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“I know.”
She continues to look so horrified that—though searching for my dad is the last thing I feel like doing—I wave her toward Beck’s desk. “Okay,CSI. Let’s do this.”
She sits before pulling out her laptop, and we return to our search, working in silence. After thirty minutes, I’ve added five more names to the list of people who won’t want to admit they slept with a student.
“This is pointless.” I sigh, shoving my laptop away.
I look over to where she’s staring intently at her screen. “I don’t think it is,” she says quietly.
She turns her laptop toward me, and I jolt as if I’ve been shocked.
The eye shape. The cheekbones.
They’re mine.
He’s young and handsome, but that’s not why I continue to stare. There’s something more about the picture, something I can’t place. A distant bell rings in the far recesses of my brain. “I feel like I’ve seen him before.”
Her eyes widen. “Really? You know him?”
I shake my head. “It’s not exactly that. I just...There’s something familiar there.”
I skirt around the desk to read his name. Walker Collins.
It takes a second. It takes a second forCollinsandWalkerto register. For me to connect it to a photo I once saw of a happy little boy camping with his family on Shelter Cove, so cheerful on the other side of that paper. A little boy who’s no longer alive.
Which means this hunt was truly for nothing. And Mimi, the woman who’d said she was going to adopt me then skipped town without saying goodbye, was my grandmother.
“He’s dead,” I announce quietly. “I knew his mom.”
Her face falls. “Are you sure?”
“I’m pretty sure,” I reply.
It took us ages to find this guy, but we manage to locate an article about his death in seconds.
The body of a man who allegedly jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge Tuesday night has been identified as that of UC-Berkeley associate professor Walker Collins. The body was recovered 10 miles from the bridge late last night. Collins, a graduate of MIT and Oxford, was well-liked, according to a campus spokesman. Errol Laudberg, Dean of Economics at MIT, said he was “devastated” by the loss. “He was a brilliant economist and a good friend. It is a loss for our entire field, and a very personal one for those of us lucky enough to have known him.”
Collins is survived by his parents, Francesca and Duncan Collins, and his sister, Natalie Collins. He will be laid to rest on Saturday at St. Paul’s Church in Tacoma, Washington. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to the National Suicide Hotline.
My throat aches, though sadness over the death of a man I never knew makes no sense. Maybe it’s simply that looking at his picture is like looking at a version of myself. Maybe it’s because I understand too well the kind of despair that would lead you to jump off a bridge. The hardest part of it all, though, is that my own grandmother knew me well...and decided I wasn’t worth her time.
I didn’t bring enough to the table for her, just like I didn’t bring enough to the table for anyone else. Not my father, not my mother, and not Caleb.
I came into the world by accident and made most of my foster parents miserable. Someone married me because he thought he had to and I cheated on him and cleaned out a bank account.
And then there’s Hannah—to whom I was going to give everything, all the love no one else had ever wanted from me. She stared up at me with absolute faith in those brief moments she was alive, but then I failed her too.
It’s hard to fault Mimi when it’s so clear she made the right choice.
33
KATE
The news about my father sits like a brick in my stomach for the next week. There’s no word from Holzig, either. It was unrealistic of me to hope I’d get the job in the first place, but that doesn’t make the silence hurt less.
I just wish all this news, or lack thereof, hadn’t occurrednow, just before Hannah’s birthday. I have to go to her grave, which means I can finally stop lying to Ann, but I’d hoped to feel a little stronger than I do at this point.
On the eve of her birthday, before Beck gets home, I pull out the box I keep under my bed. It only brings pain, but I return to it compulsively because it’s all I have left. The child I never raised is a wound inside me that just won’t heal, and this box is how I scrape away the scabs to make sure of that. Because she deserves to be remembered.
