Chapter Thirty-Five

LYDIA'S WOODEN HAIRbrUSH, HER PAISLEYrobe, her ragged Beatrix Potter bunnies, her white iPod, her Into the Wild poster, her dried roses tied with twine, her toy VW bug car—Chelsey places all of it carefully in a box and closes it. Last, Chelsey stands on a chair and unpins the FREEDOM sign from above Lydia's door.

Noah appears in the doorway, hefting a box. "Almost done? It's almost five. We have to get going if we want to drop off the keys to the Realtor before they close."

Chelsey nods, swallows. "Just finished."

"I'll meet you outside." He carries on down the hall. "I saw another reporter hanging around the gates earlier. You'd think they'd have given up by now," he throws over his shoulder.

Chelsey does not answer. It has been three months since she found Ellie in the woods. Since she killed Douglas Abbott, arrested West and Lydia. Trials will start within the year. But the media interest has lingered. Chelsey still will not comment. Even though she knows exactly what she would say. She would not speak of West, Doug, or even Lydia, nothing about her sister's guilt or innocence—the truth lies somewhere in the middle. She would say nothing about the governor or Chelsey's former sergeant, who has also been arrested and will be standing trial, too. Abbott confessed to tampering with a crime scene, framing Oscar for Lydia's murder.

But he swears that he did not know what his sons were doing in the woods. A jury will decide if he's telling the truth. Chelsey would speak of none of that. Instead, Chelsey would talk about the girls. All of them. She would say their names. Brittany, Theresa, Gabby, the ones who did not make it out of the woods. Willa. Hannah. Elizabeth… the ones who did. Even though they lived, even though Ellie didn't face charges, something has irrevocably been lost. She would ask the media, the world: When will it be enough? How society accepts women dying at the hands of men. Chelsey mourns girlhood.

She drifts through the house, clicking off lights as she goes, taking her time. This is Chelsey's final goodbye, a wound closing—sometimes these things heal naturally, sometimes they must be cauterized. At last. At last. Through her parents' bedroom, she goes. Nothing is left here. Just a bed frame, the mattress leaning against the wall. In the bathroom, she sits on the edge of a pink jetted tub. For a moment, she is five again. Lydia is six. Water trickles from the faucet, and bubbles float in the water. They're giggling. The memory sucks the air out of her lungs. Her throat rushes with anguish, and Chelsey does not push it down. She allows it to come. She lets the grief roll through her and crest. A foamy burst. Because what is grief but the other side of love?

She wanders from the bathroom to her father's office at the very end of the hall. The room is empty now. Once, she took comfort in this space, and now… now she is not sure. Sometimes she is angry at her father. Lately, memories have morphed, good into bad, bad into good. She sees him clearly now. Chief Calhoun, a man who destroyed his own marriage because he could not recognize his own faults.

She shuts the door to her father's office. It does not escape Chelsey's notice: the similarities between Sergeant Abbott and her father. Both of them cannibals, devouring their wives, children, themselves. Or how similar her story is to West and Doug's. Lionizing their fathers. Vilifying their mothers. But West and Doug became adults worse than their father. And Chelsey… better, she hopes. She thinks about the choices people make. The paths we carve of our own free will. The one she is about to forge. A new home in a new city. She stayed with Coldwell PD long enough to close the Ellie Black case. Then she'd quit. Chelsey and Noah are moving to Olympia. She doesn't have a job yet but has applied to a few police departments. She will see. The past is unchangeable. But the future is uncertain, and Chelsey is ready.

She travels down the stairs and feels the ghost of fifteen-year-old Lydia beside her, skipping out the door, full of girlish dreams, to be free of this house, in love and in danger. Chelsey flicks the final light off. She closes the front door and locks it. On the stoop, she stares at the lighthouse for a moment. Sees her and Lydia as children. In the past, the sun is near setting, but the air and concrete are still warm. Little girl Chelsey runs through the streets, up the stairs of the lighthouse, hangs from the window, cups her hands over her mouth, and shouts, Olly olly oxen free.

"That trash?" Noah cuts into Chelsey's thoughts and nods at her hands where the papers are cradled, the bubble letter F on top.

Chelsey shakes her head; she thinks about putting one life down in order to embrace another. "It's going with us." This is a thing she will carry. This is a thing she will keep. This single word. Freedom.

This is how it ends.