Chapters (51)
- Cover
- Dedication
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Thirty-Four
- Thirty-Five
- Thirty-Six
- Thirty-Seven
- Thirty-Eight
- Thirty-Nine
- Forty
- Forty-One
- Forty-Two
- Forty-Three
- Acknowledgments
- P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
- About the Author
- About the Book
- Also by Alison Gaylin
- About the Publisher
My beautiful, sweet future daughter, I don’t want to tell you what happened at the Arco station. I can’t find words to put on this page that won’t start me shaking and crying and wanting to die. What I can tell you is this: Gabriel definitely killed Jenny. Before Arco, I had the tiniest spark of hope that I had been right about hearing Jenny’s breathing over the phone, that she really was out there somewhere with people taking care of her, that Gabriel had only told me he killed her because he wanted to hurt me. Before Arco, I thought, He wouldn’t do that. Gabriel LeRoy may be a lot of terrible things. But he would never kill a little child. I was wrong, though. He would. He did. He killed his own half sister. And now, I feel such strangling hate toward him, I will never be able to breathe again until I snuff him out like a match.
June 21, 1976
3:00 A.M.
Dear Aurora Grace,
We are here, at last. Everyone is asleep, and I am using a lantern to see the page. There is no electricity. The water comes from a well, and the compound itself is just a few tents set up on the desert sand. It’s much smaller than I thought it would be, but just like Elizabeth said, there are llamas and chickens who live behind fences. They are so cute. I want to play with them all. It was cold when we got here, but Elizabeth and I built a fire in the pit. It warms my skin and smells like home is supposed to smell, and I may finally sleep for the first time in days. But not yet. I can’t sleep yet.
Aurora Grace, I need to tell you something, and it starts with Gabriel sleeping. He was sound asleep and snoring in the back seat when Elizabeth first pulled through the metal gate. When she parked the car, he woke and said, “Are we there yet, Baby Blue?” And, to be honest, my heart melted a little. I blame it on all the unhealthy things I’ve been doing for the past few days—the lack of sleep and the lack of food, the drags off Elizabeth’s cigarettes and the swigs from her vodka bottle and constantly worrying about cops and the awful things I’ve seen, the way those things have changed me. I think all that poison mixed up in my head like ingredients thrown into a blender, and my brain drank it all and turned to mush. So when I looked at that monster, that child-murderer, he just looked like a boy to me.
“We’re here,” I told him.
Gabriel got out of the car, and he looked around. “Where are we?” he said.