I put away the laundry. "What happened, darling?"
She looked at her phone. "Mom, Dad sent me a video the night before they left and asked me not to show it to you."
I stopped folding the laundry and looked at her. "What video?"
"Dad sent me a video the night before they left and asked me not to show it to you."
"I was six, Mom. I didn't understand. He texted me telling me not to show it to you until I was ten. I even forgot the phone was there when they disappeared." Lily began to cry softly. "He said you might hate it when you see it."
He handed me the phone. I pressed play and knew I wouldn't get out of it anyway.
Ryan's face appeared on the screen, in the video recorded in the garage.
"Anna," he said softly. "If you're watching this, it means enough time has passed for you to start moving on. I'm sorry. Jack and Caleb deserve something I no longer had the right to hide from them, and by the time you see this video, I'll have taken them to their biological mother."
A low, hoarse moan escaped my lips. Lily's hand rested on my shoulder, but I barely felt it.
"He said you might hate him when you see this."
Ryan looked at the camera and added, "When you see this video, you probably won't forgive me. Or maybe I didn't deserve it. Everything got out of control. Tell Peanut I love her."
Then the screen went blank.
Lily was crying. "Mom? What are we going to do now?"
I got up so quickly the bed frame creaked. "We'll figure out the rest."
***
The next morning, we traveled about 377 kilometers.
Andrea, Ryan's ex-wife, opened the door. She looked to be in her forties. As soon as she saw me, she paled. She began to close the door.
"Now I have no control over anything."
I stopped him with one hand and took Lily's phone. "Look at this first."
Andrea barely managed to watch the first half before tears filled her eyes. When the screen went blank, she stepped aside and let us in.
Inside, the walls completed the story the film had begun. Ryan was there, in framed photos, Andrea smiling beside him, and Jack and Caleb, achingly alive beside them.
The truth hit me so hard I thought I'd collapse. I looked at Andrea. "I raised those kids as if they were my own. What did I do to deserve this?"
Andrea cried before answering. Not the kind of crying you imagine when asking for forgiveness. The kind of crying born from an old guilt that has never fully subsided.
"You didn't do anything, Anna," he said.
"What did I do to deserve this?"
Then she asked us to go somewhere with her. We followed her car to the cemetery on the outskirts of town. She led us to the gravestone and stepped aside.
As soon as I saw the name engraved on the stone, I was paralyzed.
Ryan, dear husband and father.
Lily squeezed my hand so hard it hurt.
Andrea looked at me for a moment, then said softly, "Seven years ago, Ryan contacted me completely out of the blue. We'd been divorced for years, and he'd had full custody of the kids since I'd been going through a rough patch. So when he asked me to pick them up, I stared at him without saying a word. Then he showed me his medical records." She paused and looked at me with tears in her eyes. "Stage IV cancer."
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