The sun had barely started coming up when there was a knock at the front door. She’d gone back to bed after Thaddeus arrived home in the middle of the night, but her sleep had been fitful, her dreams foreboding. For a moment her addled mind decided it was Thaddeus knocking on the door, and she hurried out of bed, pulling on her old velour robe as she rushed downstairs.
She tugged the door open to find not Thaddeus on the porch but two people, a man and a woman. It took her a moment to grasp that it was the sheriff and the girl who’d been assigned to them. It took her less than a moment to understand that they were there to deliver bad news. She turned away.
“Daniel!” she called, her body beginning to shake involuntarily. “Daniel!” she hollered again, louder, glad he was there, that he was near.
Daniel appeared at the top of the stairs, and then beside him, Thaddeus. She turned to face the sheriff and the girl. Anissa. Her name was Anissa. Anissa would not meet Tabitha’s eyes, turning her gaze toward the sheriff instead. She looked to him because he was the source, Tabitha understood. He had come with the answer to a question none of them wanted to ask.
Daniel and Thaddeus came to stand behind her, flanking her like guards. She did not know if this was intentional but thought perhaps it was wise for them to be there, just behind her, in case she collapsed. In case she couldn’t withstand what the sheriff was about to say.
But she did. She stood there as Pete Lancaster delivered the news that her son, after missing for twenty-one years, had been found. He’d been buried near the rusted building where they’d found his jacket. He was not somewhere else, having grown up as a completely different person, someone who had simply forgotten them as the years passed. He had not been abducted in order to replace someone else’s son. He had not run away. He had not been trafficked. None of her imaginings that allowed him to still be alive had been true. Davy was dead.
The sheriff said other things, things she was sure were important, something about Gordon Swift, something about a press conference later that afternoon. But her mind stopped receiving information beyond the fact that Davy had been found. Her head filled with a white light, a rushing sound like wind through aspen trees, her errant thoughts the silver sound of clattering leaves. She asked to sit down and the girl, Anissa, took her arm, helped her to the couch.
Daniel and Thaddeus followed, lowering themselves to the spots on each side of her. She felt them there but could not see them. All she could see was Davy that last night. Davy whining, asking why she was leaving him with Thaddeus, why she couldn’t just stay home.
“Sometimes moms get to have fun too,” she’d said.
Je ne regrette rien. She repeated the words to herself again and again even as the sheriff left and Anissa walked him out. Even as Thaddeus fled the room. Even as Daniel stayed by her side, saying her name like a question, his face a mixture of concern and grief. He said it louder and louder, but his voice could not drown out the voice inside her head. The one that insisted, over and over, that she regretted nothing.