Chapter 12: An Empty Coffin

I had practiced a lie for fourteen years.

I could have told it again with my eyes shut.

"There's no grave," I said instead.

Ethan lay still beside me.

"There's a plot in a cemetery in Concord," I said.

"I paid for it with money from my wedding gifts.

"There's a stone with her name on it, and a coffin underneath."

"A coffin with nothing in it?"

"Her paintings. Eleven rolled canvases, and sandbags to make it heavy."

I heard him breathe out.

"Jocelyn wasn't in the lake house when it burned," I said. "She started the fire herself and walked out the back."

The room was very quiet.

"A gray car on the old road, at ten past nine, with a woman at the wheel," I said.

"That was her. Leighton found a witness, but he never found the car."

"Why?"

"Because she didn't want to marry him.

"She didn't want any of it, the Prescotts, the garden, Cornelia choosing her husband like a hat.

"She wanted a man in Montreal who played the cello."

"And you knew."

"Six weeks later a postcard came, with no name on it, and a drawing of a peach tree." My voice shook.

"On the back it said, 'If he finds me he'll never let me go. Please.'"

Ethan said nothing.

I had said this aloud to only two people in two lives.

"Our parents grieved for three years," I said.

"I told them the truth in a locked room when I couldn't stand it any more, and they kept it too.

"Leighton searched until he died, and I sat across from him at dinner while he talked about a sister I'd put in a box."

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