Page 72 of Little Secrets
“I know that. I do.”
“But Marin, I’m grateful.” Frances takes a long, deep breath. “I’m so grateful that the nightmare of not knowing is over. And now I feel… I feel…”
Frances starts sobbing again, collapsing against her, and Marin takes her in her arms and starts sobbing, too, crying for her friend’s loss and her grief and her guilt, and for her own loss and her own grief and her own guilt, crying because she loves Frances, and she feels her, and she feelsforher.
“What do you feel?” Marin whispers, holding the other woman tightly, stroking her hair. “Tell me.”
“Free.” Frances chokes the word out, and then she sobs again. “I feelfree.”
Marin holds her for a while longer, until Simon comes looking for them and it’s time to go back inside. And all Marin can think, as she watches her grieving friend circulate around the small donut shop, making sure her guests have sandwiches and vegetables and donuts and coffee, is that she resents the other woman for saying it. Marin resents her for feeling it, for confessing it, and for it being true.
Frances is free.
Marin is jealous, and she hates herself for it.
Chapter 26
For about four or five seconds, first thing in the morning, Marin doesn’t remember. Everything feels normal, like it would for any other person rousing from sleep.
And then it hits her. And it’s like losing him all over again. The pain is intense, paralyzing, the pressure bearing down on her chest, threatening to snap bones and pulverize muscles, squishing the life out of her because she dared to do something as simple and natural as wake up.
Marin opens her eyes and fixes her gaze on a spot on the ceiling. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. After a dozen or so breaths, the pain in her chest subsides.
It’s been four hundred ninety-three days.
Rolling over, she reaches for the phone to check the text that woke her.You alive?
She replies to Sal with sleep-numb fingers—Good morning—then puts the phone back on the nightstand.
She’ll never understand how Sal can run a bar and wake up earlier than she does, but he’s never needed much sleep. Back in college, they’d often crawl into bed together at two a.m., horny and drunk, the alcohol in his system having zero effect on his ability to perform sexually. The next morning, she’d wake up to the smell of fryingbacon and scrambled eggs as he made breakfast for the two of them. It was the opposite of Marin, who functions best on a full eight hours—nine, ideally—and who hasn’t had an unmedicated sleep in four hundred ninety-three days.
After Thomas’s funeral, she and Jamie left Big Holes at the same time. They paused to chat by their cars, which once again ended up parked side by side. Perhaps it was the cathartic effect of the funeral, which allowed all of them a good cry at multiple points throughout the day, but Jamie finally revealed her story to Marin. Her daughter has been missing for a little over two months, abducted by her ex-husband, whom Jamie described as a narcissist. Marin was familiar with the word, but not in the clinical sense, so Jamie explained it.
“Aaron has an inflated sense of self, and he hates everything that doesn’t reflect how amazing he thinks he is. Everything always had to be perfect. He wanted the perfect house, perfect job, perfect wife, perfect child. He was supercritical of me, of what I ate, what I wore, how I styled my hair. He would take over every conversation, belittling anyone who didn’t agree with him. We would lose friends because he was so obnoxious. His secret weapon, though, was gaslighting. He was good at making you feel crazy, and for years I thought I was being hypersensitive to things, when I know now that he was being an asshole. Ultimately, he cheated,” Jamie said with a shrug. “And had the audacity to tell me it was my fault, that if I’d taken better care of myself, and better care of him, he wouldn’t have felt the need.”
“Bastard,” Marin said, and meant it.
“Truth be told, I was relieved when I found out. At least I finally had a concrete reason to leave him, something I could explain in one sentence to anyone who asked. Saying you split up with someone because they’re exhausting, cruel, manipulative, and a liar can be a little much.” Jamie’s smile was bitter. “The custody battle got ugly. I wanted full custody of Olivia, and so did he. He dragged methrough the mud, but the judge ultimately sided with me. A few weeks later, he took her. Waited for her outside her friend’s house, two hours before I was due to pick her up. The friend’s mother—who was aware of our situation—wasn’t home. It was only the grandmother, who saw my daughter run to her father and didn’t think to question whether or not the handsome, charming dad was supposed to be there. I didn’t know Olivia had been taken until I arrived two hours later.Two hours,” she repeated, her voice quivering.
“How old is your daughter?”
“She’s eleven.”
“They issue an AMBER Alert?”
Jamie nodded. “They did. Based on things he’d said during the custody dispute, I had reason to believe he was going to take her far away and never bring her back. They found his car a mile away in a shopping mall parking lot. There was no way to know what he was driving after that, and no way to know where they went.”
“I’m so sorry,” Marin said.
Jamie looked at her. “I’m sorry, too,” she said. “I know we all have our own unique stories, but I feel like I said the wrong thing when I saw you at group last week. I told you at the end that I felt better, and that wasn’t fair.”
“It’s perfectly okay—”
“No, it’s not,” she said. “It’s not fair to you. Regardless of the issues my ex-husband has—and trust me, he has a lot—he adores Olivia. Wherever they are, wherever they end up, he’s not going to hurt her. This, I know. Unlike you, and Simon, and Lila, and Frances—up until she found out about Thomas—I don’t live in constant fear that Olivia isn’t going to survive. The only fear I have is that I’ll never see her again. Not because she’ll be dead, but because he’ll turn her against me. It’s exactly what he’d do, paint me as the bad guy so she’ll never want to come home.” She glances up at the gaudy yellow Big Holes sign and then down at her shoes. “That’s why I feltbetter after the group meeting. Which makes me an asshole. I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t make you an asshole. It makes you a mother.” Marin touched Jamie’s arm. “I’ve learned not to make comparisons. Hell is hell, in all its incarnations.”
Unlike with Jamie’s daughter, no AMBER Alert was issued for Sebastian. His kidnapping did not fit the criteria. It was ridiculous when the police first explained this to Marin and Derek. AMBER Alerts were used in cases of child abduction, and nobody was disputing that itwasa child abduction. The video made that clear.
