"Everything has gone beyond my control now."
Advertisement
I stopped it with my palm and held up Lily's phone. "Watch this first."
Andrea barely made it through the first half before tears filled her eyes. When the screen went dark, she stepped back and let us in.
Inside, the walls finished telling the story the video had begun. Ryan was there in framed photos, Andrea smiling beside him, and Jack and Caleb beside them, painfully alive.
That truth hit me so hard I thought I might crumple right there. I glanced at Andrea. "I raised those boys as my own. What did I ever do to deserve this?"
Andrea cried before she answered. Not the kind people put on when they want forgiveness. The kind that comes from old guilt that never fully settled.
"You did nothing, Anna," she said.
"What did I ever do to deserve this?"
Advertisement
Then she asked us to go with her somewhere. We followed her car to the cemetery on the edge of town. She led us to a headstone and stepped aside.
The moment I saw the name carved into the stone, I couldn't move.
Ryan, beloved husband & father.
Lily grabbed my hand so hard that it hurt.
Andrea looked down for a moment, then said softly, "Seven years ago, Ryan reached out to me out of nowhere. We'd been divorced for years, and he'd had full custody of the boys ever since I went through a difficult chapter in my life. So when he asked me to take them, I just stared at him. Then he showed me his medical records." She stopped and looked at me with tears in her eyes. "Stage four cancer."
I closed my eyes.
