The Last Secret You'll Ever Keep by Laurie Stolarz (summer reads txt) 📕

I’m tempted to tell her I did. Would it bring us closer, make things better? I was so screwed up from the fire, I could say. I ran away, just like I did those other times. I’m not sure why. The need for escape? The desire for attention? I’m so sorry. Will you ever be able to forgive me?

Would she understand?

Could we start anew?

“I’m sorry,” I say, at a complete loss for words.

Aunt Dessa is standing now, wearing a long blue T-shirt that looks like Mom’s. She brings the covers up to my chin and kisses my forehead: a soft, warm peck. The letter M dangles toward my mouth. “Thank you for saying that, sweetie.”

What did I say? What does she think it means? I want to ask her, but I almost don’t care—at least not for now. Because right now, though I might be on the verge of sleeping, I’m sweetie once again.

NOW

33

I wake up, hours later, and check the chat feed for Peyton’s name, unable to find it. I stay in the chat room anyway, hoping she’ll show up. But two hours go by and she still doesn’t.

To keep my mind occupied, I open up a search box and type the words homeschool group, bridge project, and Hayberry Park into the search engine. I end up finding an article from two years ago. A local newspaper featured the footbridge donation. The group of students, called the Mighty Mindbenders, uses the park to do nature-based activities.

I click on the link for the group’s website. Several of the photos show the students hiking the Hayberry trails, building stick houses from fallen branches, and doing science experiments by the creek. The online calendar says the group is meeting at the park’s main entrance first thing in the morning. I plan accordingly, setting my alarm. When it goes off, I change my clothes and go downstairs.

My aunt is sitting at the kitchen island with a shoebox full of photos.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“It’s my sorry excuse for a photo album. I thought it was time I sorted it out.” She sets a few of the photos in front of me, those of her and my mother, when she and Mom were teenagers (sunning on the beach, hugging in a park, and huddled up by a campfire).

“You two looked so close.”

“We were close—at one time, that is.” She flips another photo—one that shows the two of them at a restaurant. My mother’s expression is vacant; she looks present but absent. She’s like that in another photo too, what appears to be a family cookout. While everyone else looks straight ahead cheesing it up for the camera, my mother gazes downward at her hands, seemingly lost in thought.

“How old is she in that one?” I ask, pointing at the restaurant pic.

“High school. The summer after her sophomore year.”

“And these other ones?” I nod to a picture of Mom and Aunt Dessa sitting at a park caught in a laugh, both of them wearing matching necklaces with the initial pendants.

“Before sophomore year.”

An invisible light clicks on above my head. Obviously, I knew about the attack, but I never knew how much it framed their lives, compartmentalizing events into before and after (like before and after the fire and before and after the well).

“I wanted your mom and me to be close like that again,” she says.

“Why do you think that didn’t happen?”

She gives a slight shrug. “That’s life sometimes, I guess.”

“What is?”

“Not getting to do the things you want because you think you have so much time. But sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you wind up living with regret, elbow-deep in old photos that act like ghosts.”

“What didn’t you get to do?”

She touches the letter M around her neck. “Remember this: Life is short. And time is limited.”

I nod and look away, having learned that lesson all too well.

“We need to have a talk.”

Unlike the way we’re talking now? “Okay.” I brace myself for her words by grabbing a fork and pressing the prongs into the flesh of my thumb.

“You seemed really confused last night. You said some things.”

Is she referring to my confusion over the garden gnome? Or to what I said after that, when she came back to my room, when I’d been on the verge of falling asleep?

“We’re not going to talk about it now,” she says.

“Why?” I ask.

She delves back into the box and starts to hum, flipping through photos, sorting them into before-and-after stacks, evidently done talking.

I’m done too. I head out the door, eager to lose myself in research. The #22 bus is about a ten-minute walk. It’ll take me into the city of Crestwood, to Hayberry Pond, which isn’t so far from the main entrance of the park. I begin in that direction. The neighbor’s dog barks as I pass by. I grab the wasp spray in my pocket—not for the dog but to help calm my nerves—and continue forward, eventually turning a corner.

A dark gray pickup crosses the intersection, headed in my direction. The truck passed me once already. I swivel to look as it passes by again. It stops and turns into someone’s driveway, then backs out onto the street. It comes this way again, and I take a mental snapshot: Ford, older model, dented fender. I reach for my phone, wanting to get a photo.

The truck drives by before making a U-turn and heading straight for me. It pulls over to the side of the road. I look toward the driver, but the windows are blacked out.

The driver’s-side door whips wide open.

Without even thinking, I start to cross the street in front of the truck just as I hear my name, the familiar male voice. It stops me in my tracks.

Garret’s voice. He exits the truck. It’s only then I realize: I’m standing in the middle of the street, trying to breathe at a normal rate, despite the knot inside my chest.

“Terra? Is everything okay? I saw you,” he continues, when I don’t respond. “I