“Dad sent me a video the night before they left and asked me not to show you.”
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“I was six, Mom. I didn’t understand it. He texted me not to show it to you until 10 years had passed. I forgot the phone was even there after they vanished.” Lily started crying softly. “He said you might hate him when you saw it.”
She handed me the phone. I hit play and already knew I wasn’t going to come out of it the same.
Ryan’s face filled the screen in a video filmed in the garage.
“Anna,” he said softly. “If you’re seeing this, then enough time has passed that maybe you’ve started to move on. I’m sorry. Jack and Caleb deserve something I had no right to keep from them any longer, and by the time you watch this, I will already have taken them to their biological mother.”
A broken little gasp slipped out of me. Lily’s hand landed on my arm, but I barely felt it.
“He said you might hate him when you saw it.”
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Ryan looked into the camera and added, “By the time you see this, you probably won’t forgive me. And maybe I won’t deserve that. Everything has gone beyond my control now. Tell Peanut I love her.”
Then the screen went dark.
Lily was crying. “Mom? What do we do now?”
I stood up so fast that the bed frame creaked. “We’ll go find out the rest.”
***
The next morning, we drove about 235 miles.
Andrea, Ryan’s ex-wife, answered the door. She appeared to be in her early 40s. The moment she saw me, the color drained from her face. She started to close the door.
“Everything has gone beyond my control now.”
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I stopped it with my palm and held up Lily’s phone. “Watch this first.”
Andrea barely made it through the first half before tears filled her eyes. When the screen went dark, she stepped back and let us in.
Inside, the walls finished telling the story the video had begun. Ryan was there in framed photos, Andrea smiling beside him, and Jack and Caleb beside them, painfully alive.
That truth hit me so hard I thought I might crumple right there. I glanced at Andrea. “I raised those boys as my own. What did I ever do to deserve this?”
Andrea cried before she answered. Not the kind people put on when they want forgiveness. The kind that comes from old guilt that never fully settled.
“You did nothing, Anna,” she said.
