So while Grace’s well-meaning family and friends were wrong with their choice of words, they were right in the sense that she needed to move forward with her life, and that Arthur could and would forever remain part of that journey. In many ways, Grace’s grief was like Penny’s disease—incurable. No treatment, not even time, could make it go away entirely.
Tying an apron around her waist, Grace approached Ryan at the central prep station and gave him a quick peck on the cheek, catching the annoyed look in his eyes. In his mind, family affection didn’t belong in the workplace. He wasn’t wrong, but Grace loved her boy, so he’d have to endure.
Ryan was a tall, strapping twenty-one-year-old with sandy brown hair and a handsome dimpled smile. He should have had a girlfriend, a life path, been on his way to becoming a lawyer as he’d planned, but instead he’d retreated into himself, grown sullen and distant—except while serving his customers, who were increasingly scarce.
“How are we doing on orders?” Grace asked.
She scanned the tables covered with checkered tablecloths and realized there weren’t enough people eating to make payroll.
“We need salads prepped,” Ryan said as he ladled sauce onto pizza dough with the care of an artist applying the first bits of color to a blank canvas. He layered the pie with mushrooms and peppers as quickly as if he’d grown an extra set of limbs. It was in these moments, watching Ryan work with supreme confidence, that Grace paused to think that while Arthur might not have wanted this life for his son, he’d have been damn proud of the pizza maker he’d become.
“On it,” Grace responded. She was good with a knife, but not as good as Annie, who could dice and slice veggies faster than any Earp brother could draw his gun.
“Where’s Annie?” Grace scanned the kitchen but saw only Sarah and Dylan, two young people from town who made twelve bucks an hour serving customers. That alone would have given Arthur a coronary if he hadn’t already had one.
“She’s in the back, building boxes. I call it wishful thinking. Where have you been, Mom?”
“You know where I’ve been.”
Grace did not elaborate. She gave no details of the day or Penny’s surprise appearance. Ryan didn’t like to talk about his sister, because of his dad. Arthur died not far from the new oven Ryan had purchased. Penny was sitting on the floor near his lifeless body, the cordless phone used to take orders clutched in her hand, busy signal sounding like an alarm—beep, beep, beep. Her expression was a blank, her eyes glassy, as if she were sleeping while awake.
An hour or so before that, everything was fine—relatively speaking, for it had been an extremely difficult and stressful day. Shortly after Penny and Maria were arrested for writing those horrid murder fantasies, Arthur began looking at inpatient treatment options. He and Grace had been away overnight, having made a six-hour drive north to visit a residential treatment facility in Maine and returned home numb and heartbroken.
“If you think this is easy for me, you’re wrong,” Arthur had said to Grace in bed the night before the tour. “I love that girl so much.” His voice broke with grief, and it shattered Grace to hear him so distraught. “But we’re in over our heads here, honey. We have our other children to think about.” There were tears in his eyes. “What happens if it gets worse? Grace, you have to admit it. We can’t control her.”
It was true. Penny was on a variety of medications, but none suppressed her alters, and nothing dissuaded Eve from making thinly （or not so thinly） veiled threats. Honestly, life would have been manageable with any combination of Penny, Ruby, or Chloe, but with Eve in the mix, it was too volatile for everyone’s comfort.
The thought of locking Penny away someplace was absolutely crushing. When Grace closed her eyes, she didn’t see a troubled and angry teen, but rather a sweet little girl in a rain-soaked yellow dress, shivering and alone in the park.
Grace would never forget the guilt that consumed her on the drive north to tour the facility. Annie had agreed to stay at the house to look after the kids, because Penny, who grew up working with Auntie Anne, wasn’t a problem for her, which meant Eve wasn’t either.
There were no programs that specialized in DID, but Moose Creek was ranked near the top of treatment centers for teens with bipolar disorders. They seemed best equipped to take on Penny’s unique case, though at a price that would put quite a strain on them financially.
“There are varying levels of care here,” Arthur had said, trying to sound encouraging as Grace reviewed the intake forms. “As Penny gets better, we can visit her more frequently.”