain why you were all friendly with Hannah Abrams,” Sorrow pointed out.
“She wasn’t Hannah Abrams then,” Verity said. “She was still Hannah Lowell when I met her.”
“Where was that taken? I don’t recognize it.”
“Massachusetts. Amherst. We were at college together.”
“You went to college?” Sorrow managed not to shout that time, but she felt every bit as sideswiped as she had a moment ago. “You never told me that.”
“Hearing all of Henry’s stories about traveling around was what made me want to go,” Verity said. “He was the reason I even applied. He was always saying, there’s a big world out there, why not go see it? And I thought . . . it wouldn’t be so bad, to get away from Abrams Valley for a while. To get away from a town where just hearing my name was enough for people to see a whole long history of violence and tragedies they would never understand.”
Verity would have heard it too, all through growing up: You’re the Lovegood girl. There had always been more meaning behind the words than Sorrow knew how to translate.
“I never graduated,” Verity said. “I didn’t even finish my first year.”
“But you met her there? You were friends?”
A brief silence. Sorrow could hear the murmur of the TV from across the room, where the puzzle lady was watching a morning talk show, and the chatter of nurses in the hallway. One laughed, a discordantly bright sound. An elevator dinged. The hospital smelled like disinfectant and filtered air and, faintly, drifting from a break room somewhere, popcorn.
“Yes. We were close. She was a couple of years ahead of me,” Verity said. She still hadn’t looked up from the photograph. “She was from Boston. She was smart. She was beautiful. I’d certainly never met anybody like her. Certainly not in Abrams Valley—not anybody who would ever talk to the Lovegood girl, anyway.”
“And you were friends,” Sorrow said. Her voice was shaking and she felt an ache in her head, guilt twisting around and telling her she didn’t have to ask, she didn’t have any right to demand explanations of Verity just to satisfy her own curiosity. “Were you friends? What do you mean by close?”
Verity sighed and set the photograph on the cushion beside her. “It was more than twenty-five years ago. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
And that, Sorrow thought, wasn’t any kind of answer.
“Maybe not,” she said. “But why don’t you want to tell me?”
“We were different people then.”
“Different people who were really close? So close you never told anybody about it? Because you look really close in that picture.” Sorrow jabbed her finger at the photograph. “But Julie got yelled at for just asking about it, and now you’re refusing to answer.”
“Why does it matter, Sorrow?” Verity asked tiredly.
Sorrow sank back into her chair. “I don’t know. Maybe it matters because of all those times you told me and Patience how much we would ruin everything if we even talked to the Abramses, like the worst thing we could do was try to make friends like kids are supposed to. And nobody says anything that extreme about random friends from twenty years ago. Not even you. Maybe it matters because you were conveniently leaving out the fact that it wasn’t about our family history or the stupid feud or people being assholes a hundred years ago at all. It was all about you.”
Verity said nothing, and for a long, crushing moment Sorrow was certain she had gone too far. Verity didn’t look angry. She didn’t look disappointed. She only looked drained. The slump of her shoulders and lines around her eyes made Sorrow want to shrivel up, to back off and apologize for asking, to plead forgiveness for pushing and swear to never speak of it again.
But she didn’t. She was so fucking tired of being led around by that pathetic cringing instinct of hers. She was so tired of how assiduously it lied to her. It had always lied to her: If you are good, if you are calm, if you don’t upset your mother, if you don’t make her sad, everything will be okay. She had been so careful after Patience died. She had crept through the house like a ghost. She had filled the days with gentle little-girl chatter and cheer. She had made tea. She had done her chores. She had never caused her mother or grandmother a single moment of trouble, for the entire span of those two terrible weeks, and it hadn’t mattered. Verity had still swallowed a handful of sleeping pills. Grandma had still sent her away. None of it had mattered. Her family would have fallen apart even if she had been having screaming tantrums rather than trying to vanish.
“Were you friends?” Sorrow asked. “Or were you . . . was she your girlfriend?”
Verity looked down at the photograph again, but she left it lying on the arm of the chair. “We didn’t call it that,” she said. “We didn’t call it anything.”
“But that’s what it was?”
“I suppose.”
Sorrow took that in for a moment, turned it over in her thoughts. It wasn’t surprise she felt, she decided. It was the uncomfortable sort of understanding that came with figuring out something she ought to have figured out years ago, if only she had been able to look at her mother and see more than her isolation and eccentricities.
“What happened?” she asked.