Chapter 4 - What Happened in 1992"Is Victor your father?" I asked, once I could breathe again. "The boy she left with?"
Dolly nodded. "They stayed together a few years. I was born when Mom was twenty."
I looked down at the sweater in my lap. "And she never came home. Not once."
Dolly was quiet for a long moment. "She did."
My head snapped up. "When?"
"1992. She was twenty-two. She brought me with her — I was two. I don't remember any of it myself, obviously. This is just what she's told me."
"Then tell me only what you actually know," I said. "Nothing you're guessing at."
Dolly nodded slowly. "She said your father caught her and Victor at the gate the night she left. That he told her if she walked out with him, she shouldn't expect to come back."
I could hear him saying it. Not because I'd ever heard those exact words before — but because it sounded exactly like something my father would say, and mean.
"She thought he was bluffing," Dolly went on. "So she left anyway."
"And in 1992?"
"By then, coming home would have meant admitting she'd made the worst mistake of her life. It took having me — becoming a mother myself, or she becoming one — before she really understood what she'd put your mother through."
My throat closed around the words before I could get them out. "So she came back. To the house."
"She thought your mother would be the one to open the door."
"Was she there?"
"No. Neither of you were."
I leaned in, my whole body gone cold. "Then who answered?"
"Your father."
Something in my chest went very still and very quiet.
For forty years, my father had told anyone who asked that he never laid eyes on Diane again after the night she vanished.
"What did he do?" I asked, though some part of me already knew.
"He told her she couldn't come back."
I stood up so fast the chair legs screeched against the floor. "No."
"Margaret—"
"He wouldn't have done that without telling my mother. He wouldn't."
But Dolly's face told me exactly what I didn't want to hear.
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My mother had died believing her missing daughter had never once tried to come home.
My father had known the truth the entire time.
