Page 51 of Forget Me Not

The scream that erupts sounds inhuman, practically animal. A high-pitched howl that cannot be natural, a sound created by unbearable pain. It’s followed up by a low gurgle, little wet bubbles erupting from the pit in Mitchell’s neck.

“Shoot her!” Lily yells, her voice morphing into a manic scream as she runs over to Mitchell now hunched on the floor, her body collapsing onto the ground next to his. “Liam, shoot her .”

I scramble to my feet, ready to run, but I’m still cornered in the back of the shed.

I take a few steps forward, preparing to dart toward the door just as Liam’s silhouette moves between me and the opening.

He’s blocking my exit, the gun clutched in his grip, and I look back down at Mitchell, Lily’s hands grasping the base of his neck as a red glint seeps through her fingers.

Hot blood glowing in the light of the moon.

“Liam,” Lily yells as I keep backing up, my feet shuffling around as I try to find something to hide behind, some way to block the impending bullet.

I can hear Mitchell’s chokes transforming to gags, Lily muttering incomprehensible sounds as I keep the shears clutched in my hand, the handle now slick with blood from us both.

Liam keeps walking toward me, just a few feet away, and I lift my arm higher, knowing it’s no match for a gun, but still prepared to start swinging if he gets too close—but then he kneels, his hands sweeping across Mitchell’s body.

At first, it seems like he’s looking for a pulse, maybe attempting a tourniquet to stifle the blood, though Mitchell is still now, his wet wheezes softening into a rattle until, at last, it all goes quiet—and that’s when I realize Liam is looking for something else.

Not a pulse, not something to help, but the set of keys dangling from the loop of his jeans.

“Go,” Liam says, his voice bathed in agony as he stands up, Mitchell’s key ring clutched in his left hand. “Go right now.”

I stare at him, still not understanding until he turns toward Lily, positioning his body like a human shield as he points the gun in her direction, the barrel a few feet from touching her skin.

“ Go, Claire.”

I look back and forth between them in a slow bewilderment until I finally blink back to my senses, sprinting past them both and bursting my way through the shed doors.

The sky is lightening, the slow progression of dawn, and I whip around fast, ready to run back into the trees when I realize that Liam is backing up, too.

His arm still raised directly at Lily as her body kneels a few feet away.

“Liam,” I say, suddenly understanding what he’s about to do. “Don’t.”

His shoulders tighten, an internal battle raging on. Anger and pain contorting his features as his finger starts to tighten around the trigger.

“Don’t let her take the easy way out.”

I watch as Lily stares straight at him, marbled eyes asking him to end it all.

Mitchell’s lifeless body beneath her and any desire she might have had to keep living without him leaching away like blood from a wound…

and then Liam deflates, lowering himself off the shed step before closing the doors and threading the padlock back through the handles. Bolting Mitchell and Lily inside.

My body is reeling from shock, adrenaline seeping from my pores like sweat as a complete exhaustion slips in instead. Then Liam turns to face me, Lily’s screams muffled from behind closed doors.

I look down at the gun hanging limp in his grip, a cold terror starting to climb back in, until he tosses it onto the ground between us, the metal landing with a wet thud.

I stare at the gun, then back at him. This person who, just a few hours ago, was holding that very gun flush to my back.

Then I charge forward, grabbing it from the mud as I attempt to steady my shaking heads, wondering what I said that finally changed his mind when it hits me hard, the moment his demeanor started to change.

I think about looking at Michell as I hissed those words— You killed the mother of your son —just before Liam had winced, the accusation stinging like a physical slap.

“You didn’t know,” I say slowly. “This whole time, you thought—”

I stop, thinking back to the diary I know he must have read, too, as he and my sister sat in that camper, learning more about the man who fathered them both—but now I understand that the only reason I realized the woman living at Galloway wasn’t the same woman who wrote those words was because of that film I developed.

That picture of Marcia that they never saw, the final piece he and Natalie never had.

“She was never much of a mother,” Liam says to me now. “But somehow, I loved her, because I thought she was mine.”

I loosen my grip on the gun, looking intently at the lines of his face.

For the very first time, I can see the subtle little features he and Natalie share and I wonder if that’s why he always felt so familiar.

Why it seemed like I knew him the second I met him, my subconscious perpetually searching for her.

He drops down to the grass, his head falling into outstretched hands.

“I told her things,” he says, turning to face me as his fingers pull through his hair. “Out in that camper, I told Natalie things I’d never told anyone. How I was born on the property, lived here my whole life. How I never went to school because I don’t even have a birth certificate.”

My mind flips back to the diner again, to all the things Bethany had said; assuming that Natalie was seeing someone older because he wasn’t in school, because they spent all that time in his car.

“I never even realized how strange it was,” Liam continues. “I never knew anything else, but then I started to grow up, started meeting people my age when they worked in the vineyard, and it began to sink in. How different I was from everyone else.”

I feel a squeeze in my chest as I think about the kids who used to come here that summer, imagining as Liam would watch from a distance like they were some strange species he couldn’t understand.

As he would bring them out to that camper, his secret little spot tucked deep in the trees. A meager attempt to try and fit in.

“So, what happened?” I ask, talking a tentative step closer. “That last night—?”

“She went to the police,” he says, a single tear springing into his eye. “She told them everything. About how she suspected there was a missing person on the property, that she could connect Mitchell to another from 1983.”

I blink, thinking about how I went to Chief DiNello myself and relayed all the same information, though he had acted like he was hearing it for the very first time.

“She told them about me,” he continues. “That I was practically a prisoner in my own home. The night she died, she was coming to get me. She brought a bag with her so I could pack my things.”

“But if she went to the police, how come they never did anything—?” I start, though the thought screeches to a halt as I think of Chief DiNello again, his fingers twisting in knots as I spewed out all those things that I knew.

The way he demanded my proof, dismissing it all when I couldn’t provide it.

The only time he paid me any attention at all.

“Montana,” I say, the new revelation settling in as I think about how Eric DiNello grew up with my mother, how they all went by some nickname that wasn’t their own.

Those pictures I saw framed in his office, the one of him riding a horse with rolling hills in the distance.

He moved here from Missoula a few months back.

“He told Natalie he would go with her,” Liam continues, and I think about my sister hoisting up her window, sliding off the ledge and getting into that car—but it wasn’t Jeffrey’s car, not like we’d been told, but Eric DiNello’s.

Cruiser doors locking from the outside. “He promised to keep her safe and she trusted him,” he says.

“She believed him. He was a cop, but instead, he delivered her directly to them.”

I exhale, pushing stale air out through gritted teeth. Then I turn toward the water, watching the sun appear on the horizon as it casts everything in an orange glow.

“Did she suffer?” I ask, thinking of what Mitchell had said in the shed.

Twenty minutes, it’s over. It’ll be like falling asleep.

“No,” Liam says, and I bow my head. Relieved, at least, that he was telling the truth about that. “But I wasn’t there when it happened. I was still waiting for her in the woods like we had planned.”

I glance back at him, registering the faraway look in his eyes.

“Eventually, when it became obvious she wasn’t coming, I walked back to the house and found them all there… but by the time I arrived, it was too late.”

“So, how did she—?” I stop, still unable to say those final few words.

“My parents told me that at first, she ran,” Liam says as I imagine my sister tumbling out of the cruiser the second DiNello opened the door.

She must have tried to sprint through the vineyard, beelining toward the trees where she knew Liam was waiting.

“She tried to get away but then she fell in the dark, twisted her ankle and cut her arm bad. Marcia—”

He stops, corrects himself.

“ Lily, ” he continues, “convinced her to come into the house so they could talk. She told her it was all a misunderstanding, that there was an innocent explanation for all of it. Natalie didn’t know who she really was. She had no reason to suspect her of lying.”

I let myself imagine it now, the scene eerily similar to when I got that bite: Natalie sitting in the living room, maybe even in that exact same chair, her shirt wet with blood from her fall as Mitchell tenderly treated her wounds.

“Honestly, I think she just wanted to believe the best,” Liam adds as I imagine Lily walking in from the kitchen next, thrusting out a mug of something hot in her hands. “That her biological father wasn’t the monster she suspected him to be.”

“But why didn’t you try to leave later?” I ask, although I already feel like I know the answer as my mind revisits all those articles I’ve covered, Liam being conditioned his whole life to believe he was dependent on two people alone—and in a way, he was.

Without a legal identity, in the eyes of society, he doesn’t even exist.

“I was scared,” he says, the simplicity of his answer catching me off guard, though I find myself nodding as my mind is transported to my kitchen table, eleven-year-old legs kicking in the air as I willed myself to say silent about all the things that I knew.

“They convinced me it was my fault. That it only happened because I went against my family and if anyone ever found out what happened to Natalie, it could come back on me. They had a cop in their pocket.”

I think of the pain in his eyes as he led me out to the shed, no doubt believing his life would be over if he allowed me to leave with all that I knew.

“Family,” he mutters, the word hissing through his teeth like it has a bad taste, an acrid smack rising up in his throat. “She kept going on about family, how you don’t go against your family, but all along, she was lying about that, too. Natalie was more of my family than she was.”

A heavy silence settles over us both as I register the silky pink of the sky; the marbled clouds mirrored in the water and the sudden stillness of the wind in the trees.

“You two are so alike,” he says as I cock my head. “You and your sister.”

“We’re nothing alike,” I reply, that same line I’ve repeated to myself over and over and over again.

“Yes, you are,” he argues. “Natalie risked her life to help me, you risked your life to help her .”

He gestures back to the shed, to Lily, who’s gone silent inside.

“Neither of you had to do that. You could have just left, gone about your lives, but you came back to help someone who you could tell was in trouble.”

I stay silent, letting myself sit with that belief for a bit.

“If you take me to the police, I’ll come clean about all of it.”

I glance back at my car, the tires slit, but then Liam holds up Mitchell’s keys, his neck jerking in the direction of the truck as I realize the enormity of what he’s suggesting.

“Natalie was right,” he adds. “This place is the prison. I’d rather be in jail than spend another day here.”

There’s no movement between us for a handful of seconds, no sounds at all as I let the truth finally settle over my shoulders, the prospect of Liam walking into the station and willingly living the rest of his life behind bars.

On the one hand, he’s been complicit in so many crimes.

He’s known the truth about Natalie for twenty-two years and he’s hid it from everyone, hoarding the answers all for himself—but somehow, it still doesn’t sit right, letting him bear the brunt of it all.

I’m still standing above him, trying to decide what I should do, when Liam perks up beside me, his back lengthening as he turns toward at the road.

“Someone’s coming,” he says, and I follow his gaze as a cloud of dust erupts from the side, a little black car roaring fast through the gates.

Something about it looks familiar and I take a step forward, a small smile emerging as I think about leaving the station yesterday, digging out that picture of my parents before calling my mother and leaving that message.

I had admitted to staying at Galloway, demanded answers to the secrets she’s been keeping herself, and I watch now as her car creeps closer.

Her face twisted in fear on the opposite side of the glass until our eyes meet and I can see her shoulders loosen, her held breath expelled.

I look down at Liam, then back up at her.

“I think I have an idea,” I say.