Chapter 29: The Visit
I went to see Celeste once.
Only once.
It was the year Zuri turned ten. Renée had pleaded guilty to fraud and witness tampering and was serving four years. Celeste's last appeal had been denied by the Florida Supreme Court. She would not be eligible for release until she was seventy-four.
I don't know exactly why I went.
Dr. Nwosu said maybe I needed to close a door I'd been leaving open.
The visitation room at Lowell smelled like bleach and burnt coffee.
Celeste came in wearing a blue prison uniform. Her blond hair had gone gray and coarse. Her face had collapsed in on itself. She was sixty-two and looked eighty.
She sat down across from me and smiled.
"Ryan. I knew you'd come eventually."
I didn't say anything.
"How is she?" Celeste asked. "Still wearing that ugly lanyard?"
"She's ten," I said. "She's on the swim team. She sails the Simone with her uncle Tyler on weekends. Last month she won a regional science fair with a project about dolphin communication. She wants to go to the University of Miami for marine biology."
Celeste's smile tightened.
"How nice."
"She doesn't think about you," I said.
Celeste blinked.
"I came here to tell you that. I thought you should know. You spent four million dollars and your sister's freedom trying to take her from me. You wrote her letters. You tried to make her doubt me." I leaned forward. "She doesn't think about you. She doesn't have nightmares about you anymore. When people ask about the boat, she tells them she held on and her daddy came. You're not even in the story, Celeste. You're just the reason she learned to hold on."
Celeste's hands began to tremble on the table.
"Harold left her everything," she said hoarsely.
"Harold left her a box of letters," I said. "And a family. That's what she treasures. The money's in a trust. She's never asked about it."
Celeste stared at me.
For a second, I saw something crack in her face. Something that might, in another woman, have been regret.
"Tyler won't see me," she whispered.
"I know."
"He changed his name."
"I know."
"I did it for him."
"No," I said. "You did it for you. And he's the one who found your phone."
I stood up.
"Ryan," she said. "Wait."
I waited.
She looked up at me, and for the first time in all the years I had known her, she didn't look like she was calculating anything.
"When she was hanging there," Celeste said. "On the rail. She looked at me. She didn't scream. She just looked at me. Like she was waiting for me to help her."
Her voice cracked.
"I see her face every night."
I looked at the woman who had held my daughter over the ocean and let go.
"Good," I said quietly. "Then you'll remember what you chose."
May you like
I walked out.
I never went back.
