Page 143 of The Bitterroot Inn (Jamison Valley 5)
“I hired a company to go through the house and pack it all up,” he said. “Everything got shipped to Nell because I figured she had nothing else to do, she could sort it all out. I took my personal stuff, what I could fit in the truck, and she got the rest.”
He took another drink of his water and paused his story while Coby came running back in to demonstrate how he’d just learned to do his car in a spinning circle.
“Good job, buddy,” Hunter said. “Can you go into the living room and play for a sec while Mommy and I finish talking? Then I’ll come in and we can practice it together.”
“Okay.” Coby smiled and off he ran.
“Coby?” I called before he disappeared. “I love you.” I’d been saying it as much as I could.
He kept running. “Love you too! And Hunter!”
“I missed him,” Hunter said when he disappeared.
“He missed you too.”
Coby had asked after Hunter more times in a day than I could count. Now that he was back, the three of us would be spending some quality time together. And I would finally get some sleep. When he was gone, the bed was too cold and empty. I’d been tossing and turning for weeks.
“Anyway,” Hunter said, continuing his story. “Everett had an old diary in his room. None of us had bothered cleaning out his room because it had been so empty, but when the movers had come to box up all of the stuff, they found an old diary in his closet. They sent it along with everything else.”
“And Nell found it.”
He nodded. “It was by her bed in Grand Rapids. When I got to her house, I started packing things up, looking for reasons why she would have flipped and taken Coby, and I found that diary.”
“What was in it?”
He sighed and shook his head. “It was filled with page after page of hateful things about her. I had no idea Everett hated her so much but he had written it all down. What an awful mother she had been. How he thought she was ugly. All of this horrible stuff.”
I’d never heard of a boy keeping a diary before but I guess it wasn’t impossible, especially if he was young. “How old was he when he wrote it?”
“That’s the crazy part. He was just a kid, an angry pre-teen whose mother had just married a new guy, and he’d gotten a younger brother he hadn’t wanted. A lot of it was how he wanted things to go back to just the two of them.”
“So Nell found this diary and started to question herself as a mother.”
“Exactly,” Hunter said. “I think my statement at the custody hearing reinforced some things already going through her head.”
I knew all about Mommy guilt. If Nell had been reading that diary over and over, I could see how it would have made her crazy. She’d seen Coby as her second chance at motherhood and had taken him to try again.
“I get it.” I nodded. “I don’t forgive her for taking Coby, but I get it.”
“Yeah. Me too.” Hunter hung his head. “I wish I had known about that diary. Maybe I could have stopped this from going so far.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. I think if Nell had been in her right mind, she could have seen past the diary. I think there was more going on in her head than you’ll ever know.”
Hunter sighed. “You’re probably right.”
“Do you think that’s why she filed for custody of Coby? Because of the diary?” At the time, I’d thought it was only a way to punish me for killing Everett, but now, I wasn’t so sure.
“Partly. I think the things we talked about before are still true. She wanted her revenge. I mean, she wanted him before the diary. Maybe just finding it made her push harder. And then when she actually saw Coby . . .”
“She snapped.”
He nodded. “I found an old picture of Everett at her house. They look so much alike at this age, it’s uncanny. I think when she saw him in the café, it was the last straw.”
Not for the first time, I pitied Nell. She hadn’t been a great mother, but she’d clearly had her regrets, and she’d never get the chance to make amends with Everett.
“It was so sad going through her stuff.” He’d sold everything of hers in Grand Rapids, other than her personal belongings now stored away. “She really loved Dad. She sent him love letters and kept them all. She kept every birthday, Valentine’s Day or anniversary card he ever gave her. And I think in her own way, she loved Everett too. She was proud. She kept boxes full of his art projects and report cards.”
“Then why would she be so cold?”
