It was one thing to read Toby’s love letters to my mother. It was another entirely to read hers to him. She sounded like herself, so much that I could hear her voice with every single word I read.
She loved him. The muscles in my chest tightened. It hurt to love him, and she loved him anyway. I breathed—in and out. He left her, and she loved him anyway. That string of thoughts cycled through my head on repeat as we drove back to the airstrip where the jets awaited. What my mom and Toby had—it was tragic and messy and all-consuming, and if the postcards made one thing clear, it was that she would have done it all again.
“Are you okay?” Grayson asked beside me, like it was just the two of us in this SUV, like we weren’t surrounded by Oren’s men. There were two other SUVs, one in front of us and one at our rear. There were four armed men, including Oren, in this car alone.
“No,” I told Grayson. “Not really.” My entire life, I’d grown up knowing that I was enough for my mom. She hadn’t dated. She hadn’t wanted or needed a damn thing from Ricky. Her life was full of love. She was full of love—but romance? That wasn’t something she’d needed. It wasn’t something she’d wanted. It wasn’t even something she was open to—and now I knew why.
Because she’d never stopped loving Toby.
Close your eyes, I could hear Max telling me. Picture yourself standing on a cliff overlooking the ocean. The wind is whipping in your hair. The sun is setting. You long, body and soul, for one thing. One person. You hear footsteps behind you. You turn.
Who’s there?
And my answer had been: no one.
But after reading even just a couple of my mom’s postcards? It was getting harder to ignore Grayson’s presence beside me, harder not to think about Jameson. My eyes stung, even though there was zero reason for me to be crying.
I stared through my tears at the postcards my mom had written to Toby and forced myself to keep reading. Soon, the focus of my mom’s writing shifted from what they’d had to a different kind of love story. From that point on, every single postcard was about me.
Avery took her first steps today.
Avery’s first word is “uh-oh!”
Today, Avery invented a game that combines Candy Land, Chutes and Ladders, and checkers.
On and on it went, up until the postcards stopped. Up until she died.
My hand shook, holding the last postcard, and Grayson’s hand made its way to mine.
“She wrote these,” I said, my voice catching in my throat, “to Toby about me.” It couldn’t have been clearer reading them: He really was my father. I’d been working off that assumption for so long that it shouldn’t have come as a shock.
Beside me, Grayson’s phone buzzed. “It’s Jameson,” he said.
My heart skipped a beat, then made up for it. “Answer it,” I told Grayson, pulling my hand back from his.
Grayson did as I’d asked. “We’re on our way back to the plane,” he told Jameson.
He’ll want to know what I found. I knew that, knew Jameson. I held up the small metal disk that Jackson Currie had given me. “This is what Toby left with Jackson.” Grayson stared at it, then switched Jameson over to a video chat, so he could see it, too.
“What do you think this is?” I asked. The disk was gold and maybe an inch in diameter. It looked like some kind of a coin, but not any I’d seen before, its surface engraved with nine concentric circles on one side and smooth on the other.
“It doesn’t look like it’s worth much,” Jameson commented. “But in this family, that means nothing.” The sound of his voice did something to me—something it shouldn’t have done. Something it wouldn’t have done before I’d read my mother’s postcards.
Close your eyes, I could hear Max telling me. Who’s there?
“We’re incoming,” Oren announced curtly—to whom, I wasn’t sure. “Sweep the plane.”
When we arrived at the airstrip, he opened my door, and I got three escorts to the plane. Behind me, Grayson had switched the phone off video, but he was still on the line with Jameson.
My mind was full with images of them both—and with the words my mother had written to Toby.
The night air was cold and getting colder. As I walked toward the jet, a brutal wind picked up, then gave way to sudden and utter stillness. I heard a single, high-pitched beep, and the world exploded. Into fire. Into nothing.