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Chapters (45)
  1. I know you'll never forgive me...
  2. Part One - Your Father
  3. Chapter One
  4. Chapter Two
  5. Chapter Three
  6. Chapter Four
  7. Chapter Five
  8. Chapter Six
  9. Chapter Seven
  10. Chapter Eight
  11. Chapter Nine
  12. Chapter Ten
  13. Chapter Eleven
  14. Chapter Twelve
  15. Chapter Thirteen
  16. Chapter Fourteen
  17. Chapter Fifteen
  18. Chapter Sixteen
  19. Chapter Seventeen
  20. Chapter Eighteen
  21. Chapter Nineteen
  22. Chapter Twenty
  23. Part Two - Your Mother
  24. Chapter Twenty-One
  25. Chapter Twenty-Two
  26. Chapter Twenty-Three
  27. Chapter Twenty-Four
  28. Chapter Twenty-Five
  29. Chapter Twenty-Six
  30. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  31. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  32. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  33. Chapter Thirty
  34. Chapter Thirty-One
  35. Chapter Thirty-Two
  36. Chapter Thirty-Three
  37. Chapter Thirty-Four
  38. Chapter Thirty-Five
  39. Chapter Thirty-Six
  40. Chapter Thirty-Seven
  41. Chapter Thirty-Eight
  42. Chapter Thirty-Nine
  43. Chapter Forty
  44. Chapter Forty-One
  45. About the Author

So he lied. He had to erase me from your story. There was no Rebecca Colder, no night of love in a blizzard last January. The woman who left the baby at his doorstep was a mystery. She put that sweet child there, thinking she’d left you at a church, and then she drove off into the night and disappeared. All that remained was the owl. The sign from God that brought Tom home to find you. The little girl who would become his daughter.

And I lied, too. I told the worst lie of all.

Rebecca, what did you do?

I lied to Darrell when he asked me that.

I lied again to Norm when he asked me the same question later that day. Rebecca, what did you do?

I lied to the judge when I pled guilty and accepted my punishment.

If I hadn’t lied, they never would have stopped looking for you. Rumors would have spread across the state. Questions would have been asked. Sooner or later, they would have found Tom, and they would have found you.

You wouldn’t have the wonderful life he gave you, Shelby.

So I had to lie.

Rebecca, what did you do?

I lied. No matter what it did to me to say those words, I lied.

I told them that I’d buried my little girl in the woods and that they would never, ever find her.

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-One

And now you know the truth, Shelby. That’s how your story began. The rest of it, everything that followed, belonged to you and Tom, not to me. Life passes so quickly, doesn’t it? Yours did. Mine did, too.

I spent twenty years in prison for the murders of my ex-husband and my baby daughter. Don’t feel bad for me about that. I did terrible things, and regardless of what had been done to me, I had no illusions that I should have escaped punishment. I also won’t give you any illusions that it was anything but hard. For months, I did nothing but cry every day, drowning myself in self-pity. For months after that, I became angry and combative with the guards and the other prisoners, and none of that went well for me. And then more months—years—passed in a dreary endlessness of boredom and routines, every day exactly like every other to the point of numbing my brain into a kind of dead despair. The only things that would break up the routine were not the things you wanted. Fights. Bullies. Threats. Twice, there were riots. When that happens, you find yourself craving boredom again.