“Anastasia is watching over Julian and Clara. I truly believe that.”
My body went completely still.
For several seconds, my mind refused to understand what I had heard.
Then the meaning landed.
They thought I was dead.
Not living in Atlanta.
Not working somewhere else.
Dead.
My mother had told them I was dead.
I waited until they walked away.
Then I stepped into the hallway.
My legs were shaking.
I unlocked my bedroom.
Inside, everything looked strangely untouched.
My old books.
My bed.
My high-school things.
It looked less like a bedroom and more like a museum exhibit.
Then I saw the display in the center of the room.
A framed photograph.
A white dogwood tree.
The same dogwood I had sold Clara.
Beneath the photograph sat a black granite memorial plaque.
I walked toward it.
And read:
IN LOVING MEMORY OF
ANASTASIA DUNAWAY
1995–2014
AN ANGEL TAKEN TOO SOON
I stared at my own name.
My birth year.
And the year they had chosen for my death.
2014.
The year I turned eighteen.
The year I had entered psychiatric treatment.
The year my family apparently decided I was more useful to them as a tragic dead daughter than as a living one.
Everything finally made sense.
The weekends away.
The locked bedroom.
The elaborate secrecy.
The sympathy.
The church connections.
The carefully performed grief.
My mother had not simply hidden me.
She had erased me.
Worse, I had personally selected the tree planted in memory of my own fake death.
I expected to cry.
I didn’t.
Something colder replaced the pain.
I opened my closet and pulled down a small metal lockbox.
Inside were my real documents.
