"It's my fault," I said starting to cry again. "I let her get away with it because I was too tired from working and keeping up with Riley and the house. I should have stopped her. I should have gotten her help, but she was so angry, Patrick."
"It's not your fault, Leah," he said sternly. "Mama made her own choices, and one of them was to keep drinking. That's not your fault or your responsibility. It took me many years of therapy to understand that I wasn't responsible for her hatred or for her choice of how to work out her own pain. She had choices, Leah. There are always choices."
I nodded as I cried against his shoulder and he simply wrapped his arms around me and patted my back until I had cried myself out. When I was done, I stepped back and looked at the bedroom. It was a disaster, and there was no way we were going to salvage anything.
"Look in the drawers and see if there's anything she might want to keep," I said. "Tomorrow I'm calling the guys who haul junk and will have them clean this place out before we try to sell it."
"I forgot to tell you," Patrick said as he dug through Mama's nightstand and tossed out old magazines and romance novels she'd kept stashed in the drawer. "We've had an offer on the house. The realtor called and said a buyer saw the pre-listing she sent out and offered the full price, sight unseen."
"You're kidding me, right?" I said as I pulled open the dresser drawers and tossed out clothing that my mother hadn't worn in twenty years. "Jesus, she's a pack rat."
"Leah . . ." Patrick said.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend you," I said rolling my eyes with my back turned to him again. "But seriously, Patrick, she kept so much stuff!"
"No, Leah . . ." he said again. This time I turned around to see that he was standing in the middle of the room holding a handful of what looked like envelopes. "She wrote her."
"Who wrote who?" I said, not understanding what he was talking about.
"These are all from Molly," he said. "She wrote Mama."
"What?" I said not sure I was hearing him correctly.
"These letters are from Molly, Leah," he said as he dropped them on the bed and began looking through them to find the most recent postmark. "They started right after she left, and they seem to end a year later."
"That would be two years ago," I said, excited that maybe they would lead us to our missing sister. "Where is she?"
"It looks like she was in Florida the last time she wrote," he said pulling the letter out of the envelope and finding a blank sheet of paper. He turned it over looking for writing and said, "There's nothing here."
"Is there anything on the other sheets?' I asked as I walked over and grabbed one. It was postmarked Kentucky and inside was a sheet of hotel stationary with nothing written on it. I looked at the envelope and saw Mama's name and our address clearly written in Molly's looped handwriting, but there was nothing else. "What the hell?"
"We should ask Mama," Patrick said flatly. "She'll know what this all means."
"When can we visit her?" I asked.
"They told me that it would be another couple of weeks," he said. "She hates the treatment facility and is fighting them the whole way. They told me it was best if family didn't visit for a while."
"But we need some answers!" I cried. "She can't just hide in rehab."
"Maybe that's just what she's trying to do," he said. "Maybe she doesn't want to tell us what's going on or what happened to Molly."
"I want to know, Patrick," I said, determined to confront my mother and find out the truth. "Riley deserves to know, and we do, too."
Patrick stood silently for a long time and gave me an almost imperceptible nod.
We would find out what happened to Molly, and then leave the past where it belonged.
Chapter Forty-Three
Jack
I'd been finalizing the last parts of my plan for dinner that night. I'd wanted to do a quick run through of how the evening's events would unfold and go through the information I'd gathered.
"Where'd Le
ah go?" I asked Norma.
"Darlin’, I haven't got a clue," she shrugged as she continued opening the mail. "Not my day to watch the girl."