“Theo,” I correct her.
“What?”
“His name is Theo.”
She wipes at her cheeks, the tears dried up now. “Theo,” she amends.
“And my name is Calla.”
Her eyes have stopped blinking, her mouth drooping at the corners. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry for all of it.”
I don’t know what to say, how to piece together seven years of being trapped in a place, forgetting who I used to be, when my mother knew exactly where I was. I feel angry and sorry for her, I want to blame her for it all—but I know that I can’t. I have my own festering regret, my own responsibility for the things that have happened.
She lowers her head, gathering more words together in her mind. “I loved it there, for a time. I thought maybe you stayed because you loved it too.”
I touch the necklace against my shirt, counting through each tiny silver book, trying to dig through the cluttered mess of my mind, pinpointing all the moments that felt real inside Pastoral. “It was my home,” I admit. The truth. Even if I never intended to stay in Pastoral, even if the lies Levi told us kept me there longer than I should have been, it did become my home. And in some ways, it was a balm for my broken soul, forgetting everything I left behind in this world: my mother, the boy who died while searching for a place that only existed in my mind, and even the reason I came to Pastoral in the first place—to find Cooper, a man who was already long dead when I arrived.
“When you were little, I used to tell you stories,” Mom says now. “They were fairy tales about a forest and a girl who vanished inside it. They were tales I remembered from Pastoral.” Her mouth quirks to the side, almost a smile. “I think it’s why you wrote your Foxtail books. They were based on the stories I told you as a child. You were writing about the forests of Pastoral, you just didn’t know it.”
“You told me those stories?” It feels like a riddle finally stitching itself back together, the thread made of my mother’s words. When I was young, she told me the tales of the wheat farmer’s daughter—the girl who lived in the woods when the town was first built. A story I would later grow up to write about in my books.
But Levi had used that same story to make his lies true, to convince us the forest was infected with an illness. When in truth, perhaps that young girl merely wandered into the woods and got lost, never to return.
It was a tale that grew and became something different each time—as stories tend to do.
I let my gaze settle on my mom, the warmth in her face, the distant look in her eyes like she too is recalling her time in those woods. “The Pastoral you remember is not what it is now,” I say. “The people who live there are afraid.”
Her expression drops, turns cold. “Afraid of what?”
“Disease. A sickness that we’ve feared for years—but it was never real.”
“I don’t understand.”
If I wasn’t so exhausted, so lost in a sea of my own thoughts, I might cry. I might scream. But instead I stand mute, staring at my mother in a hotel room that feels like a midway place between an old life and an unknown one I haven’t figured out yet. “I know you don’t understand,” I say. “You’ve never understood. But I am not the daughter you raised; I’m someone different. And I think, for the first time, I know who I am.”
“Maggie,” she says, and now she reaches out for me, touching my arm. Growing up, she rarely placed her arms around me unless I was sick, rarely brushed my hair away from my face. She kept her distance. And now I understand why: She saw in me the man, and the place, she was trying to forget. A past she was trying to rid from her mind.
I was an outsider in my own home.
I meet my mother’s ivory-blue eyes, unblinking, and I feel sad for her: this awful secret she’s kept, the thing she’s held on to all these years, only ever revealing small clues to me as a kid—stories that rooted themselves inside me. As if those woods, as if Pastoral had been calling to me all my life, urging me to come back.
“Come home with us,” she says at last. “You can start your life again.”
I smile at her, but it feels like a wince. “My life didn’t stop just because I was gone. I have another life now, and a husband.”
She lowers her hand from my arm. “You don’t believe that, do you? That he’s really your husband?”
White spots of anger burn against my eyes. “I forgive you, Mom,” I say, instead of the thing I want to say. “I forgive you for not knowing how to fit me into your life when I was younger, and for still not knowing how. But thank you for telling me the truth that day at the ferry, and thank you for sending Theo to find me. But I can’t go back home with you and Dad. I can’t go back to my life in Seattle, either.” Although I suspect my home in Seattle is long gone. After seven years, my parents have surely boxed up my things and sold off the old house where I once lived alone.