Emily, I found some new friends. They’ve lost their children, too, just like I have.
I imagine her response: Come on, Mom. You told them you can’t forgive Harris and all they did was throw a bunch of sad faces at you. They’re just as judgy as the rest.
“Yeah, well, at least they believed your story.”
It isn’t a story. It’s real. It’s what happened to me. Harris killed me. You have a right to be angry about that, Mom. Nobody should try to force you to forgive him.
Of course, it’s me responding, not Emily. She isn’t here, and she never will be. I’m alone in a graveyard on a freezing day, talking to myself. I wouldn’t exactly call that healing or moving on.
I find Emily’s headstone. It’s pink marble and reads, Emily Cheyenne Gardener 1999–2015 Beloved daughter, with this inscription underneath: “If there ever comes a day when we can’t be together, keep me in your heart. I’ll stay there forever.”
The quote is from Winnie-the-Pooh, Emily’s favorite book when she was a little girl. Matt chose it, as well as the pale pink marble, and if you don’t look at the dates, it would be easy to think she died at eight rather than fifteen. Matt liked to think of her that way, young and uncomplicated. When the pictures from her secret Instagram accounts came out, he refused to look at them. I got it, of course. But I couldn’t look away. To me, they were more evidence of naivety than worldliness. She was a little girl playing with a camera, much the way she used to play dress-up alone in her room, never imagining that, after her death, those pictures would kill her for a second time. She just wanted to be liked. I tried explaining that to Matt, to Luke, to one of the reporters, whose name I can no longer remember. All of them got that same pitying look in their eyes. Nobody understood.
I bend down to set my flowers on the grave, and my breath catches. There’s a bouquet here already—a dozen white roses. They’re fresh and alive, and with the weather the way it is, they couldn’t have been placed on Emily’s grave much earlier. Who could they be from?
There’s a tingling at the back of my neck—that primordial sense that someone is watching me—but I’m not afraid. I feel protected.
At the center of the bouquet rests a business card, glossy black against the ivory blooms. I remove it and turn it over, my breath coming out fast, a burst of condensation in the still air. There are two words on the card—the same font as the one the silver-haired woman gave me in the city, thin white letters against the black.
A?layan Kaya
The Weeping Rock. The unbreakable thing Niobe turned into, once her grief became too much.
“CAMILLE?”
I’m leaving Cumberland Farms, a to-go cup grasped in my hand, when I hear my name. My first impulse is to ignore it. I can’t even remember the last time I was happy to run into someone I know up here. She says my name again, and I recognize her voice—Denise, the second witch in the texting trio. Her daughter, Chloe, was in Emily’s class and had made her cry in the seventh grade by posting pictures on Instagram of a sleepover she hadn’t been invited to. By the beginning of high school, Emily had taken to calling Chloe and her friends “basic bitches,” and to be honest, I’ve always felt the same about their mothers.
I keep my eyes aimed at my shoes, but Denise is relentless. “Camille? Camille Gardener?” She’s facing me, the two of us the only people on the sidewalk, and so I have no choice but to acknowledge her. “Hi, Denise.” My voice comes out a rasp. I’m no good at this anymore. There was a time when I was the outgoing one in my family—an extrovert with golden highlights and fake boobs who wore makeup and went to PTA meetings and smiled a lot and did 99 percent of the social planning, but I can safely say I’m no longer that person. Since Matt left, I’ve sometimes gone for days without speaking and, like any unused muscle, my personality has atrophied. I can’t fake a smile to save my own life, especially with a basic bitch like Denise. I try to move around her, but she puts a hand on my arm.