After Faking My Death, I Refuse to Forgive Anyone novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Boathouse
Gillian tips her own skiff in the cold lake and hides under the dock, and through the boathouse wall she hears her husband and mother split her trust fund and complain that the committal papers are wasted.
The skiff went over at 9:40, exactly the way I had planned.
I pulled the drain plug first and dropped it into my pocket.
Then I put my shoulder against the hull and rolled it, and the lake took it without a sound.
The water was fifty-one degrees.
I had checked it that morning, on the dock in my navy sweater.
My husband had kissed my cheek and told me to have a good day.
I left my left shoe floating beside the hull and my life jacket tangled in the oars.
Then I swam.
I was a state champion at seventeen, and my body remembered every stroke.
It was two hundred yards to the boathouse in the dark, and I made it in four minutes with my teeth locked shut.
The boathouse stands on pilings at the edge of our dock.
My grandmother used to keep her rowing shell in it, and now it held a rotting canoe and a pile of life vests.
I came up through the slip, hauled myself onto the boards and lay there shaking.
The dry bag was where I had hidden it at dusk, behind the canoe.
Inside it were my passport, eleven thousand dollars out of my grandmother's tea tin, a burner phone and a pair of dry socks.
I had packed it in forty minutes, after I found the papers in my husband's study.
There was a doctor's certificate with my name typed on it, Gillian Weldon, age twenty-nine.
There was a petition to have me committed, signed by the doctor, my mother and my husband.
There was a booking for a private van at seven the next morning.
The certificate said I was a danger to myself.
I had never met the doctor.
I peeled off my sweater and wrung it out onto the boards, and that was when I heard the dock creak overhead.
Footsteps crossed the planks above me.
A phone chimed, and my husband's voice came through the thin wall.
"Marcella, I'm on the dock. The sheriff's boat is still out there."
The line crackled, and then my mother's voice came out of the speaker.
It was steady and low and a little tired, the voice she used to order a second bottle of wine.
"Is she really gone, Neal?"
"They found the shoe and the oars. The deputy said a body can take days to come up in water this cold."
I pressed my back against the wall and held my breath.
Under the dock I had taped a waterproof phone, and I knew it was recording every word.
I had set it going before I ever stepped into the skiff.
"Then we move quickly," my mother said. "Before that lawyer starts asking questions."
"Calvin Sanborn can ask what he likes. He's only the trustee."
"He's the trustee who can freeze every dollar, Neal. Do not be stupid about this."
"I won't be."
My husband laughed, short and relieved.
"Thirty-eight million, Marcella. Twenty-two for the firm, and your cut comes off the top like we said."
"My cut comes first," said my mother. "I raised her."
A third voice cut in from somewhere behind Neal, bright and breathless.
"Is it true I get the lake house?"
It was my sister Lindy, and she was laughing.
"Not yet, sweetheart," my mother said. "Wear black from now on, and try to look like you've been crying."
"I look good in black."
"Everyone looks good in black," said Neal. "Keep your voice down."
Lindy gave a giggle I knew from our childhood, the one she used when she had gotten away with something.
I stayed very still on the cold boards.
My teeth had stopped chattering, and I did not feel the cold anymore.
"One thing," Neal said. "The doctor. The papers are wasted now."
"Burn them," said my mother. "Burn every page, and make sure the doctor's payment is lost in the firm's books."
"Thirty thousand dollars for nothing."
"Not for nothing. It's cheaper than a divorce."
That was the sentence that broke something in me.
My husband and my mother had paid a stranger to sign away my life, and they were calling it a bargain.
"What do we tell the sheriff?" Neal asked.
"That she was unwell. That she talked about the water for months."
"She did not."
"She does now," my mother said. "Nobody will question it."
There was a pause, and a small clink.
"Besides," my mother said, in the same flat, tired voice, "she never could swim."
I closed my eyes in the dark.
My mother had taught me to swim in this lake when I was six years old, standing waist-deep with her hands under my stomach.
She had told me then that the water was the one thing I would never have to be afraid of.
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