She planned to come back.
Below that, a line I had to read three times.
“You’ll always know where to find me.”
***
I put the letter down.
Ashley was watching me.
“There’s one more thing,” she said. “She left a location.”
“You’ll always know where to find me.”
***
The hill overlooked the river.
It wasn’t far, maybe twenty minutes outside town, up a path through a stand of old pines that opened onto a cleared rise with a view that stretched all the way to the bend in the water where everything had started and ended.
At the top was a small stone plaque set into the ground. No name. Just a date. The date of my birthday. Our birthday, she’d always called it, because Lily said she was claiming partial credit for the day.
“She placed this herself,” Ashley said. “She came up here every year on that date.”
“She placed this herself.”
I stood there for a long time.
She hadn’t marked the place where she died.
She’d marked the place where she lost me.
***
Ashley was crying. I was crying.
We stood on a hill above a river on a clear afternoon and mourned the same woman from our different angles, and after a while that felt like enough.
She’d marked the place where she lost me.
I went back three days later.
I brought flowers. Wild ones I picked from the field at the base of the path, because Lily always said florists made flowers look anxious.
I sat beside the plaque for a long time. I’d brought the final letter with me, and I read through it again slowly.
Near the end, I found the line I’d missed the first time. Or maybe I hadn’t been ready for it the first time.
“You’ll always know where to find me.”
I brought flowers.
***
I sat with that for a while.
At seventeen, I thought it sounded romantic. I didn’t know it was going to become the kind of sentence that takes thirty years to finish.
I set the flowers against the stone.
Looked out across the river, the same water I’d hated for three decades, which was the wrong river to hate, I understood now.
