Chapter 6: Kellerton
I drove to Virginia the next morning.
Grace had offered to come with me and I had said yes without hesitating, which was not something I would have done sixteen years ago.
Sixteen years ago I would have driven alone at midnight and called no one.
I had learned, slowly and badly, that that kind of alone doesn't help anyone.
Grace drove.
I sat in the passenger seat with the bag in my lap and the photograph in my coat pocket and watched the highway flatten out toward the coast.
The woman we were meeting was named Sylvia Holt.
She had agreed to meet us at a diner on the edge of Kellerton, away from the main street.
Grace had spoken to her twice on the phone and said she seemed careful, not evasive — the kind of careful that comes from protecting someone, not from hiding something.
She was already there when we arrived.
Sixties, gray hair cut short, hands wrapped around a coffee mug.
She looked up when we walked in and I could tell from the way she looked at me that Grace had described me accurately.
"You're the mother," she said.
"Yes."
She nodded at the seats across from her.
We sat.
"I've known Rosie for nine years," she said.
"She came into my shop looking for work.
I run an alterations business.
She said she could sew." A small pause.
"She could.
Better than most."
My throat tightened.
I had taught her to sew.
She was twelve when I taught her the first basic stitch.
"She goes by Rose Callum now," Sylvia said.
"She built a life here.
Small, quiet.
She has an apartment above the hardware store on Deering Street.
She has regulars who bring her their mending.
She has a cat." She wrapped both hands tighter around the mug.
"She was doing all right.
Until about three months ago."
"What happened three months ago?" Grace asked.
"Danny Crell came back."
The name landed on the table like something dropped from a height.
"He found her?" I asked.
"He says he just wants to talk.
He's been coming into the shop.
Standing outside.
He came to her apartment once — she told me about it the next morning.
She was shaking." Sylvia looked at me directly.
"She left home at seventeen to get away from him.
You need to understand that.
She didn't leave because of you."
I heard that sentence and it went through me in a way I wasn't prepared for.
I pressed my hand flat on the table.
"She was seventeen," I said.
"How did she even know him?"
"He was twenty-one.
He'd been around her school.
He was — she described it to me once, years ago, when she'd had a glass of wine and she was feeling safe.
He was the kind of person who makes you feel chosen.
And then, slowly, makes you feel trapped." Sylvia's jaw tightened.
"She tried to end it.
He didn't accept that.
She was frightened to go to anyone because he'd told her things — that no one would believe her, that her mother would be angry, that she'd ruin his life over nothing."
The green tank top.
The argument about the tank top.
She had been trying to get me to see something and I had turned it into a fight about clothing.
"She didn't leave because of you," Sylvia said again, quietly.
"But she was ashamed.
And she was scared.
And she was seventeen."
I couldn't speak for a moment.
Grace said, "Does Rosie know her mother has been looking for her?"
"No.
She thinks—" Sylvia stopped.
"She told me once that she assumed you'd moved on.
That enough years had passed."
"I renewed her library card twice," I said.
"I kept her toothbrush in the cup for nine years."
Sylvia looked at me for a long moment.
Then she said, "She needs to know that."
"I know." I took a breath.
"But first — Danny Crell.
What does he want?"
Sylvia set down her mug.
"That's the part that worries me.
He's been telling her he's changed.
That he just wants to apologize.
But last week he told her something that frightened her badly enough that she called me at midnight."
"What did he tell her?"
Sylvia looked at Grace, then back at me.
"He told her he knew she'd been in contact with someone from her past.
He said he had ways of finding things out.
He said if she tried to run again, he'd make sure the people she cared about in Kellerton found out things about her that would make them see her differently."
He knew she'd been in contact with someone from her past.
Grace and I looked at each other.
"He's watching her," Grace said.
May you like
"Yes," said Sylvia.
"And she doesn't know you're here."
