TWENTY-NINE

Blackbead is a tomb, a museum, a bad memory to its core.

I stand in the foyer as people bustle. Blackbead’s doors sit open like some gaping maw, and I pay attention to the outline of the door carvings. A great tree with fruit on its branches.

A mango tree.

Servitium et Honorem? Not here.

The chandelier twinkles—in fragments.

Sometime during the night’s chaos, the light fell, showering crystal everywhere. The chandelier’s silver body sits in a broken heap. Muddy footprints mar the floors. One of the wall sconces flickers, and I flinch.

This was supposed to be my home. The Halls were untouchable.

And all they had to do was lie, steal, kill, and degrade themselves for the honor of having that power for years.

Was it worth it?

My head throbs.

Medics hurried Aaron to the hospital for his shoulder. Dante sits in the courtyard with Jada and Luis, arms wrapped tight around them. Police cars cram into Blackbead’s driveway, line the street outside the front gate. I don’t know who called the cops or the media, but they’re all here. The crowds, the cameras—it’s too busy. It’s too loud.

Run.

But I refuse to leave until I see everyone go.

It’s like observing an hours-long funeral procession. Everybody standing around, shocked and bawling. Everybody marching through the foyer, down the driveway, and into police cars.

Ruth leaves Blackbead first. The crazed appearance is gone; she’s escaped deep inside herself now. The mascara’s still smeared, hair’s still mussed, nails still broken. I don’t see the woman I remember, the one who seemed glamorous and regal and in charge. No. Ruth seems pathetic.

This is what a real murderer looks like.

Gregory trots out next. He’s as gruff and irritated as ever, yanking on his handcuffs. The escorting officer shoves him toward the street.

Ruth wasn’t lying when she said it was a burden to be right. And I was right about Gregory. He buried Kelly, planted the mango tree on top. Tended to it for years. Proudly.

Cops walk Thomas to the foyer. Thomas isn’t rattled by the turmoil around him. His clothes fit perfectly; his face remains stoic. He doesn’t seem like a criminal. But neither did anyone else at Blackbead—besides Gregory.

“What’d he do?” I ask the officer. My throat’s rough and raspy. Thomas glances at me from the side of his eye.

The cop seems to recognize me from earlier. And I remember him too. He had to pry me off Aaron as I wailed and tried to stop his bleeding wound. Maybe that’s why he’s comfortable answering. “We believe he helped cover up everything, miss. But don’t worry. We will take care of this, we promise you.” The officer nods before pushing Thomas out the front door.

I don’t know if the police will take care of anything, what sort of justice there will be, if any. Nobody here trusts the cops, and Thomas is smart—probably smarter than most. He could wiggle out of this. But if he really was the key to keeping everything hidden for so long? I hope he fucking rots.

“Please,” a desperate voice calls. “I didn’t know.”

Ian weeps as the police drag him out of Blackbead. His face is covered in black and blue. He stumbles, trips over a chair on the veranda. The metal screeches. Cameras flash. No poise. No grace. Ian’s face warps from apparent agony as the cops snap cuffs on his wrists.

“Ian Hall, you are under arrest for embezzlement,” declares an officer. But it’s as if Ian can’t hear him, doesn’t care at all.

“I did not know about Kelly,” he says, each word clear and pained. “I thought she left because of me, and I regretted it. Believe me. She said she was abroad. She wrote to me for years. The letters are in my office, I have them, believe me.”

There’s a brokenness in him. Something I recognize in myself. I don’t want to share anything with him beyond the DNA he gave me. But the rawness, the hurt? Sounds real.

Those love letters, each written in the neatest handwriting, each missing a return address. Dated for years after Kelly died. Ruth wrote Kelly’s goodbye note. She must have faked all those messages too. Kept Ian clueless and pining after the girl who got away.

But the girl was always right here.

Maybe Mother Maud wasn’t talking about me when she told Aaron to watch out for a lying woman. Maybe she was warning us about Ruth. A decade and a half of her lies.

My mom isn’t my biological mom. Ian Hall, one of the most miserable people I’ve ever met, is my sperm donor. I spent weeks this summer caring for my half siblings without knowing it, letting my half brother boss me around so I wouldn’t get fired.

The world is tilted. I don’t know how to set it right. Or if I can. It feels too big for me.

Blackbead falls into stillness. Jada cries outside. She’s never been so loud.

In the shadow of everything, I am small and naive. Childlike. My eighteen years aren’t enough to process this. I want my parents.

But what would I even say to them? How do I explain this? How do they explain this?

Someone rests a hand on my shoulder, and I startle.

“Hey, breathe deep, yeah?” Ora’s tone quickly soothes me. I throw my arms around her neck, hold on like she’s a life raft. Ora makes sense. Nothing else does. “Cops done with you?”

“Think so,” I mutter into her shirt. She rubs my back.

“Okay. Let’s take you home, Bambi.”

The next morning, the sun’s out.

I’m not feeling it.

I lie in Ora’s bed, the girl snoring beside me. She offered to set me up on the living room couch. Then her mom called her a bad host and suggested I take Ora’s room for myself.

I asked if we could just share. Didn’t want to be alone.

My phone vibrates on the nightstand. I peek at the screen.

Ah, the flood of messages begins. I start to reply.

But a call comes through.

MOM

Oh, she and Dad have some explaining to do.

I grab the phone and scurry into the hallway so I don’t wake Ora. And for the first time in weeks, I pick up.

“What are you doing in Jamaica?” Mom fumes. I haven’t heard her speak in weeks. I don’t admit I’ve missed it. Can’t admit how it nearly brings me to my knees.

“How do you know where I am?”

Mom kisses her teeth. “How are you going to ask me questions when you weren’t answering any of ours? Just photos.”

Shit. I had fake road trip updates scheduled to go out through the end of my trip. But then my life exploded, as it likes to do. I got sloppy.

“Wondered if someone took your phone, pretending to be you so we wouldn’t check to see if you’re okay.” Mom hits a sharp pitch. “Imagine our surprise when we search up your phone. And see! You’re not even in the country. My heart, Carina Brielle! Thought you got snatched.”

Mom has always been big on the Life360 thing. So at the airport, I’d set up a VPN so she could track my fake trip if she wanted. But when did it switch off? When the duppy screwed up my phone at Ian’s fundraising banquet, maybe? Has my location really been exposed for so long?

“I didn’t mean to freak you guys out.”

“You don’t know freak out. Not even close.” Car horns honk in the background. “Roads a mess… give me your address. We’re driving there.”

“You’re here?”

“Our daughter is lost on the island. Of course we’re here. So stop back talk and tell us where you are.”

I wait outside Ora’s house, sit on the stoop and count the palm fronds littering the road. Ora’s mom brings me a cup of hot tea while I scan every car driving down the road. With each passing moment, I grit my teeth, replay the weeks, try to find sense where none exists. Everything circles back to a single question. And only my parents can answer it.

After forty-five minutes, a car rolls into Ora’s driveway.

I stand and imagine I’m a stalwart palm tree that hurricane winds could not take down. I can face this. I can face them.

The car doors swing open.

Mom and Dad sprint to me, wrap me in their arms. I want to lean in. I want to let go.

But I can’t.

I push them back.

“Why didn’t you tell me the truth?”

Dad at least has the courtesy to wince. “Carina—”

“Why didn’t you tell us where you were going?” Mom cuts in. “Expressly told you not to come. Imagine you got hurt out here, all alone, nobody know where you are.”

“I did get hurt. Because of you two. Because you lied for years.”

“You don’t understand the situation,” Dad insists. He looks forlornly at Ora’s house, probably worried everyone inside is witnessing us being messy and loud in the yard. And they definitely are.

“Then explain it to me.”

Mom pinches the bridge of her nose, forces air out like an angered bull. How can she be mad at me? “The plan was to tell you on your birthday back in June. Right?” Mom looks to Dad to back her up; he’s too distressed. “But you had just lost Joy. Weren’t going out, eating, talking. Your whole world was upside down. Were we supposed to tell you still?”

“But why was it ever a secret? Mom, you never mentioned Kelly’s name, not once. Do you get how crazy this has been?”

“I told you a family member went missing in Jamaica, didn’t I? I told you why I didn’t want you here. Because it isn’t safe for—”

Dad cuts Mom off. “No, Rina, you’re right. We should have been honest. But Kelly wanted us to wait until you were eighteen, or until she could come meet you herself. So we honored her wishes.”

“She was my baby sister, Carina,” Mom adds, some anguish leaking into her tone. “All those years ago, she reached out for help. Pregnant and scared. I’d do anything for her. Including become your mother.”

And she is my mother. Aunt by blood, yes. Pain in my ass, absolutely. But these are my parents, shared blood or not. They always will be.

Mom’s words irk me, though. She’d do anything for her sister. Yet that same sister died out here, alone. She was hidden for over a decade, and hardly anyone searched for her.

“You came all this way for me,” I start. “Why didn’t you do the same for Kelly when she disappeared?”

Now it’s Mom’s turn to flinch. “When I lost contact with Kelly… I called her you don’t know how many times. Contacted the Halls until they blocked my numbers. Reported her missing to the police because she never would have just vanished like they were saying.” She studies her shoes. “Your father thought we should come here, locate her ourselves.”

“But you didn’t.”

“I couldn’t. I don’t know if you can understand.” She sighs. “If we found her, or if we didn’t, it’d be… hard. And I needed to take care of you. You were all I had left of her.”

I remember the red ribbon in Kelly’s hair. Like the one I’ve worn here at Aaron’s troubled request. Like the ones Mom loved to wrap around my hair ties until I told her I was too old for that.

Red ribbons that reminded Mom of her sister.

Mom left Jamaica with a sibling and couldn’t come back knowing she might not have one anymore. And she thought if she could keep me from coming here, she’d shield me too. Her last link to Kelly.

I do understand. We all fool ourselves, hide from the truth when it’s too much to handle. We fear getting lost, drifting.

Like mother, like daughter. Again.

“After a while,” Dad says, “we knew we weren’t going to get answers about what happened. We had to move on. But we still wanted you to know.”

“Then plans changed,” Mom murmurs.

Meaning, if I hadn’t blown up my life, I’d presumably have known everything by now. Maybe I would have found some other way to come here. Maybe I would have never been haunted by Kelly to begin with.

But that’s more speculation than I can handle.

“When we realized where you were,” Mom explains, “we believed that… you knew. Figured it out yourself somehow. Come here to make sense of it.”

“We’re sorry,” Dad adds. “We can’t imagine what you’ve been through.”

Tears prick my eyes. Because he’s right. He can’t. I wouldn’t even know how to describe the events of the last few weeks, the ups and downs of my own feelings, the terror I’ve lived through.

I sob.

This time, they embrace me, and I let them. I fall into their arms. Mom whispers gentle words, holds me with a sweetness I didn’t know was possible, a softness she must not have known how to show while trying to protect me. It’s comforting.

“We’ll try to find a flight that leaves tomorrow,” Mom says. “Throw it on one of the cards. Get you home, make it up to you somehow.”

“Thank you both, for apologizing.” Having Black parents, I know how rarely this happens. “But I’m not done here.”

“Oh, don’t start,” Mom warns.

“No, listen. A friend told me duppies need dead yards to move on. Kelly never got one.” I look between Mom and Dad, read the confusion on their faces. “Can you help me put one together for Kelly before we go?”

They grin.

“Of course,” Mom says. “Punkin always loved a party.”