Page 20 of The Last Letter of Rachel Ellsworth

Chapter Seventeen

Henry had settled on the couch. “Is it all right if I stay for a while?” He held up the book from the car. “It’s a lot more comfortable here than my hotel.”

“Of course. Feel free.” She filled the kettle. “Want tea or coffee or anything?”

“No, thanks.” One long leg was propped on the other, ankle to knee, and he’d donned a thick sweater the color of sand. It set off the darkness of his tan, making him look like a rugged outdoorsy gentleman.

Veronica measured coffee into the cup, and sugar, and waited for the water to boil. “Mariah told me to google her accident.” A rustle of warning stirred in her gut. “And to never talk to her about it. She thought I knew already.”

“Mmm.” He closed the book, swung his foot onto the floor. “You don’t know what happened?”

“I assumed it was a snowboarding accident. Then, when I realized her mom was dead, maybe a car accident.”

Henry said, “I’ll sit with you while you do it.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Will I need support?”

He lifted a shoulder.

Veronica made the coffee and carried it to the sofa. It surprised her again how large he was, lean muscle draped over a large frame—the long limbs and broad shoulders. His warmth was a comfort as she picked up her laptop and typed Mariah Ellsworth into the search bar.

Hundreds and hundreds of results popped up—and they were not the Olympic angle Veronica expected. “Oh my God,” she whispered. She clicked on one from The Denver Post .

Among the 11 victims of Tuesday’s mass shooting at a local grocery store was celebrated snowboarder Mariah Ellsworth, a multiple Olympic medalist. She has undergone three surgeries to save her left leg.

According to a hospital spokesman, physicians were unsure whether the operations would be successful.

“We did everything we could, but the bone was massively shattered. It’s a miracle she didn’t bleed to death. ”

Ellsworth’s mother, cookbook author Rachel Ellsworth, was killed instantly, one of six deaths.

A weight pressed the air out of Veronica’s lungs.

“I remember this,” she said hoarsely. It had taken place at the same brand-name grocery store that she shopped at, so she knew the layout and the angles, everything, making it devastatingly easy to imagine how it happened.

It had been deeply unsettling. “Such a mundane place for so much horror.”

“Aren’t they all?” he said gruffly.

Veronica felt tears rise, and pressed her mouth together. Tears were so easy, such a surface-level response. And yet—she thought of mother and daughter in the store, picking up dinner, trading easy conversation, and then ... “You don’t think about the people who are just injured, do you?”

“It’s hard to think about any of it. We’re not equipped to cope with this level of horror.”

She gave a short, humorless laugh. “Aren’t you a war photographer?”

“Not anymore,” he said gruffly. “But that’s how I know.”

She took in his stoic expression and wondered what hid beneath it. It felt schoolgirlish to react with tears when he’d faced so much, when shootings were so common now that it was hard to even remember them all.

And yet, all of them were not the one. All violence did not cancel the particular and piercing horror of this one .

“So her mom was killed,” Veronica said, “and now Mariah wants to finish this book for her.”

“It was Jill’s idea, Rachel’s sister. Mariah was struggling with a pretty substantial depression—her mom dead, her career on hold—and Jill came up with the quest.”

Quest. Such a good word. A sense of purpose filled her. This was something she could do, right now. “I have Jill’s number,” she said, checking her watch to calculate the time difference. “We need those letters.”

Henry covered her hand. “Take a minute.”

It was a simple, quiet comment, one that tore a hole through her careful facade.

Focusing on the bend of his brown thumb, she let the devastation of the shooting fill her up, then spill out in pity and compassion for her prickly boss.

She remembered reading about it, obviously, a shooting so close to her own city.

Another one. There’d been so many, which was part of the problem now.

How could you find empathy for the enormity of endless, random violence?

No one could. But now this one was personal. Her empathy would not be wasted, flung into the red river of shattering news stories.

She opened the door to a picture of the mother and daughter being herself and Jenna, and it was almost more than she could bear. Stay with it, she told herself. Stay with it . It was terrifying and sad and impossibly horrific, to die violently while checking tomatoes for ripeness.

She wanted to text her daughter, but forced herself to stay with the intensity of feeling, the juxtaposition of clean white grocery store tiles, and—

Ugh.

After a minute, she blew her nose. Wiped her face. “Will she snowboard again?”

“Doubtful, but she’s got a lot of grit.”

Veronica nodded, took a long swallow of her cooling coffee, and looked up. “I’m glad she has a quest.”

“Me, too.”

Her phone buzzed a text alert, and it gave her an out to stop thinking about—all of this.

“Go ahead,” Henry said, turning his book back to the pages he’d been reading.

She picked up the phone and carried it toward the window. The message center had eleven new messages, and she frowned. Why so many? Was there some kind of trouble?

Okay, three from Spence, five from Jenna, one from each of the boys, and one from Mariah with Jill’s contact info.

She opened the Jenna texts first, a series sent over the course of the morning about a section she’d figured out on her thesis, and a struggle she was having with her roommate over how to divide chores.

Their sweet ordinariness pierced her. Grounded her. Her daughter was alive and well and consumed with the mundane matters of life.

The final text was a long one.

Dad is being really weird about everything.

He wants me to pay my rent starting next month!

! And I get that he’s under pressure with a new baby, but he should have thought of that?

And I can get a better job, but I might need to get some more roommates, and that’s fine, too, but I need a little time.

Veronica scowled, then texted: First of all, that is weird. A month isn’t long enough to spring something like that. You can make it work, though. I have faith in you.

A text came right back: Mom !! don’t take his side!!!!! this isn’t fair

It isn’t fair, but until I talk to your dad, which I don’t really want to do from here, I can’t figure it out.

Which wasn’t at all what she thought she would say, but she realized she meant it. I love you, though. I’ll send some pics from today.

Wow, thanks. Not.

For a moment, she looked at the text, her thumb hovering over the keypad. What if her daughter had been shot at a grocery store?

But the same could be said about almost anything. What if she was in a car accident? What if she was in a building that collapsed? What if she was kidnapped by a stranger? What if ... what if ... what if? A million things could happen at any moment.

What ifs had held her hostage as a young mom.

She had exhausted herself trying to imagine all the disasters that could befall her babies, and scanned the horizon constantly trying to hold them off.

Spence thought it ridiculous, but then he wasn’t a mother, was he?

She covered wall sockets and hid sharp things and installed carbon monoxide detectors and never traveled in a car with them during a threatened blizzard in case of getting stranded.

And then a three-year-old at Jenna’s day care had tripped on an uneven sidewalk on the way home, cracked his head on a metal stake buried in the grass, and died. It panicked her for a time. How could you possibly prevent that?

But then, the very randomness of the event finally came home.

She couldn’t prevent everything. She settled into being a mother who could only do her best. Now she had to employ the same sense of reason.

Jenna had plenty of coping skills, at least for a couple of months.

Veronica really did not want to deal with Spence, and would do what she could to avoid him.

Right now, Veronica was on a quest. The word filled her with resolve.

She opened the text from Mariah that contained her aunt Jill’s contact info.

She clicked on Jill’s number to open a new text.

Hi, this is Veronica Barrington , she wrote.

I’m traveling with Mariah. She said there are some letters Rachel wrote while she was in India, and I was hoping you might be willing to scan them into an email for me.

She doesn’t want to see her mom’s handwriting, which is why they’d come to me.

Are you comfortable with that? You can email me at [email protected] .

“Jill contact, made,” she said aloud, but Henry had gone back to his book.

Neither of the boys said anything about finances or their father. Ben said, sweetly, that he hoped she was having a good time. Tim, terse as always, said, I passed my final. Onward!

When she couldn’t put it off anymore, she took a breath and opened Spence’s texts. The heater went out completely, and I have to replace it right now. I can’t afford it. You’ve got to sign those alimony adjustments. I can’t do all of this on my own .

Veronica frowned. Did he really have to replace the furnace? Or was that another ploy? It had been on its last legs for a while, so it wasn’t out of the question.

But how was that her problem? She didn’t actually own the house anymore. It was his.

The next two texts detailed what he would do if she didn’t sign the agreement—cut Jenna’s rent, and go back to court.

She closed her eyes. What was the right thing here? She really didn’t know. In light of what she’d learned about Mariah, alimony squabbles seemed ridiculous.

And yet—she had to live in the world, which required money.

Her biggest bill was a repayment for damages she’d invoked in the incident that led to her arrest, and it came out before anything else, a substantial sum.

If she signed the agreement, she wouldn’t have enough to pay rent, even with the current income from this gig with Mariah.

For a moment, she stared out the window where the rain fell harder. The early dark was already creeping in. Henry had turned on the gas fire against the wall, and the warmth made the room cozy and snug.

Part of her conflict was her love of the house itself.

She wanted it to be well tended. After a childhood spent in a single-wide trailer in northern New Mexico, she’d fallen hard for the space, the windows, the expansive kitchen.

It was something out of a fantasy she’d spun, night after night, reading design magazines in her tiny room, earphones connected to her Walkman playing Sinéad O’Connor and Depeche Mode while her little brothers played Nintendo in the living room, her stepdad resolutely zoning out in his shed with a portable TV.

“I lost my mother when I was young,” she said aloud to Henry, surprised to hear it come out of her mouth.

“I’m sorry.”

She nodded. “I was younger, sixteen, and it wasn’t violent, just run-of-the-mill cancer, but I was furious, for so long. She didn’t really get the treatment she needed because she didn’t have health insurance, and as much as we tried, it was pretty much too late by the time they found it.”

Henry put his book down. He had such a calm way about him, not the tortured thing she’d expect from a man who’d spent his time shooting images of people in pain. He held his hands in his lap, his eyes on her face. He waited.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to bother you. You can keep reading.”

“Or you can keep talking. I don’t mind listening.”

She closed her eyes, shaking her head. “She was so full of life. She taught me to cook, and sew. My stepdad thought she hung the moon, and he was just wrecked when she died. He only lasted a few years.” She let go of a breath. “So sad, and yet, not as sad as—”

He nodded, still calm, still focused on her. Waiting.

“Life is really not fair.”

“That is a true statement. Maybe the truest of all.”

She put the phone down on its face. “Do you have family?”

“Lots.” He half smiled. “Parents, a bunch of siblings, cousins, aunties, uncles. Even a grandmother who is still living.”

A thread of envy wound through her. “That’s unusual. Do you see them a lot?”

A single lift of his shoulder. “Not really. We don’t have a lot in common. I get back a couple of times a year, kiss and hug everybody, and we’re all happiest like that.”

Her phone buzzed, and she looked at the screen, prepared to ignore it if it was Spence. Instead, it was Jill. Hi, Veronica. Good to meet you. There are quite a few letters. I have a lot going on, so I’m not sure how many I can do at once, but I’ll get started tonight when I get home. How is Mariah?

She’s okay. Sleeping right now.

Well, now that you have my number, feel free to call me anytime. And you can ask me anything.

Got it. Thanks.

Veronica looked at Henry. “Jill is going to scan the letters Rachel wrote when she was in India. Maybe there will be some clues in them.”