friend of Hannah’s. In fact, when your mom made up her will, she insisted on listing Miss Macy as your godmother.”
I turn to her, surprised. “You’re my godmother?”
Miss Macy’s eyes are full of tears, her voice soft. “I can’t magic you a ball gown or anything, but yes. It’s what your mother wanted.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I wanted to,” she says, stroking my hair.
“Then why didn’t you? All these years . . .”
“I asked her not to say anything about that stuff, about your mom,” Dad says, gruff. Irritated. “I’m not ashamed of it, Elle. I was doing my best to protect you. I’m still trying, if you haven’t noticed, but I’m not the voice you listen to these days.”
He’s cheating. It’s not fair to make me feel guilty now. But it works, and my voice wobbles.
“Dad . . .”
“It doesn’t matter, kid, I’m fine. Just let me get through this.” He takes a haggard breath, his shirt stretched tight across his chest. “Miss Macy helped. To tell the truth, I couldn’t convince her not to.”
“I loved your mom, Elle.”
Dad soldiers on, brushing Miss Macy’s words aside. “So Miss Macy helped. She’d sit with your mom when I couldn’t, and she’d keep you when Grams was too tired. It was a hard time, kiddo. Impossibly hard. When we knew your mom had only days to live, that there was nothing more to be done, I brought her home. She wanted to be here. With you.”
Tears pour down my face, but I’m silent. Her pain, the cancer, these are things I’ve known or assumed. Dad’s response to it all, his own agony, is something he’s never discussed. But I see it on him now. Even without the halo on my head, without celestial eyes, his pain is all I see.
“Miss Macy and I were both here that last night,” Dad continues, producing a handkerchief and blowing his nose. “And you. You were here. You were with your mother.”
“You were brushing her hair,” Miss Macy says. “Painting her nails with that Hello Kitty nail polish you loved so much. They were the most precious moments I’ve ever witnessed.”
I pinch my eyes shut, trying to remember, willing my mind to paint the picture. But there’s nothing. Only blackness. Only fear.
“And then she was just gone,” Dad says.
My eyes snap open.
“What do you mean, gone?”
“Miss Macy was cooking dinner,” Dad says, looking at my teacher fully for the first time. There’s tenderness there—a memory shared. Miss Macy nods, tears pooling in the corners of her eyes. “And I’d just stepped out to grab a book. She liked it when I read. There was this . . .” He shakes his head. Whatever he was going to say, he’s changed his mind. “It was quiet. Very, very quiet.”
“Keith,” Miss Macy says. Her voice is soft, but there’s something of a reprimand there.
Dad ignores it, his eyes back on me. “And then your mom’s machines went haywire. The alarms beeping. We’d been expecting it, knew it was coming. Her breathing had been so weak. We both dropped what we were doing and ran to the room.”
He stops, unable to go on.
“You were there,” Miss Macy says. “Asleep on your mama’s bed. A Cinderella crown on your head and ballet slippers on your feet.”
How I wish I could remember that. “And Mom?”
“She was gone,” Dad says.
Gone?
Miss Macy turns me toward her, her soft, wrinkled hands firm on my forearms. “The bed was empty, honey. She must’ve walked out, walked past us when we weren’t looking.”
“How? You said yourself she was weak, her breathing frail.”
“We don’t know,” she says, shaking her head. “We’ve never known.”
“Could someone have taken her?” Noah says.
I’m still not sure why he’s here. This information seems new to him as well.
“Perhaps,” Sheriff Cahill said. “It’s a theory we considered. I was just a deputy back then, but we combed the county. Had help from other agencies. Never found a thing.”
“Several weeks passed with no sign of her, no leads. And with some . . . help,” Dad says, looking at Miss Macy, “I finally realized that even if she was out there somewhere, she was surely gone. Her body had so little life left in it, baby, she couldn’t have made it far, even with medical attention.”
My head spins. My stomach aches, and I just want to go back to wondering what happened. To come up with my own unlikely scenarios. “But why the grave? Why bury an empty casket?”
“For you. For Grams,” Dad