Chapter 4: Laurel’s Secret
It took Mr. Prescott and Ms. Tate weeks to reconstruct the whole of it, and every piece broke and mended me at the same time.
While Laurel and I weren’t speaking, she’d had a baby.
She never told me. Too proud, too hurt, the same stubbornness I’d handed down to her like an heirloom.
She was raising Georgie alone in another state when the accident happened — Laurel and her father, Gene, in the car together.
I learned, later, where they’d been driving.
They’d been coming to see me.
Gene had finally talked Laurel into it. She was bringing my granddaughter to meet me, to end the silence, to come home.
They never made it off the interstate.
Georgie, barely a year old, had been with a sitter that day. She survived because she wasn’t in the car.
And then the system failed, the way it does when files are thick and people are busy.
