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“Are you saying she never thought of any of us?Or her grandkids?”Abby asked.“How could she not have realized we’d be devastated?”

“It wasn’t about us,” Charlie said.“Mom probably had tunnel vision and could only see things from her perspective.I know from clients I’ve had that when someone gets to that point, they don’t see another way out.”

Morgan cleared her throat, then gazed down at the table for a moment.“Four years ago, I thought about killing myself,” she said.“If I hadn’t gone to AA, I would have done it.”

“Seriously?”Charlie asked.

Morgan nodded.

“I had no idea,” Abby said.

“You needed us, and we weren’t there for you,” Charlie said.

“You couldn’t have known; I didn’t tell anyone how I felt.”Morgan met their eyes.“At first, it was a fleeting thought that would come and go, then I considered it more often, and then it became all I could focus on.When alcohol didn’t solve my problems, I thought disappearing would.I couldn’t handle disappointing you all anymore.”

“I wish you’d come to us,” Charlie said.

“I was sure you’d all be better off with me gone, and I didn’t want to be guilted out of it,” Morgan said.“I knew Mom was always worrying about me, and I thought I could end that for her.It’s ironic, that I’m still here, and she’s not.”

The silence that floated between them told Morgan her sisters must be thinking about what would’ve happened if Morgan had gone through with it, and how their mother must’ve felt as she made that final decision.

Abby put her hands up to the gold butterfly around her neck.“I always wondered why you gave me this expensive necklace you said you didn’t want anymore.”

“I forgot about that,” Morgan said.“Since I’m not dead, you need to give it back.”

“Me and my big mouth,” Abby said under her breath.

Morgan reflected on how different she was back then.“It seems so long ago that I was in that place.Being sober and going to AA made me see that just because my father didn’t want me, I’m still worth having around.And now, I have a community of people in AA who understand and help me stay in the right head space.”

“And you have us,” Charlie said.

“We need to watch out for each other,” Abby said.“Now that Mom’s gone, we’re all the family we have.”

Morgan slumped as the weight of that sunk in.She had been to the funeral, and she’d stayed in her mom’s house without Carla there, but hearing Abby say those words out loud hit her harder than a fly ball coming at her head at eighty miles an hour.

“Because of everything you went through, does that give you a better understanding of how Mom might’ve been feeling?”Charlie asked Morgan.

“No.You all knew I was struggling, but Mom didn’t show any signs that she was in trouble.It seemed like she had everything together,” Morgan said.

“I think whatever it was that made her do it happened quickly,” Charlie said.

“I agree.I’m hoping we find something here that gives us answers and some closure,” Morgan said.

Abby sighed.“So, where do we start?”

They agreed to begin with the most straightforward clue: the pizza place listed on the magnet that Carla had given Michael.

CHAPTER 22

Charlie

When Charlie awoke the following morning and rolled out of bed, she wrapped her arms tightly around her body in the frigid room.She couldn’t stop trembling as she pulled a sweatshirt over her pajamas and turned the thermostat from sixty-five degrees to seventy-one.She looked out the window and saw a dusting of snow on the pavement below that resembled powdered sugar.

She touched the window with her fingertips, the raw, icy glass numbing her skin.Charlie had never liked cold weather.That was part of the reason she lived in Arizona—year-round sun.

Charlie stepped in the shower before her sisters got up.When she finished, Morgan was lying in bed looking at her phone, and Abby was still asleep.Charlie turned on all the lights in the room, and Abby groaned.Morgan smiled without taking her eyes off her phone.

As much as Charlie enjoyed giving her sisters a hard time, she wouldn’t have wanted to live without them for anything.Morgan and Abby were a part of her, and she of them, and with their mother gone, she wanted to hold on to them tightly.