Sucking in my breath to stop the tears, I force myself up off the ground. I didn’t come here to fall apart. Skirting around the wreckage, I take the path to the tree. The grave is still covered over. So, it wasn’t something I imagined in the darkness. It dawns on me only now that it must have been Willa who filled it back in, while I was at the cottage trying to figure out whose body it was.

Avril Island has become a graveyard for the main players in my mother’s game of betrayal. The only one who made it off this island alive was her, which is no surprise at all. I see now that she lived her life in survival mode, always calculating her next move. Using people to fill her up, care for her, make her matter, provide things that she herself couldn’t, then discarding them when they turned on her or let her down. Had her childhood made her that way, or had she come to it naturally?

“I’m sorry, West,” I say to the ground. “I’m sorry that you loved her as much as you did and that it brought you only pain. I will always remember you. Your kind words, your patience with my questions, the way you taught me about birds and plants and fishing and wood carving. Good-bye. May you have found peace, wherever you are.” I bend down, put my fingers to my lips, and touch the freshly turned earth.

I’m sorry for West and for Willa, but mostly I’m sorry for Ezra, May, and myself, victims of the decisions and actions our parents made. As children, you just trust in your life and in your family. You have no choice; it’s the only way to survive. You convince yourself that what seems wrong is right, that what feels bad is not so bad at all, that what you are being told must be the truth because it’s coming from a parent. When you grow up and are finally able to step behind the curtain of childhood, the truth can be blinding.

I say good-bye to Avril Island. I will not be back. There is nothing left here for me anymore but the past, and I no longer want it. This truth pushes deep sadness into my bones, but at the same time, gratitude settles into my heart for having had Avril Island at all—for the chance to swim her waters, to be in her forest, to lie on her dock and sleep in her beds. This place holds my family history, both good and bad. And I can’t help but feel that the only way I would ever have escaped it was by having it burn to the ground.