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Now, Aria grabbed her key and slid it through the envelope, removing what looked to be a cut-out from an old and yellowed newspaper.What the heck?
Aria stared at the photograph for a long time. In it, several young women and men stood in a line at Savannah College of Arts and Sciences, all in graduation gowns, some of them laughing together and others staring into an unseen distance. Aria recognized the building behind them as the architecture building on the campus, and a stab of fear and intrigue entered her heart.
Beneath the photograph, the newspaper had listed the names of the Savannah College of Arts and Sciences architecture program graduates. The list was long, filled with names Aria would never know. But then, her eyes stopped on one that she would have recognized anywhere:
Bethany Quinn.
Aria’s ears rang as she searched the crowd to find the young woman who could only be her mother. There she stood, between Billy Rodgers and Ginny Tyson, in a graduation cap and gown, her smile electric and filled with pride. In it, she couldn’t have been more than twenty-one or twenty-two, and she held her diploma aloft as though it was the secret to the questions of the universe.
Aria collapsed on the edge of her bed and searched through the envelope for some sign of who had sent the photo. The handwriting on the envelope itself was not her mother’s, which she would have recognized anywhere.
Filled with adrenaline, Aria searched on her phone for some sign of Bethany Quinn at the Savannah College of Arts and Sciences. Aria’s mother was forty-nine, which meant that she would have graduated around 1995 — just before internet records. There was nothing online that suggested Bethany had ever been on Savannah’s campus at all.
Aria dropped back onto her pillow, wracking her brain to remember what her mother had looked like when Aria announced she wanted to go to the Savannah College of Art and Design.Had she looked joyful? Nostalgic?Had she said anything at all?Throughout that journey and even after she’d moved, Aria had felt so alone, with no help at all from her parents.Why had Bethany kept this information a secret?
Aria began to write her mother an email, one that demanded answers. But halfway through, she closed her computer. Whoever had sent this photograph wasn’t her mother. It was crystal clear that her mother didn’t want her to know about her past.What was she hiding?And how could Aria get to the bottom of it without asking her mother the truth?
ChapterEight
It was a balmy day in mid-May when Carmella dared to continue reading her mother’s diary. She’d read it in bits and pieces throughout the past couple of weeks, watching her mother fall deeper in love with her therapist, Oliver Matthews, as she avoided her husband as much as she could. Each entry threatened to break Carmella’s heart. Each spoke of a woman who was so lonely that the only person she felt understood her was the man she paid to listen to her talk.
But all that changed in April of 1978.
April 13, 1978
I’ve done something terrible. And yet, in my soul, I know it’s the most magical thing I’ve ever experienced in my life.
I had a session with Oliver yesterday that I had been looking forward to all week, counting down the hours. It was the single thing getting me through Elsa’s temper tantrums and Carmella’s sickness. (It seems like they’ve both been sick all spring.)
Yesterday with Oliver, I broke down and told him I wasn’t sure if I could do it anymore. I couldn’t remain with my husband. I couldn’t continue to think of myself as this boring, lifeless thing that was secondary in Neal’s life. And at that moment, Oliver removed his glasses, stood, and sat next to me on the couch with his hand on my knee. He’d never touched me so delicately before— I mean, he’d hardly touched me at all. He asked if he could talk to me as a friend rather than as a therapist, and I was so nervous that I just nodded. I could not breathe.
He told me:
“I meet women in lonely marriages all the time. It’s a frequent plague of our time. Normally, I do what I can to help these women heal. I help them patch together their marriages and their psyches. But with you? I struggle to know what to say because I find myself wondering why on earth you would stay with this man.”
I nearly fainted when he said that. It was beyond my wildest dreams, honestly. I wanted to fall against his chest and cry as he held me. I wanted to tell him that I never should have married him. I wanted to ask him where he’d been in my life when I’d “needed” to get married.
And then, Oliver did something insane. He took out his business card and wrote down the name of the hotel, the number of the hotel room, a date, and a time. He said nothing else as he slid it into my palm.
Wordless, I stood up and walked from the office, feeling as though I was about to float into the sky. All evening and all night, I asked myself, should I really do it? Should I really see him? Yet I knew that I’d already made up my mind.
The babysitter came on time, thank goodness, and then I walked away from the house, down the beach, then cut through several tourist houses to find this little hotel he’d picked. I know he picked it because the place is discrete. The people who own it are hush-hush about things like this, which is essential on such a small island.
I went to the hotel room Oliver had written on the card and knocked. I thought I was going to pass out with fear. Then, his voice called, “Come in,” and I walked through to find him seated on the bed, wearing clothes he always wore, his eyes alight behind his glasses. When I looked at him then, I had this feeling that I was coming home for the first time in years. We fell into bed after that. It was no longer a time for words.
Carmella continued to read, through April, into May, and finally, June of 1978. Throughout, she could feel herself and Elsa within the pages, two little things who needed their mother so badly, even as their mother was preoccupied elsewhere.
June 11, 1978
Oliver asked me to come to New York City with him for a weekend trip. I knew it was outside of reason for me to ask Neal if I could go, but then, we had a stroke of luck. Neal was asked to go to a business conference in Iowa, of all places, and he planned to go. (Note: it’s not like he asked me if he could. It was assumed that I would watch the girls.)
After I found out about Neal’s trip, I asked the babysitter if she wanted to make a ton of cash. Her eyes lit up at that, as she’s saving up to move to the city herself. I asked if she could watch the girls from Friday to Sunday, and she said that would be fine. Neal swims in cash and often doesn’t know how much he spends, so I knew that I could manipulate the books without him seeing how much I’d given her.
Oh, goodness. The trip to New York was a dream. Right before I left, I removed my wedding ring and boarded the ferry to get off this stifling island. Oliver was waiting for me on the mainland in his convertible, his hair windswept, and I dropped into the passenger side as though I do it all the time. Up in that front seat, we kissed with reckless abandon, far away from the island, my husband, and my girls. I felt like someone else. I felt free.
June 17, 1978
Neal accused me of being a bad mother today. Carmella was weeping in her crib as Elsa had a temper tantrum in the kitchen, and I just couldn’t keep up with both of them at once. He came home in the midst of all of that, and I swear, at that moment, I almost told him what I was up to, that I was in love with someone else. I tried to imagine what his eyes would do when he found out. Would he feel ashamed? Would he hate me?
