Chapter 11: The Donnelly Boy

I sat down in Dad's chair.

My phone was in my jacket pocket, where I'd lied about it being in the car.

I took it out and set it on the blotter, camera up.

Then I opened the thread called "The Donnelly Boy."

The first message was dated six years ago in August, at 9:14 at night.

Mom had written: "She's been seeing him all summer. She came home smelling like the lake again. Frank, he's twenty-nine. She's twenty-three."

Dad had written: "Is it serious?"

"He's talking to his father about a ring. Her friend told Dawn."

Dawn, aged twenty-one, had typed: "She's going to move out. She'll go wherever he goes."

I put my free hand over my mouth.

Dad wrote: "Motion. Donnelly goes. All in favor?"

"Yes," Mom wrote.

"Yes," Dawn wrote.

"Three to nothing," Dad wrote. "Carried."

I scrolled down.

The vote had not asked me.

It hadn't even tried to.

"Jo is not to be consulted," Mom had written. "She'll cry and she'll dig in. Better if it ends cleanly."

"How?" Dad asked.

"He texts her every night. She leaves her phone on the counter when she goes to bed."

"I can do it," Dawn wrote. "I'll take it while she's asleep."

"Write it for her, Carol."

There was a gap of a minute.

Then my mother's message appeared, with the text itself in quotation marks.

"Don't write again. Sent from Jo's phone, 5:02 a.m., while she sleeps."

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