Second Chance at the Riverview Inn (Riverview Inn)

The edges of her vision got blurry and she had to remind herself to exhale.

Breathe. Just breathe.

Twice a year she got these letters from Angela Newman. Maybe there was a chance that they weren’t from Angela Newman, but as Angela Newman was the only person she knew from Taconic Correctional Facility, it was a good bet.

The only way to know for sure was to open them. Read them. And she never opened them. Couldn’t even dream of reading them.

The hard part of forgiveness was supposed to be the actual forgiving. She’d thought, foolishly maybe, hopefully certainly, that once she’d done it, it would stick. But it seemed to be a process, and there were days it retreated from her like it had never been there. She was left dry and brittle and so full of whatever the opposite of forgiveness was, she was paralyzed.

The letters came to Haven House, and not to the farm, because with her limited resources in jail Angela Newman had googled Helen Larson and found the Haven House address.

If those letters had come to the farm she imagined her parents might throw them away thinking they were protecting her, but because they came here, they didn’t even know about them. No one knew about them. And they felt like a dirty rotten secret that someone shoved into her hands. A secret that she’d never wanted, but didn’t know how to get rid of. She could tell Dani, of course, to get rid of them. But every time Helen imagined the conversation she couldn’t find the words.

So, twice a year, these letters sat, stacked with the bills and junk on Helen’s desk. Like a grenade with the pin pulled, just waiting to destroy the little bit of peace and control she’d managed to salvage over the years since Evan died.

And not dealing with the letters wasn’t right. She knew that. It was moving her backward and not forward, as her therapist would say if she went to see that therapist anymore. God, she’d never even told the therapist about the letters.

The day the first one came, she’d had a phone call with the New York Times to discuss Haven House and its unique fundraising challenges. She’d been so excited about the interview and the chance to talk about the stigma around giving women who lived with poverty—who needed government assistance and often couldn’t work because of child-care issues—what some people regarded as a vacation.

But the letter had made a mess of her, and in the interview she’d ended up talking about Angela and what happened to Evan and the victim statement she’d read at the trial. And how forgiveness wasn’t stagnant.

And that had become the story.

For weeks she’d felt sick with exposure. Sick with the thought of a million people seeing her pain and pitying her. There’d been calls to go on talk shows and talk to other journalists and she’d ignored them all.

Then it all got drowned out by COVID news.

Weird thing to be grateful for, but here she was, grateful.

And these letters kept coming.

“Mom?” Bea stood in the doorway. She’d insisted on dressing herself this morning and was in head-to-toe orange, including a too-small Halloween shirt.

“Yeah, honey,” she said. It took so much work to pretend she was fine. To turn a smiling face on her daughter.

Bea stood there like a pumpkin with curls. “I want to go home.”

Helen tore the letter in half before throwing it in the garbage.

“Me too,” Helen said, and followed her daughter away from the past.

The Following Monday

The Haven House summer picnic was at the end of September. Back at the very beginning of Haven House, when Jonah, his business partner, Gary, and Mom were really doing just about everything on their own—on top of running a farm and Jonah’s real estate empire in the city—they’d wanted to hold it in August but just couldn’t get it organized fast enough.

And then they realized the end of September was a much better time to have a picnic in the Catskills. Fewer bugs, better temperatures and all the tourists were gone so the parks belonged to the locals again.

The picnic used to be something that could be put together in a few weeks. Alice and Gabe would donate food and grills. Max and Delia would come down and hang banners, and build the bonfire and the small stage.

But now the event had grown, and thanks to the donation from Micah, Helen was planning the picnic in June. Booking magicians and face painters.

She was expecting close to three hundred people.

“Yes,” she said into her phone. She was sitting outside Dani’s house Monday night and in a few moments she’d go in to watch The Bachelor. She’d driven down by herself. The half hour trip took forty minutes because she got caught behind a tractor and wasn’t in the mood to pass it. The trip had, very oddly, not been as hard as she’d thought it would be.