The website described long-term care, supervised accommodation, and memory support.
My stomach twisted.
“Is that where she was?”
“I don’t know,” Michael said.
Vanessa had followed us inside.
When she saw the screen, she stopped.
I turned toward her.
“That’s it, isn’t it?”
She said nothing.
“That’s where you kept her.”
Her eyes filled with tears.
“Daniel, please.”
“Was she there?”
“Yes.”
The word was barely audible.
Everything around me seemed to disappear.
The guests.
The music.
The flowers.
The wedding cake.
All I could see was Vanessa.
The woman I’d loved for five years.
The woman who’d held me while I cried over my mother’s grave.
“You told me she was dead.”
Vanessa lowered her head.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
She began crying.
“I thought it was the only way.”
“The only way to do what?”
“To keep everything from falling apart.”
I stared at her.
“What does that mean?”
She wiped her face.
“Your mother didn’t approve of us.”
“I know.”
“She kept telling you things about me.”
“She was worried.”
“She wanted you to leave me!”
Her voice rose.
Several guests turned toward us.
I remembered those arguments.
My mother had never liked Vanessa.
She said Vanessa was too controlling.
That she isolated me from old friends.
That she answered questions for me.
I’d dismissed it as ordinary tension between a mother and her son’s girlfriend.
Now those memories felt different.
“What happened to her?” I asked.
Vanessa shook her head.
“I can’t explain it here.”
“Then we’ll go somewhere you can.”
I started toward the exit.
She caught my sleeve.
“Daniel, if you go to Rosewood tonight, you could make everything worse.”
I looked at her hand.
Then at her face.
“Worse than believing my mother was dead for three years?”
Vanessa released me.
And for the first time, she had no answer.
