“Ha ha.” But she followed Harper down the stairs.
Harper paused outside the door. “Luke is still in love with your daughter. He never stopped.”
“What did he tell you?”
“It’s not what he told me. It’s what I found.” She twisted the knob and pushed the door open. “Go ahead. You can look through it all. I’m going to go make us some coffee.”
Joni nodded, but her attention was on the contents of the room.
Harper gave Joni her privacy and went back upstairs. She took the dogs out in the back yard while coffee brewed.
She didn’t know if she was doing the right thing. But spending years believing your daughter’s husband had cast aside her memory and moved on without a second thought? A mother deserved to know the truth.
She gave it another half an hour before venturing back into the basement with a tray of coffee, sugar, creamer, and tissues.
“Joni?”
She found her sitting cross-legged on the floor holding a photo album. “He kept everything,” she whispered tearfully.
Harper saw the box with the onesies was open. She set the tray down on the floor and sat next to Joni.
“Everything. Every article of clothing, every picture, every newspaper clipping.”
“They were going to have a baby.” Joni ran a finger over one of the onesies. Her eyes welled up again. “I was going to be a grandma.”
Harper handed her a tissue.
“It wasn’t his fault,” Joni said, tears falling freely now. “I always knew it wasn’t, but when I thought he had just moved on ... I blamed him for that. It was easy to point the finger.”
“At the funeral — Oh, God. The things I said to him. And he kept my secret. He knew and never told a soul.”
“Your secret?”
“It was my fault,” Joni said, crumpling the tissue in her hand. “Karen died because of me.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
“It was an accident,” Harper started.
Joni shook her head. “I was the reason she was in the accident. I texted her to tell her I was running late. She was reading the text when ... when it happened. The police told me. Luke knows.”
“Joni,” Harper laid a hand on her arm. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“If I had just waited. I knew she always checked her phone while driving. I should have known not to text her.”
Harper shook her head. “Karen was running late, too. You couldn’t have known that. You didn’t make her pick up her phone. You didn’t make her car drift into the other lane. You’re not responsible.”
“Two little words. ‘Running late.’ They seemed so important at the time.”
“Between you and Luke and your misplaced sense of responsibility,” Harper shook her head. “Neither one of you is to blame. Neither one of you is responsible. It was a terrible accident. Nothing you did or didn’t do caused it. You have to understand that. And blaming yourselves isn’t helping anyone. Is that what Karen would have wanted? The two people who loved her most in this world wasting the rest of their lives blaming themselves for her death?”
Joni shook her head, brushing an imaginary speck of dust off of the album in her lap.
“Blame doesn’t heal anything. Acceptance and gratitude do.”
“How can I be grateful that my daughter is dead?”
“You can be grateful that she lived.”
Joni nodded slowly. “It makes sense, but how? How do you stop thinking about the loss?”
“It’s not easy, but what’s the alternative?”
Joni glanced around the room. “Point taken.”
“Joni, there’s no amount of grief and guilt in the world that will change the past. What matters is what you do now,” Harper said, stirring sugar into her coffee.
“So what does ‘now’ mean for you two?” Joni asked. “Does Luke know you know?”
Harper shook her head. “It’s not a conversation we can have while he’s gone. I don’t know what it means for him, for us, for me. He tells me he can’t love me. I didn’t understand why before. Now that I have a name for it, for her, I don’t know if I can live in her shadow,” Harper said.
“Is that what we’ve been doing?”
“Maybe you’ve been living in the shadow of her death.”
“It’s amazing how much can change in a morning.” Joni sighed and picked up a coffee mug. “I just don’t know how to let go of the guilt.”
“Well, maybe you can start by letting the Garrisons back in?”
***
They started with breakfast at the diner with Charlie and Claire. And it gave Harper hope to see slates wiped clean and what was once a strong friendship began to rebuild.