I, Coraline Margaret Golliher Allbright, shot my husband, Ernt Allbright, when he was beating me.

I weighed his dead body down with animal traps and sank it in Glass Lake. I ran away because I feared going to prison, even though I believed then—and now—that I saved my life that night. My husband had been abusive for years. Many Kaneq residents suspected the abuse and tried to help. I didn’t allow it.

His death is on my hands and on my conscience. Guilt has turned itself into cancer and is killing me. God’s justice.

I killed him and hid the body. I did it all alone. My daughter had nothing to do with it.

Sincerely, Coraline Allbright

Beneath her mother’s shaky signature was her grandfather’s signature both as an attorney and as a witness, and a notary seal.

Mama coughed into a ball of tissue. She drew in a phlegmy breath and looked up at Leni. For a terrible, exquisite moment, time stopped between them, the world caught its breath. “It’s time, Leni. You’ve lived my life, baby girl. Time to live your own.”

“By calling you a murderer and pretending I’m an innocent? That’s how you want me to start a life?”

“By going home. My dad says you can pin it all on me. Say you knew nothing about it. You were a kid. They’ll believe you. Tom and Marge will back you up.”

Leni shook her head, too overwhelmed by sadness to say anything more than, “I won’t leave you.”

“Ah, baby girl. How many times have you had to say that in your life?” Mama sighed tiredly, gazed up at Leni through sad, watery eyes. Her breath was wheezing, labored. “But I am going to leave you. It’s the thing we can’t run from anymore. Please,” she whispered. “Do this for me. Be stronger than I ever was.”

*   *   *

TWO DAYS LATER, Leni stood just outside of the sunroom, listening to Mama’s wheezing breaths as she talked to Grandma.

Through the open door, Leni heard the word sorry in her grandmother’s trembling voice.

A word Leni had come to despise. She knew that in the past few years Mama and Grandma had already said what they needed to say to each other. They’d talked about the past in their bits-and-pieces way. Never all at once, never one big end-up-crying-and-hugging moment, but a constant brushing up of the past, reexamining actions and decisions and beliefs, offering apologies, forgiveness. All of it had brought them closer to who they were, who they’d always been. Mother and daughter. Their essential, immutable bond—fragile enough to snap at a harsh word a long time ago, durable enough to survive death itself.

“Mommy! There you are,” MJ said. “I looked everywhere.”