“Are you all right?” Mary asked.
Hannah shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe my square’s telling me I’m destined for greatness and to run away from home. Because as far as I can see that’s basically the point of it.”
But she sounded sad.
Lark looked around, and then she stood, and Mary’s heart squeezed because she could see, in the tremble in her daughter’s hands, the pale color of her face, just what she was about to say. “I have something to tell you all.”
Her story, the one that Mary already knew came spilling out, along with the fact that she’d told Ben today, and then sent him away. “Gram knew,” she said. “The whole time. And she understood. But we didn’t talk. We didn’t talk ever. I could have told her. She could’ve told me. We could have helped each other heal. We were so busy trying to protect each other. But I think we’re all a whole lot stronger than we’ve given each other credit for.”
Hannah was stoic, Avery was wiping tears away from her cheeks.
“I just think we need to... I think we need to stop trying to be the version of ourselves we think each other wants us to be. Or even just the version you think you have to be.” She directed that last part at Hannah.
“You don’t have to be anything except for you,” Mary said. “And it’s up to you what that is.” She looked around. “That goes for all of you. I’m so sorry that we didn’t talk. Not before all of this. Maybe things would’ve been easier.”
“Gram wasn’t good at it either,” Lark said softly. “I don’t think it’s a magic gift you have, talking about things that are hard. You just have to choose it.”
Mary nodded. “Like doing any hard thing. You have to be willing to stumble around in the darkness, and make wrong turns.” She took a breath. “I was so hurt by your grandmother. By the things she didn’t teach me, and I tried to pretend I didn’t need any of it. I tried to pretend I was fine. To take on my father’s lessons so I wouldn’t miss hers. It’s why sewing was so hard. It’s not just that I don’t know how, but that I was angry she didn’t teach me. That she taught you. Like a secret language she kept from me.”
“Oh, Mom...” Avery said.
“But I can’t blame her, not forever. It’s up to me to make the relationship I want with the three of you.”
She looked down at the book that she was holding in her hands, and then she turned the page. And that entry stopped her cold.
I’ve received a proposal from another man. He’s kind. He’s offering me something more than what I have. I like him. Perhaps that will be enough. But I can’t allow him to call me Dot. Dot is who I was to George. And it will always be his name. Our secrets will always be ours. Our love will always be ours. I asked him to call me Addie, for my middle name. Maybe I can simply be someone new.
Dot’s diary, July 1946
“It’s Mom’s,” she said, looking up around the room. “This is my mother’s.”
“What?”
She felt light-headed, the full realization of what she was reading echoing inside of her.
Dorothy Adaline Dowell.
“We always called her Addie, and never... And I never knew... I never knew.”
“What?”
“She was in love before my dad. And he died. She had a... She had a baby.” She found Lark’s eyes and met them. “She had to give her up. She was forced to give that baby up. She was raised here in town.”
“Oh my gosh,” Avery said. “Mom, do you have a half sister?”
There were so many unanswered questions, and Mary didn’t know how to go about getting the answers. Because her mother was gone. Because they had never talked. Because this was what happened when you didn’t talk. Secrets touched everyone. What if they had known? What if they had always known that her mother was forced to give up a child?
What if never telling was why she had never healed. If it was why she had run away.
And she had known about Lark. About Lark’s baby. What kind of comfort could she had offered her granddaughter. She could see that very same question reflected in Lark’s eyes.
It was grief, fresh and bright and new. And it burned like a flame.
“Poor Gram,” Lark said. “Poor Gram going through that not being able to tell anyone.”
Of course Lark would have nothing but sympathy.
“But if she had told,” Mary said. “Maybe it would’ve changed things.”
“But she can’t now,” Hannah said. “Gram can’t make it different now.”
“We can,” Lark said. “We can find out who it is. We can find out who the man was. Who the baby was.”
And Mary’s first feeling was resistance. A desire to keep things from changing, because they’d already changed so much.
But there were so many wrongs, so many things that had happened that couldn’t be changed.
She couldn’t go back and raise her girls so that they would feel like they could talk to her. She could only talk to them now.
She couldn’t go back and know her mother better. She could only try to understand her now. Just like she couldn’t bring Lark’s baby back, or go back in time and sit with her in that hospital and hold her through her grief. No, she couldn’t do any of that.
She could make the life she wanted now though. Learn what she wanted. Forget being so afraid to fail.
She turned to the next page in the diary, then the next, and shifted it, and when she did, a photograph fell out.
Lark crossed the room and picked it up. “George Johnstone,” she said, looking at the picture. “That was his name. I bet this was him.” She held it up, the photograph of a handsome young man in a military uniform.
“Maybe we can find the family. Maybe
