The day she stopped waiting

Chapter 9

The journal was under the bed.

It was Ethan who found it — he'd come to the apartment to help clear it out, because Patricia had asked, because she couldn't bring herself to do it. He'd found it in a box under the bed, behind a pair of winter boots, inside a shoebox with a rubber band around it.

He sat on the edge of Lydia's stripped mattress and read it for an hour.

Then he took it home and read it again.

The journal went back four years. It was not dramatic — that was the first thing that struck Ethan, and later struck everyone who read it. No screaming or accusations or theatrical declarations of suffering. It was quiet. The handwriting was neat. It read less like a cry for help and more like someone keeping careful, methodical records, the way you'd record evidence you suspected you'd need someday.

March 14. Daniel texted Selene four times tonight. I know because I was sitting next to him and I could see the preview on his screen. He thought the phone was angled away. It wasn't.

April 2. Mom called to cancel our lunch because Selene was having a hard day. I said it was fine. It wasn't fine. I've said it's fine so many times that I think everyone believes me.

June 19. I found Selene's handwriting on a piece of paper in Daniel's jacket pocket. A grocery list. Their grocery list. He went grocery shopping with my sister and didn't mention it.

August 3. I asked Mom today if she thought I was overreacting. She said, "You've always been sensitive, sweetheart. It's part of what makes you you." I don't know what that means. I think it means yes.

September 11. I had a dream that I didn't exist. That I'd never been born, and the family was the same, and no one noticed anything missing. I woke up and lay in the dark for a long time.

October 30. Aunt Helen told me I'm the strong one. The one they never have to worry about. I think she meant it as a compliment. I think I've been performing strength for so long that everyone has taken the performance for the real thing, and now I'm expected to keep performing so they don't have to worry. I am tired of being strong. I want to be fragile once, just once, in front of someone who will still be there when I'm done.

November 14. I put on the blue dress. The one Daniel said was his favorite. He didn't notice. He noticed when Selene walked in wearing an old sweater. I went to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror and I thought: you are not imagining this. And I wasn't scared anymore. I was just sad.

November 22. Thanksgiving. Ethan was the only person who tasted my cranberry sauce. He took seconds. I almost cried at the table. I am getting very good at not crying at tables.

December 1. I have been thinking about what it would be like to just go. Not disappear — not in the scary way. Just go somewhere where nobody knows me. Where I start over. I think about it more than I should. I think about it mostly late at night when Daniel is asleep and his phone is on the nightstand and I am lying in the dark not sleeping. I think: what if I just went? And then I think about who would notice. And then I stop thinking about it because the answer is too easy to arrive at and too hard to sit with.

December 15. I know I need to leave. I think I've known for a while. I've been waiting for the right moment, which is stupid, because there is no right moment for something like this. You just go. Or you don't. I think I'm going to go. I think I've been making my way toward this for years and I just couldn't see the shape of it until recently.

December 20. Two days until the engagement party. I am terrified. I am also, underneath that, calm in a way that feels significant. Like the calm is waiting for me on the other side of terrified, and I just have to get through to it.

That was the last entry.

Ethan sat across from Gerald at the kitchen table with the journal between them. They didn't speak for a long moment.

"She told us," Gerald said. It was almost exactly what Selene had said weeks earlier. Something about that made it worse.

"She told you a lot of things," Ethan said.

Gerald rubbed a hand over his face. "I didn't know it was this serious. I thought —"

"You thought she was fine."

"She always said she was fine."

"Because every time she tried to say something else, someone redirected her." Ethan said it without heat, just clearly. "I read four years of this, Gerald. I read four years of Lydia trying to tell this family that something was wrong. And I read four years of this family telling her she was strong, she was resilient, she was overreacting, or just moving on to whatever Selene needed next."

Gerald looked at the journal. He didn't pick it up.

"We have to find her," he said.

It wasn't a question. It wasn't even really directed at anyone in the room. It was the sound of a man who has understood, too late, that someone was falling right in front of him, and who is now desperate, finally, to look in the right direction.