I looked at my mother, my face twisted in anguish. “I miss her so much, Mom, I want to die. I want to die.”

My mother was crying as hard as I was. She stroked my forehead. “I know you loved her, sweetheart.”

“I can’t stand the pain. What do I do?”

She pulled my head in next to her cheek. “You just keep on living, Eric. And you hope.”

“Hope for what?”

“For grace.”

CHAPTER Thirty-nine

Though your sins be as scarlet,
they shall be as white as snow…

ISAIAH 1:18

It snowed Saturday night.

Outside my window the winter wind had rippled the snow like sand dunes, piling drifts in crusted peaks.

I put on my tennis shoes and climbed out my window onto the crystalline blanket. The snow slid up my pants and bit my legs.

For the first time since Grace left, I returned to the clubhouse. Our footprints from that night were gone, evidence covered over at a crime scene. Everything was white.

The clubhouse didn’t look the same to me. It was the same feeling I had at the funeral service staring across the room at Grace’s body. She was gone. The clubhouse was just a corpse.

I kicked at the snow by the door and pried it open.

I crawled in and turned on the light. There was frost on the walls and the Christmas tree was still there, the water in its bucket frozen hard. Grace’s things were there, just as she had left them. On top of the sleeping bag was her yellow diary.

I held it for a moment before I opened it and began to read what she’d written. She had recorded all that she’d been through, the horror and the joy. My emotions rose and fell with each page. The happiness she felt that her mother had found someone and her disappointment when she saw the real side of the man. She wrote of the first time Stan had gotten to her. And the day she realized she was pregnant.

I suppose the diary was a prayer of sorts, written only for God’s eyes. On nearly every page she wrote of her hopes of finding someone to help her. Someone to love her. That is, up until the day she met me. As I read each page I realized what my role had been in her life and how much I meant to her. The last thing she wrote was this.

He is the only thing on this earth I believe in. Eric is my Hawaii.

I stared at those words. Then I closed the book and held it near my chest and I curled up in a fetal position. I had been there for a long time, when I heard something outside. I looked over to the door. Joel was there, looking at me. He was afraid of me, but he was there, just like he always had been.