PART 3 — THE BLUE DIARY
The girl on my porch had Jennas eyes, and when she stepped into the light I knew before she said another word. Grace. My daughter. Sixteen years old and alive.
She had not died on that mountain road. Only her mother had. For sixteen years I had buried a wife and a baby together, and the baby had been alive the whole time, two states away, being raised by Jennas sister.
Grace had found the blue diary hidden in Michelles closet and read the last page, the one Jenna wrote the day before she died. If anything happens to me, please do not let Michelle take my baby. Mark does not know what she did.
My wife had been afraid of her own sister, and had written it down in case the worst came, and the worst had come, and no one read her warning until the daughter she was trying to protect found it sixteen years too late.
I did not blame the girl for loving Michelle. Michelle was the only mother she had ever known, and whatever that woman had done, she had not been unkind to the child. That mattered to me. It mattered a great deal.
But the truth had a right to come out. I took the diary to the authorities, and the old case of a car that somehow burned on a road to nowhere was opened again. Michelle had a great deal to answer for, and this time there was a witness who had grown up and come looking for the truth herself.
Grace and I are going slow. I do not ask her to call me Dad. I only ask to be in her life. We visit her mothers grave together, and I tell her the things Jenna loved, the blue blanket, the way she laughed, how she grabbed my finger through the car seat straps.
I lost my wife on that mountain. But my daughter came home on a cold night, holding her mothers diary, with her mothers eyes, and I will spend the rest of my life grateful she knocked.