group of teenagers roughhoused nearby and a continual parade of couples, just like them, strolled by.
“It is hard to explain, but it really isn’t mourning. Sure, sometimes I’m sad about Tricia, but most times she just casts a big shadow,” Grace said. “Remember that case where a couple had a baby because their older daughter had leukemia and there was no donor?”
“Kind of,” he said. “They needed a match for her bone marrow and they decided to take a chance and have another child.” He put his arm around her and said, “Just in case.” It wasn’t supposed to be a sexy move, just a kind of reassuring gesture from someone who cared about her. Grace could feel it.
“Right,” she said. “Just in case. And, you know that it worked. The little girl was a match.”
“I’m not sure what you’re getting at, Grace,” he said, after a pause.
“I’m not saying it is exactly the same thing, but I grew up knowing that I was a kind of replacement for Tricia. Don’t get me wrong, I know my parents loved me. But they just missed her so much, loved her so much, that I was there to fill the void. You know, like a family sometimes rushes out and gets a new cat the day after their cat is run over.”
Shane looked off at the water, thinking.
“That’s a little severe, Grace.”
“Maybe, but that’s how I felt. It was always Tricia this, Tricia that. Do you know that Tricia and I wore the same outfit to our first day of school? It was a pink sweater with a poodle appliqué. I thought it was cool because it matched Mirabelle. I didn’t even know it was the same sweater until years later when I was going through an album tucked away in the basement.”
“Okay, I’ll grant you that is a little creepy,” he said.
“That’s not all. I mean, I could tell you stories all night about what it was like being the sister of a dead girl. Even though she was gone and had been gone before I was even born, there was never a time when her name didn’t bring my dad to tears. There never was a time when I didn’t feel that they wanted her so much that if there was a knock on the door from someone with a potion or promise that could bring her back and the only caveat would be that I was to be traded for her, they would have done so without so much as a thought.”
Grace held Shane’s gaze for a while. She could see trust, understanding in his eyes. Yet she was unsure how much she could really say. She had never been abused or anything like that; she understood that a parent’s loss was undoubtedly greater than whatever anyone could imagine unless they’d been there themselves. As she grew older she could see a haunted look in the eyes of those who had suffered great loss. When she was a small girl, her parents hosted a support group for mothers and fathers of murdered children. Her mom had her serve cookies at many of the meetings and she could feel the longing stares coming from the club members as they watched her move from the kitchen to the living room, where a semicircle of chairs had been set up.
“How old is your little girl?”
“Nine,” her father said.
“My Tracy would be about her age now.”
“My Danny would be driving a car.”
“Paula would be married by now.”
It was always that way. The parents talking about their loss in terms of what their children would be doing at that very moment had they survived their killers. Yet, like Tricia, the reality was that they were frozen in time. Forever stuck. Just like the pictures that hung in all the sad little bedrooms of those kids who never came home—always there, as if waiting for the inevitable and relentless tears of those who mourned them.
C HAPTER 8
E mma Rose set out a pair of black pants, a white cotton blouse, a S AVE THE S OUND T-shirt, a black sweater, and a pair of black heels. She was short and no matter what the occasion, heels were always in order. Even for work at the Starbucks adjacent to the Lakewood Towne Center, just
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