Sorrow looked up, and with the motion a wave of dizziness passed over her. Her eyes were hot with exhaustion, her blood buzzing with too much caffeine. It felt as though the hours since she’d found Cassie in the cemetery grove had passed in the bewildering whirl of a dream. She had called Dr. Parker to get through to Verity. She had called her father. She had gone to the police station as soon as Verity came home in the morning. She had given her statement, she had told the truth, she had answered all of the sheriff’s questions. Her part in it was supposed to be over now. She had been eight and Cassie nine; under Vermont law neither of them was criminally liable for the fires they had set.
But Mr. and Mrs. Abrams had known exactly what they were doing when they’d covered up Cassie’s role in Patience’s death. There would be consequences for them, although nobody seemed to know yet what they would be. Sorrow knew the whole town would already be talking about it—the tragic Abrams Valley girls, those who were lost and those who remained—but for once the prospect didn’t anger her. She only felt tired and sad, and a pang of something almost like sympathy, that this little mountain town had to figure out, once again, how to deal with such terrible things happening to its girls.
“I hope it does,” she said. Verity was looking at her across the car. “Rain,” Sorrow clarified. “I hope it rains.”
“Let’s go home,” Verity said.
Sorrow leaned her head against the seat as Verity drove them out of town. She closed her eyes, lulled by the quiet rumble of the car. When she opened her eyes again, they were passing the Abrams house. Sorrow wondered if she should say something, if she had to be the first to break the silence. Then they were passing the cider house, passing the hill, and before she could decide what to say her phone rang.
She was expecting Dad, but the name on the screen was Sonia.
“Oh. I should . . . Oh. Can you let me off at the bottom of the driveway?”
Verity was already slowing to make the turn. She let Sorrow out by the mailbox and headed up to the house, and Sorrow answered the call. “Hello?”
There was a pause, then Sonia’s voice, surprised: “Sorrow! Hello. I thought you—”
Sorrow felt a tired pang of guilt. Sonia had thought she wouldn’t answer, and Sorrow couldn’t even blame her. “We just got home,” she said. “From the police station.”
“Oh, Sorrow. That must have been hard. How are you doing?”
“I don’t know,” Sorrow said. “I’m tired. I don’t know what else to . . . I don’t know.”
“Your mother is home with you?” Sonia asked, and she sounded so hesitant, so unsure, like she didn’t even have the right to ask that question. Sorrow hated hearing that uncertainty in her voice. She hated knowing she was responsible for putting it there.
“Yeah. She’s home now.”
“That’s good,” Sonia said.
They fell into an awkward silence. A few cool drops of rain tapped Sorrow’s face. She brushed them away. She couldn’t think of a single thing to say. She was too worn down, too wrung out. But she didn’t want to hang up either. She leaned against the wooden fence and held out her hand to catch the raindrops.
“Sorrow.” Sonia’s voice was soft, almost pleading. “Why didn’t you call? Why didn’t you tell us what was happening? You didn’t have to deal with all of that by yourself.”
Sorrow’s eyes stung; she squeezed them shut. “I wasn’t by myself. Grandma’s here.”
“I know. I know she’s taking care of you, but—why didn’t you call?”
It was no use. The tears were going to fall no matter what she did. She was so tired of holding them in like a stone in the center of her chest. “I don’t know. It just didn’t seem . . . I don’t know.”
“Your father told me about the conversation you had yesterday.”
Only yesterday she had sat in the hospital parking lot with her father on the phone, frustrated and alone and so very angry. It seemed ages ago now, but the hurt was still raw inside of her, piled up on top of everything else.
“I don’t think I want to apologize to him,” she said.
“I’m not asking you to,” Sonia said. “I think you have a lot of reasons to be angry. I think it’s good for you to be angry.”
“You do?”
There was a brief pause; then Sonia went on: “You always try so hard not to be, Sorrow. You’re always trying to be calm and avoid upsetting anybody and that’s . . . Sometimes you’re trying so hard it hurts to see.”
Sorrow’s face grew warm. She had never known anybody noticed. She had always hoped it looked like being relaxed, unruffled. She had never known that Sonia or anybody else might look at her and see how desperately she was trying not to fall apart.
“I didn’t know a lot about your childhood until recently,” Sonia said. “When I met your father, it was still so fresh and painful for you, he decided it was best to let Dr. Silva deal with it, so I tried to stay out of it. I didn’t want to make things worse for you. And that’s what I was thinking this year, when you were so upset after spring break. I was so used to thinking it was something that had nothing to do with me that I thought—no, I convinced myself I would only make it worse by sticking my nose in. You know I have a tendency to do that, and it’s not always helpful.”
Sorrow didn’t know what to say to that. She didn’t know if Sonia’s interfering nature would have helped or hurt when she was trying to remember Patience, trying to decide if coming back to Vermont was the right idea, trying to find a way forward when the tangled tragedies of her past kept tugging her back. She did think she would have liked Sonia to try, but she didn’t know how to say that either.
“And I was . . .” Sonia sighed. “I was reeling a little bit. I was angry at Michael. It’s something of a shock to learn that you’ve been married for seven years to the kind of man who would have stayed away for weeks when one of his daughters had just died and the other one was all alone in such a terrible and scary situation.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” Sorrow said weakly.
“Yes, Sorrow, it was, and you’re allowed to be angry about that. You were eight years old. You never should have felt even for a second like you were responsible for your mother’s well-being. And I know you love your mother and your grandmother. I know they did the best they could for you. But your father didn’t. He should have been there. When he first started telling me about it back in the spring, when you were so lost and we didn’t know what to do, it was—I had to figure out how to deal with it.” Sonia took a breath, released it, shuddering and slow. “But I didn’t want to make it harder for you, what you’ve been going through now. I didn’t want to get between you and your father, not when you needed him. I don’t think I made the right call, letting you sort it out on your own.”
Sorrow couldn’t help it: she let out a startled little laugh.
“What?” Sonia said. “Is that funny?”
“No. Yes. No. It’s really not.” But she was still laughing, trying to catch it and bottle it down, not quite succeeding. “It’s just that on the scale of parents making really bad decisions I’ve dealt with just in the last twenty-four hours . . . that doesn’t even rate. That’s, like, farm-team-level parenting mistakes. You’re nowhere near the big leagues.”
She tried to laugh again, but it turned into a sob, and Sonia let her cry. When she felt steady enough to speak again, she said, “It’s kinda starting to rain. I should get inside.”
“Okay. We’ll talk when we get there. Michael sent you our flight itinerary, right?”
“Yeah.”
“We are going to talk. All three of us. Okay?”