Chapter 6 - What Really Happened to Rachel
Erin's hand closed around the wooden box. She didn't open it. She just held on.
"What did my mother tell you?" she asked.
"That Rachel didn't go to that hospital alone." Callie stepped fully into the room. "That somebody drove her there. And that somebody left before anyone could ask him a single question."
Erin's jaw flexed. "Your grandmother shouldn't have said that."
"Why not?"
"Because it's more complicated than she made it sound."
"Then make it simple," Callie said. "Right now. Right here in this kitchen. I've had enough of complicated."
Erin looked at Adrian. Adrian looked back at her, steady.
"It's time, Erin," he said.
She pressed her lips flat. Then she pulled out a chair and sat.
"Rachel was seeing someone," she said. "After Adrian. About a year before she got pregnant."
"Who?"
"A man named Dennis Kroll. He was older — forty, forty-one. He had money, and Rachel was twenty-two and lonely, and he made her feel like she'd finally landed somewhere solid." Erin's voice stayed flat, held on a tight leash. "He wasn't solid. He was controlling. Didn't like her calling home. Didn't like her friends. Slowly cut her off from everybody who loved her."
Callie sat down slowly.
"When she found out she was pregnant, she told him. He told her to make it go away." Erin stopped. "She said no. So he walked out."
"He was the father?"
"No." Erin shook her head. "The dates didn't line up. You're Adrian's. But Dennis didn't believe her — or he didn't care which it was." She paused. "When Rachel went into labor, she was alone in her apartment. She called me first. Then she called him. I still don't know why. Maybe she was just that scared. Maybe part of her still hoped he'd be a person." Her hands went flat on the table. "He drove her to the hospital. He signed her in at the front desk. And then he walked back out to his car, and he never came back."
"That's not a cr!me," Callie said carefully.
"No. But what came before it might be." Erin opened the wooden box.
Inside was an envelope gone yellow at the edges, and under it, a second sheet of paper — newer, whiter, folded in thirds. She lifted the envelope out and set it aside, and unfolded the newer page.
"After Rachel passed, the hospital flagged something in her chart. A drug interaction. Something in her blood that no one had prescribed her, that shouldn't have been anywhere near a pregnancy." She looked up. "Somebody had been putting it in her food. A little at a time, for months. Small enough doses that nobody caught it until she was already gone."
The kitchen was so quiet I could hear the clock in the hall.
"They looked hard at Dennis," Erin said. "But Rachel was gone. There was no one left to say what had happened in that apartment. And Dennis had money, and money bought him a very good lawyer, and the whole thing just… stopped."
Adrian leaned in. "I didn't know that part until two years ago. Erin found me a second time. She's the one who told me."
"Why two years ago?" I asked.
"Because Dennis Kroll d!ed," Erin said. "And when he did, his daughter — from his first marriage — reached out to me. She said she'd been clearing out his house and she'd found things. Papers. Notebooks." Erin tapped the folded page. "She mailed me copies."
Callie stared at it. "What do they say?"
"They're not a confession. But they're about as close as you can get without the word." Erin slid the page across the table. "He wrote about Rachel. About the pregnancy. About how badly he wanted it gone."
Callie didn't reach for it.
"He's dead," she said.
"Yes."
"So nothing happens. No trial. No nothing."
"Nothing happens to him." Erin met her eyes and held them. "But his daughter wants to bring it into the open. She came to me to ask whether we'd stand with her. Whether you'd let yourself be named — as Rachel's daughter — in whatever she decides to do."
Callie looked at the page for a long moment. Then she looked at me.
"Did you know any of this?"
"Not one word of it," I said.
She nodded. Like that answer was the only solid thing left in the room. Like it was the one thing she could still put her weight on.
"I need to read the letter," she said. "Rachel's letter. By myself."
Erin picked up the envelope and held it out. Callie took it without a word and went upstairs.
This time the door didn't close.
Adrian stood. I didn't stop him.
"I'll leave my number," he said. "In case she ever wants it."
He wrote it on the pad by the phone and let himself out. The front door clicked. Erin and I sat alone at the table.
"How long were you going to wait?" I asked.
She didn't answer.
"Erin."
May you like
"I don't know," she said. "Maybe forever. Maybe I told myself that if I just held on long enough, one day it wouldn't be true anymore."
From upstairs, there wasn't a sound.
