“Lola, I—”
“Why didn’t you tell me, Ivy?” she asked, and her voice broke, as if she were really hurt. And maybe she was. She trusted me. Liked me. Told me things. “All this time you knew so much about me, pretended to be my friend, and you were their daughter.”
I bit into my bottom lip until I tasted blood. “You have no right to be upset with me for lying,” I said in an even tone. “Yes, my name is Ivy Hill. Yes, I found you and pretended to be your friend, but that’s only because you ruined my fucking life! I loved my parents. They were all I had, and you took them away from me. It wasn’t proven, but I know you made the detective on that case keep your name out of the files just so you could protect your own name! You made it virtually impossible for me to find you, let alone get answers about that night! You would have let me live my entire life lost and confused!”
Lola was flabbergasted. Her eyes stretched wide and she stood up and I couldn’t believe it, but she dumped her wine in my face. I let out a sharp gasp, standing with her in complete shock.
“You don’t know the whole story, you little bitch!” she hissed at me. “You don’t know what the fuck happened that day, so don’t you stand there and accuse me of ruining your life! I didn’t even know the fucking Hills had a daughter until now!”
“No?” I shouted as wine ran over my lips. “Well, what happened that night, then, Lola? Please enlighten me, you fucking liar!”
Lola’s bottom lip trembled as she stared me in the eye. She slammed down her wineglass on the table and I was surprised it didn’t shatter.
“Fine,” she muttered. “I’ll tell you. I was in St. Petersburg visiting my gynecologist,” she said, looking me hard in the eye. She sat back down and I hesitated before doing the same, but I did anyway, only because I needed to hear everything she had to say. “I was nine weeks pregnant at the time. Happy as could be. But on that day I felt like something was wrong. I was getting cramps, feeling ill. I needed to be checked. My doctor couldn’t squeeze me in until the afternoon, and it took me about three hours to drive there, so I drove alone. Three hours is far, yes, but this was the best doctor in the state. I was willing to make the drives. I didn’t tell Corey about the pain I was having, I just went, but I knew what was happening because it had happened to me before.” She drew in a sharp breath. “By the time I got to St. Petersburg it had started to storm, but I needed to get to the clinic as soon as possible. The pain had become even more intense by this point and I was crying. I was—I was driving so fast. Racing through the rain. My GPS told me to take a back road to get to the clinic faster, so I did, but it was a shadowy road, and with the sky so dark from the storm and all those trees, I could hardly see. My phone started ringing and I tried to reach for it, but it fell through the crack on the side of the passenger seat. I was reaching for it while also trying to hold back tears and drive. God, I was in so much pain that I couldn’t even see straight. Then, before I knew it, I saw a car in front of me pull out of nowhere. I ran into the back edge of the car, and because the roads were slick, the car did a tailspin and slammed into a tree. I was lucky enough to slam on my brakes and stop with minimal damage to myself, but the crash was so loud. I knew someone was going to be hurt. I got out and saw the front of my car was completely wrecked, but it was nothing in comparison to the car that had hit the tree.”
Blinking my tears away was impossible at that point. I thought of my parents and the fear they probably felt as they realized their lives were in danger and, soon, coming to an end. I’d heard about the car hitting a tree. It was the same tree I used to climb when I was a little girl.
My parents were cleaning out my grandma’s house that day. I remember, because they’d dropped me off at my friend Retta’s house to spend the day there while they went to clean it up and toss out old furniture.
My grandma had passed away about eight months before that day and they were thinking about moving into the house, but also considering the responsibility of it. It was an old house—a small, ranch-style, vintage home with a big wooden porch, painted a pale yellow that Mama said would be the first thing to be changed on the outside of the house. The shutters were dark green, and I remember them needing a fresh coat of paint too.