He’s in a better place.
That’s how it all ended: that comment. Even after it was deleted, they were still able to trace it—and it brought them not to Valerie’s place, but to Abigail Fisher’s, a nondescript little rental she had moved into halfway across the country. And that’s where they found her, waiting, almost like she was relieved to get caught: sitting in a little nursery set up with toys and dinosaurs and piles of books.
All the things a child would need to be happy, healthy. Loved.
I still think about how it must have been for her: a childless woman just trying to grieve and move on—but she couldn’t. She couldn’t move on. Instead, she held on to it, refusing to let it go, pushing it around and around until Valerie approached her one night, late, and told her a story.
A story about a boy with an unfit mother. A boy who would be better off with somebody else.
In a way, I understand it. I really do. Nothing about grief makes sense: the things it has us do, the lies it leads us to believe. Valerie simply told her what she wanted to hear, and she let herself believe it—that it was for the best, for everybody—so she swallowed her guilt and her fear as she met her that night, late, fingers digging into Mason’s little body as he was passed between them in the dark, his stuffed dinosaur slipping from his grip and getting stuck in the mud.
Then she strapped him into her car seat and took off fast, disappearing into the night.
I walk down the hall now, toward Mason’s nursery, and approach the door that I’ve always kept closed. I touch my hand to the knob the way I’ve done so many times before—too afraid to twist it, to peer inside, to catch a glimpse of everything I had lost—but now I do. I open it gently. I let myself look. And there he is, just as I’ve imagined it so many times before: There’s Mason, sitting up in his bed, cracking that toothy little smile when he sees me. He’s holding that same stuffed toy, the mud cleaned off before being removed from evidence and returned back to us, a gentle reminder of the life with me I know he’s probably forgotten.
He was gone for an entire year, after all. An entire year that I will never get back.
And that could have been the end of it: Abigail Fisher driving fast down the interstate, moving them both into a new home. A new life. Mason growing up with another mother, his young memory erasing me completely, little glimpses coming to him only as a foggy dream, a distant echo. Something fractured and broken and warped with time. He might have been happy, even, whatever story Abigail told him planting roots and turning true—until she started seeing me in the news each day, begging for him back. Until the doubts had crept in, forcing her to come to my talks and listen to me speak. Until she started seeing me not as the monster Valerie had made me out to be but as a heartsick mother desperate for her child—so she memorized my speech and cried as I told it, knowing she had made a mistake, but still, trying to convince herself that the story had been true. That she did what was right.
That he was in a better place.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
If you haven’t made it to the end of the story yet, I ask that you stop reading this now and finish first—what comes next will surely spoil everything.
Before this book existed on paper and it was still just an idea in my head, the idea was basically this: What would it feel like to be trapped inside the mind of a sleep-deprived mother who, deep down, believed that the disappearance of her child was somehow her fault? When I started wondering why she would believe that, it hit me like a truck: It’s because mothers—and, honestly, women in general—are conditioned from birth to feel guilty about something. We always think things are our fault. We always feel the need to apologize: For being too much or too little. Too loud or too quiet. Too driven or too content.
For wanting children more than anything or for not even wanting them at all.
I won’t lie to you: I was afraid to write a book about motherhood without first being a mother myself. I make some strong statements in this novel, and I was worried about making those statements without coming from a place of personal experience. There are many things about motherhood that I simply cannot understand, and in those instances, I relied heavily on research, as well as speaking to friends and family members who are mothers to help me sort through it all. And while I acknowledge that there are certain emotions and experiences that I cannot fully appreciate yet, I also believe that every woman can understand the unspoken expectations of it: the weight of motherhood that seems to be ever-present throughout our entire lives from the very moment we’re given our first doll. Not only that, but because of the judgment that emanates from others once we make a decision of our own, oftentimes, we feel like we can’t even talk about it.