For fourteen years, I had believed she was underground.
I stared at Frank.
“You knew.”
He looked down.
“You knew!”
“I knew some of it.”
I slammed my palm against the table.
“How much?”
“Your dad made me swear.”
“He lied to me!”
“Yes.”
Frank’s voice was soft.
“But not for the reason you think.”
I laughed bitterly.
“People always say that when they’re about to defend someone.”
Frank didn’t flinch.
“Your mother was sick.”
“Cancer?”
“No.”
His answer was immediate.
“Then what?”
Frank looked at the letter in my hands.
“Read.”
So I did.
My mother wrote that the year before her disappearance, something inside her had begun to unravel. Depression had hollowed her out. Then came paranoia. Panic attacks. Sleepless nights.
Finally, after months of hiding it, she had suffered a severe psychiatric breakdown.
She became convinced strangers were following us.
That the phone was listening.
