was who took her husband away. Yes, she’d been unstable—but this, this, would of course have sent her over the edge. Lily Ross might as well have pushed her right off the Judybird.
I thought of my father’s words: We’re Lieblings. No one gets to see what’s in our basement and no one ever should; there are wolves out there, waiting to drag us down at the first sign of weakness. Apparently he’d already met the wolves by then, and they were named Lily and Nina Ross.
I tried to remember the faces of the mother and daughter that I’d met in the café that day but they’d already blurred out of focus; I remembered only the dark dour smear of the daughter, the cheap blond tart that was her mom. Them? How could my father and brother have been so taken in by them? How could those two nobodies so quickly and effectively destroy my entire family?
I rose and retrieved the diary from where it had landed, near the bed, and then turned back to the last page of the diary. I read and reread the entry. Twelve years of questions and finally I had answers. I had a scapegoat (a pair of them!) on whom to heap blame for all my family’s problems. They were the force that had knocked my world off its axis. (My mother’s suicide, my brother’s schizophrenia—not my fault at all! Their fault!)
Lily and Nina Ross. Something violent rose inside me at the sight of their names in my mother’s elegant handwriting. It was too much to bear. I grabbed a pen and scrawled over the names with furious black scratches, but their presence in my mother’s diary still felt like a violation. So I tore out the last entry and crumpled the paper up into a ball, then retrieved a shoe from the closet and hammered the ball of paper as hard as I could until the paper shredded and the heel of my shoe began to splinter. Then I gathered the scraps and marched them down to the library and threw them in the fireplace.
Rage had gripped me and I did not want to let it go. I moved through Stonehaven for the rest of the day in a hot, destructive fury, throwing books to the floor, smashing wineglasses in the sink, each unsatisfying crack a surrogate for the two women whose faces I really wanted to break. I stalked through the house in a circle, around and around, as if by doing enough circuits through the rooms I might somehow rewind all of our lives back twelve years.
And then I collapsed. Because, of course, there are good emotions and bad emotions and anger falls in the latter category. I knew that. Wasn’t there a quote about just that on Ashley’s home page? I pulled up her website and—oh yes, there it was. Buddha says: You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger. I felt abashed, ashamed, then—as if Ashley could see me from down there in the cottage, and she knew I’d fallen short.
I climbed back in bed under the velvet coverlet and for penance I read motivational quotes, which didn’t help much, until finally I took three Ambien and slept for the rest of the night.
By the time I woke up the next morning, I almost felt calm again, as long as I didn’t think too hard about the Judybird still parked in the boathouse down at the lakeshore.
And still, Michael and Ashley didn’t come.
On their fifth afternoon in the cottage, I watched through my bedroom window as the BMW crawled down the driveway toward the gate. Ashley sat behind the wheel, window down, the breeze moving her hair. I wondered where she could be going. And then a little while later—a knock on the back door. Michael? I slapped my cheeks until they stung with life, threw my unwashed hair back into a ponytail, and raced to answer it.
He stood there on the rear portico, rocking back on his heels, his hands shoved into his pockets. An afternoon wind was blowing off the lake; it picked up his curls and flew them around his head like a halo.