My little brother shook me awake at three in the morning and whispered, “We have to leave right now, or I think they’re going to k!ll us.”
Chapter 3
Laura arrived that evening.
She came through the field-office doors carrying no suitcase, only her purse and a winter coat thrown over one arm, as if she had left home before remembering she might need anything.
The moment she saw us, she stopped.
Both hands covered her mouth.
“Oh, God.”
She didn’t rush forward.
That mattered.
“I’m Laura,” she said, crying openly. “I’m your mom’s sister.”
Eli stood half behind me.
Laura noticed and took one step backward.
“I won’t touch you unless you want me to.”
She wiped her face.
“I know you don’t know me.”
Her voice shook.
“But I knew you. Julia, I was there the day you were born. Ethan, your mom called me before she even called your grandparents when she found out she was pregnant.”
Something inside me broke.
Not recognition exactly.
Maybe grief finally finding somewhere to go.
I crossed the room.
Laura wrapped her arms around me.
She smelled like cold air and peppermint gum. Nothing familiar.
I cried anyway.
That night, in a hotel under federal protection, she showed us photographs.
Our mother laughing on a dock.
Our father asleep with me on his chest.
Eli as a baby wearing a ridiculous knitted pumpkin hat.
There were videos too. A birthday party. Christmas morning. My mother singing badly while somebody behind the camera laughed.
“That’s Dad,” Laura said.
I watched the video again.
A man I could not remember laughing at a woman I could not remember while a little girl who was somehow me tore wrapping paper off a box.
It hurt in a way I had no language for.
“What happens to the Marshes?” I asked.
Laura’s jaw tightened.
“They’ll answer for what they did.”
“I miss them.”
The confession came out before I could stop it.
I expected her face to change.
It didn’t.
“I know.”
“You can’t know.”
“No,” she said. “Not exactly.”
I looked at sleeping Eli.
“I hate them. But I keep remembering Dad making pancakes. Mom brushing my hair. Stupid things.”
“They were your daily life for eleven years.”
“They killed your sister.”
“Yes.”
“And I miss them.”
Laura reached for my hand.
“You don’t owe me the right kind of grief, Julia.”
It was the first time someone in my real family called me Julia without making me feel like June had to disappear.
A few days later, we went to Colorado with her.
Laura’s house stood on a quiet street where the mountains were visible at the end of the block. She showed us two bedrooms.
Eli’s had a telescope beside the window.
Mine had a quilt folded across the bed.
Then she opened a hall closet.
Inside were boxes.
Birthday gifts.
Christmas presents.
Clothes in different sizes.
“What is this?” I asked.
Laura looked embarrassed.
“I didn’t know when you’d come back.”
There were things for seven-year-old me, ten-year-old me, thirteen-year-old me. Things for toddler Ethan and grade-school Ethan and teenage Ethan.
“I know it looks crazy.”
Eli picked up a wrapped box with a faded tag.
ETHAN — AGE 8.
His face collapsed.
Laura knelt beside him.
“I didn’t know what else to do,” she whispered.
That was when I understood what eleven years meant from her side.
We hadn’t been missing every day.
We’d been missing every Christmas.
Every birthday.
Every ordinary Tuesday.
School was almost comically difficult at first.
I was seventeen and had never used a locker. Eli had never eaten in a cafeteria. Crowded hallways made us nervous because we’d been trained our whole lives to notice exits without knowing we were being trained.
Therapy helped, although I hated it for months.
My therapist once asked what I missed most about Rebecca.
“Her soup.”
The answer embarrassed me.
“Soup?”
“She made chicken noodle soup from scratch when we were sick.”
My therapist nodded.
“That sounds comforting.”
“She was a murderer.”
“That doesn’t mean the soup wasn’t comforting.”
I laughed then.
A real laugh.
The first in weeks.
Eli had a harder problem. He believed he should have figured everything out sooner.
“You were thirteen,” I told him.
“I was twelve when I found the bag.”
“Fine. You were twelve.”
“I waited months.”
“You collected evidence.”
“I was scared.”
“You were supposed to be scared.”
He stared at me.
“What if I hadn’t woken up that night?”
I knew what he was really asking.
What if I had failed you?
I sat beside him.
“You did wake me.”
“But—”
“No.”
I took his hand.
“You woke me.”
A year later, we testified.
The evidence uncovered far more than the six names on Rebecca’s list. Investigators connected the couple who raised us to killings, disappearances, extortion, and financial crimes across several states.
Eli’s photographs became part of the case.
So did the passports.
So did my testimony.
When the prosecutor asked me to describe that night, I told the jury about waking at 3:11. The shoebox. The laundry-room window. The diner.
I told them about hearing my father ask Marlene whether she’d seen his children.
I didn’t look toward the defense table until the verdict.
Guilty.
Count after count.
Daniel stared forward.
Rebecca turned around.
Our eyes met.
For a moment, she looked exactly like my mother.
Not the woman from the garage.
The woman who had sat on the edge of my bed when I was sick. The woman who knew I hated raisins and loved thunderstorms. The woman who had kissed my forehead thousands of times.
Her face crumpled.
I almost went to her.
That truth is difficult to admit, but it is true.
Then the bailiff touched her arm.
She turned away.
Both received life sentences.
Outside the courthouse, reporters shouted questions, but Laura led us past them.
Eli took my hand.
For the first time since that October night, I understood that there was nowhere left for us to run.
