mysteries, more lies.” Larry’s bitterness welled up, and he decided to unload on her. “Do you ever stop lying? Hiding things? You’ve been taking birth control pills, for a year. I found them.”
“Larry, I can explain that—”
“You told me we were trying! The ovulation, the mucus—it was all lies. No wonder you put off the testing. You lied to me, Allie.”
“No, but I can’t say more, I have to go. I’ll call you later tonight. I love you.” Allie hung up.
Larry looked out the window. She’d sounded different, or was he telling himself that? She sounded clear, like something was new in her voice, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Her tone sounded stronger, charged up. Determined. Driven.
Larry looked down at his phone. He realized he had a way to know where Allie was, without asking her.
CHAPTER 70
Allie Garvey
Allie hung up with Larry, speeding along the turnpike. The traffic was congested, but she kept switching lanes, her nerves pushing her to keep going.
Julian had sounded so sad on the phone. He’d adored Sasha, and it had to have been awful for him to come home and find her dead. Allie thought of how brokenhearted Ryan had been at David’s graveside. She couldn’t imagine anything worse than coming home to find someone you loved dead. She had been there when Jill died, but the Garveys had lived in fear of that moment for years.
Allie’s thoughts raced. Her stomach knotted. She tried to stay in the moment. She’d heard the wounded, angry note in Larry’s voice, and she could imagine how heartbroken he’d felt finding the pills. There was so much she’d kept from him. She should’ve come clean with him. She should’ve said what she felt in her heart, that she didn’t deserve a baby, that she wasn’t worthy of being a mother, that she had killed another mother’s child and so she had forfeited her own right to become one.
Barton had been right, she had been in exile from herself. She needed to find a new way to live, in which she could acknowledge that she was responsible for Kyle’s death, but at the same time not let it destroy her life. She would explain it to Larry, and all she could do was pray that he’d give her another chance.
Allie accelerated behind a tractor-trailer, watching the terrain change but remain the same, a Jersey strip mall instead of a Pennsylvania one, a New Jersey development instead of a Pennsylvania one. Brandywine Hunt would always be with her, and that was part of her responsibility, too, but she had to move past it. She was truly her father’s daughter, because he had stayed in the same house since her mother had passed. He lived within his grief, never moving past it, taking on the responsibility himself, and she couldn’t do that to herself anymore.
Allie flashed on Sasha, picking up her pill bottles from the ground. Sasha had lived in her pain, too. Sasha’s choice had been to self-medicate, to numb the pain. Drugs couldn’t make a City of Refuge, and Sasha had succumbed just as David had, in a different way but for the same reason.
Allie’s eyes filled with tears, wishing it had all been different. Wishing she could go back twenty years ago and make it better.
Allie thought unaccountably of Jill, feeling her sister’s spirit with her, for the first time in a long time. Jill would’ve wanted to know the truth, too. Jill would’ve gotten in the car and driven to meet Julian. Jill would have taken her life into her own hands, if only she’d had the time. Allie couldn’t let her sister down.
And suddenly Allie didn’t feel trapped in her grief any longer, but felt her sister inspiring her, filling her with breath and purpose. Allie could feel the full measure of the love within her suffuse her, fill her from the center of her being to her very skin. She could love her husband the way he deserved to be loved. She had so much love to give, and now it could be free.
CHAPTER 71
Larry Rucci
Larry scrolled to his Find My Friends app, opened it, and watched the map come to life on his phone. He and Allie had gotten the app two years ago, when he got sick of calling around for her.
LOCATING ALLIE’S PHONE read the screen, on top of a map, and then it showed a blue line heading north.
Larry didn’t get it. Where would Allie be going? Anywhere in