Bree told herself. At least not the kind she had done yesterday.
Besides, she was so sore she could barely move. What was she thinking doing all that at one time? She needed to pace herself better until she was back in shape.
Instead, today, her self-care would be mental and emotional. She would find the information that Paul had kept hidden from her. Not because he was cruel, but because she had asked him never to tell her.
However, she was ready now, and she had to assume he had kept records so that she could find the information if she ever looked. Or at least left a hint for her, a thread she could pull to find the answers she needed.
She had Paul’s laptop with her, and he had left her all the codes she would need to get into it. She even had a file box of Paul’s papers in the car’s trunk, just in case he had kept the information off his computer.
Where she would find the information was a mystery, but she was finally ready to look.
So after a lovely breakfast, a quick walk down to the lake and back, Bree returned to her room and plugged in Paul’s computer.
It didn’t take long for her to realize that she had more immediate things to deal with than looking for what he had kept hidden from her.
She had thought that giving away his clothes—except for the one shirt he always wore, carefully packed away in her suitcase, hoping his scent would never leave it—was the end of dealing with the logistics of his death.
But once she opened his computer, she realized Paul was still getting email. Mainly spam, but there were legitimate emails from people who apparently didn’t know he had passed away. So she spent the morning writing to those people and fielding their responses, which only brought back the hurt and pain she had managed to contain. Luckily, Paul had no social media presence, so she didn’t have to deal with shutting those channels down, too.
But by the time she had finished with the emails, she was mentally and emotionally exhausted, and Bree wasn’t sure she could continue. Or that she wanted to. It would be easier to go back to Spring Falls and never tell a soul. She’d keep their secret forever.
But then she heard Paul’s voice in her head. Not actually in her head, but there anyway, because it would be what he would say if he were physically with her now.
“Remember who you are looking for, Bree.”
And that broke the dam. Until now, Bree had fooled herself into thinking that she was only looking for information. Impersonal information. But now she had to face that she wasn’t looking for information.
She was looking for a person. Someone she had never met. She didn’t know her name, where she lived, or who or what she loved. She knew nothing. It was how she had wanted it to be and what Paul had done for her, because that was what she wanted.
And now, she didn’t. Now she wanted to meet her. She wanted to know her daughter. And she could only hope that her daughter would want to meet her too.
But by the end of the day, Bree realized she had been living in a fairytale land. Paul had left nothing behind about her daughter. There were no clues. There was no information about the adoption agency he had used. Nothing. Not a shred of evidence that she had ever had a child. He had buried it all somewhere.
It was as if the nine agonizing months of bearing the child that she was too afraid to love, because of the violence of its conception, too embarrassed to tell anyone what had happened, as if it had been her fault, had never happened.
But it had. And Paul had agreed that they could move away and tell no one if that was what she wanted.
“But is it necessary?” he had asked. “It’s your child. I’ll love it as if it was mine. No one will know.”
“Can’t. Won’t,” Bree had said over and over again. She had reasons. Good reasons. Maybe the child would look like the man who attacked her. Then people would know. Every time she looked at it, she would relive the memory.
“No,” she would cry in Paul’s arms. “I can’t do it. I can’t make this baby live a life where I would have to decide to love it every time I saw it. It’s not fair. Whoever this person is going to be will be better off without me.”
Paul had not agreed with her, but he had agreed to do what she wanted. He had also agreed with her decision to never return to Spring Falls—to stay away from the Ruby Sisters because they would figure it out if they saw her.
They had to make a clean break. Make a new life. Just the two of them. She had promised him they would have children of their own one day. But something had gone wrong at her daughter’s birth, and it had turned out that she was the only baby Bree would ever have.
Both of them pretended it was okay, and in some ways, it had been. They never spoke of the child again. She had never held the baby. They had whisked it off to the adopted parents waiting in the wings. She didn’t know who they were. She had not wanted to know. The only reason she knew it was a girl was because she heard two nurses whispering about it.
She never asked Paul what adoption agency he used. He only told her it was done.
And now that she wanted to know, there was nothing to find. She had been wrong twenty-eight years before, and she was wrong now. Paul had not wanted her to find the child. His gift was as simple as it appeared. Get a new life, and return to the Ruby Sisters. It was over. His gift was over. That would have to be enough.
But now, she wasn’t sure it would be. The only choice that remained was what to do next. And at that moment, she didn’t want to do anything. She was done. All of it was over.