Chapter 6: The Things She Didn't Want to Know
I showed Ruth the message.
She read it twice.
Her expression didn't change.
"He's frightened," she said.
"He should be." I set the phone face-down on the table.
"But he's also right that I don't have the full picture yet.
I only have Danny's notebook."
"And the photograph."
"Which proves they knew each other.
That's all it proves on its own." I looked at her.
"Ruth, is there anything else?
Anything you haven't told me?"
She was quiet for a moment.
Long enough that I knew the answer before she spoke.
"Danny had a friend," she said.
"A boy named Thomas.
They were close — the three of them were, before your family moved to the street.
Thomas was there that night too.
He saw Gerald at the shed." She paused.
"He told me, years later.
He said he'd always been afraid to say anything because Gerald's family had money and influence, and Thomas's family had neither."
"Is Thomas still alive?"
"He's seventy-one.
He lives in Millhaven, about forty minutes from here."
I stood up.
"Can you call him?"
Ruth already had her phone in her hand.
Thomas answered quickly, as if he'd been expecting the call.
Ruth spoke to him for less than two minutes, then held the phone out to me.
"He wants to talk to you," she said.
I took it.
"Thomas?"
"Mrs.
Marsh." His voice was older, rougher, but steady.
"Ruth told me about the notebook.
I've been waiting a long time for someone to find that notebook."
"You knew about it?"
"Danny told me he was writing everything down.
He made me promise that if anything happened to him, I'd speak up." A long pause.
"I was nineteen when he d*ed.
I was scared.
I told myself I'd do it when I was older, when I had more standing.
Then the years just—" He stopped.
"I'm sorry.
I should have spoken a long time ago."
"Will you speak now?"
"Yes," he said.
"Tell me what you need."
I looked at Ruth across the kitchen.
She gave me a small nod.
"I need you to write down everything you remember," I said.
"Everything you saw that night.
And then I need you to be willing to say it to someone official."
"I'll do it," Thomas said.
"I've owed Danny that for fifty years."
After I hung up, I sat for a moment with the phone in my lap.
Claire arrived an hour later with her husband, David, who was a retired county attorney.
She had called him on the way over without telling me, and when I saw him walk through the door, something in my chest released — just slightly, just enough.
"Mom." Claire sat beside me.
"David thinks we should talk to someone at the district attorney's office.
Not the police — the DA.
Someone who can look at the notebook and Thomas's statement together and tell us whether there's a case."
"Is there?" I asked David.
He sat across from me, his hands on his knees.
"Honestly?
A forty-five-year-old case with a deceased witness and a secondhand notebook is a hard road.
But if Thomas's eyewitness account corroborates the notebook, and if Gerald's behavior today can be documented—" He paused.
"It's not impossible."
"He sent me a threatening text," I said.
David looked up.
"Don't delete it."
I turned my phone over and slid it across the coffee table to him.
He read the message.
He read it again.
"No," he said quietly.
"Don't delete any of it."
That evening, after Ruth had gone home and David had taken photographs of every page of the notebook, I sat alone at the kitchen table for the first time all day.
The sixty sunflowers were still on the porch.
I hadn't moved them.
I looked at the folded note — Danny's note — still lying where I'd left it that morning.
I picked it up and read it again, all the way through this time.
At the very bottom, below his signature, there was one more line I had missed in the chaos of the morning.
*P.S.
— I never blamed you for moving on.
I only ever wanted you to be happy.
I hope you were.*
I pressed the note flat against the table with both hands.
I had not been happy.
Not for most of it.
But I thought, sitting there in the quiet kitchen with the late light coming through the window, that maybe that was finally allowed to change.
My phone buzzed again.
May you like
Gerald's name on the screen.
I let it ring.
