**Part 2**
The first crack appeared after my grandmother June died in March 2018.
Avery was coming to the funeral with Mitch, so I wasn’t allowed at the church service.
“You can come to the graveside,” my mother told me. “Family only. After Avery leaves, stand in the back.”
After the service, someone handed me an obituary.
It listed June as survived by one daughter, Lynette, and one grandson, Mitchell.
Not me.
If my family truly claimed I lived in Atlanta, I should have been there.
Another woman stood apart from everyone that day, beside a group-home van.
She stared at Mom through the entire service.
As we headed toward the cars, she whispered:
“Linny?”
Mom kept walking.
“Who is that?” I asked once we were in the car.
“Nobody. Somebody from mama’s old church. Get in the car.”
We were already inside.
Dad suddenly claimed he had forgotten his sunglasses and walked back toward the grave.
He returned four minutes later without sunglasses.
During the drive home, Mom hummed Blessed Assurance repeatedly.
She only hummed when frightened.
A year and a half later, Avery walked into my garden center.
I recognized her immediately from years of family photos.
She had never seen me.
“I need a dogwood,” she said. “A really good one. It’s for our church’s memorial garden. My boyfriend’s family lost someone. Every Easter, my mom reads the names at sunrise, and I want this to be something she’s proud of.”
I assumed she meant Grandma.
I helped her choose a Cherokee Princess dogwood with a clean graft union.
On the tag, I wrote what I wrote on every tree.
“Graft is good. Water deep the first summer. She’ll bloom.”
At the gate, Avery looked at me strangely.
“You look like someone I should know,” she said.
It was the closest I came to telling her.
Instead, I sold her a tree.
That Christmas, Mitch proposed.
Mom texted me:
“Wedding is June 13th. Keep that weekend free.”
It took me a day to understand that “keep that weekend free” meant I wasn’t invited.
I confronted her.
“It’s not the right time for you to be there.”
I still didn’t know why.
Then the pandemic arrived, and for eight weeks in 2020 everyone was forced to stay home.
For the first time in years, so was I.
One Sunday, Avery called on FaceTime while I was making lunch.
Mom saw me behind her and covered the phone.
“Out of frame,” she mouthed.
I carried my plate to the one corner the camera couldn’t see and ate standing up while Mom chatted with a woman who believed I lived in Atlanta.
The wedding was postponed twice before settling on October 8th, 2022.
Mom texted:
“New date, October 8th, 2022. Keep it free.”
By Easter 2021, my parents had begun attending the Lockhearts’ sunrise service.
“Sunrise service with the Lockhearts Sunday, be gone Friday.”
People ask why I didn’t leave sooner.
The answer was insurance.
My medication and therapist were covered by Dad’s employer plan. The garden center offered none.
Mom reminded me whenever I resisted.
“You’re on our insurance until you’re 26. Our house, our rules.”
When I turned twenty-six, I finally bought my own marketplace coverage.
The card had only my name on it.
Still, I stayed.
That Thanksgiving, I returned from Ruth’s and found all my medication moved into my locked bedroom.
“Keep your medicine in your room,” she said. “People use that bathroom.”
People had used that bathroom for seven years.
My newest bottle, dated that October, was now hidden behind a door only Mom could unlock.
I thought she feared the medication.
I couldn’t imagine what else frightened her.
In January 2022, another box of cuttings arrived from Ingred.
Ruth copied Ingred’s number onto a paper towel.
“You call her,” she said. “I’m tired of being the middleman.”
I called.
Ingred skipped the pleasantries.
“So you’re the hands,” she said. “The offer stands. April, bring gloves.”
I told her I would think about it.
Three months later, the Easter text arrived.
“Lockhearts for supper Saturday. Sunrise service Sunday, be gone by 10:00.”
The visits now included Avery’s parents too.
Mom called them:
“Our church friends now.”
On Saturday morning, I left at 9:40.
Tally mark 211.
April 16th, 2022.
That evening at Ruth’s, I opened my pill organizer.
Saturday was empty.
The bottles were inside my locked bedroom.
Ruth watched me.
“Go get what’s yours,” she said. “Then come straight back.”
I drove home near ten.
The Lockhearts’ Suburban was still in the driveway.
I parked down the block and approached the house from the dark side yard.
The hallway window near my bedroom was cracked open.
Suzanne Lockheart stood outside my door.
Mom was beside her holding a tissue.
Avery clung to Mitch.
Dad stood near the kitchen looking at the floor.
Suzanne touched my door.
“May I?”
Mom nodded.
Suzanne laid her palm against the wood and bowed her head.
Mom dabbed at her eyes.
“I still can’t bring myself to open it.”
I stood outside watching a stranger pray over my bedroom door.
You don’t touch a door like that unless you believe whoever belongs behind it will never return.
After they left, I waited until the house went dark.
Near midnight, I entered through the back.
On the dining table sat a framed photograph of a blooming dogwood.
At its base was a granite memorial stone.
In loving memory of Anastasia Dunaway, 1995–2014.
She is not dead but sleepeth.
A card read:
We’ll read her name at sunrise. —S.
Then I saw the white nursery tag hanging from the tree.
My handwriting.
The same tree I had sold Avery.
Everything rearranged itself at once.
The burned candles.
The obituary that omitted me.
“My boyfriend’s family lost someone.”
“It’s not the right time for you to be there.”
The locked bedroom nobody could supposedly bear to open.
Mom had never told Avery I lived in Atlanta.
She had let her entire family believe I was dead.
And I had personally selected my own memorial tree.
I sat in Mom’s chair until the refrigerator had cycled twice.
Then I stood.
Her keys were beside the coffee maker.
I opened my bedroom and packed one bag.
Medication.
Birth certificate.
Ruth’s grafting knife.
The yellow notebook.
Everything else belonged to the girl they had invented.
I left the bedroom door wide open, lamp burning, key in the lock.
They claimed they couldn’t bear to open it.
I made sure they would have to look inside.
Then I called Ruth.
“Then go see April,” she said.
I drove northwest.
Near Memphis, with dawn beginning to rise, I sent my parents the only message they would receive from me for years.
“I’m alive. Don’t look for me.”
It was the first truthful sentence my family had said about me in eight years.
I drew a line beneath tally mark 211.
While I crossed the Mississippi, my mother was at sunrise service listening to my name among the dead.
I wouldn’t learn that until years later.
It took four days to drive roughly 2,500 miles.
I finally called Ingred from Oregon.
“Come straight to the packing shed,” she said. “I’ll put the coffee on.”
I reached Soulberg Orchards on April 20th, 2022.
One hundred forty acres above the Columbia River.
Ingred studied my hands before my face.
Within a week, I had a new bank account, phone number, and bunk with the seasonal crew.
When I closed my old bank account, one thought stayed with me:
Nobody in Washington had ever been told I was dead.
The apples were blooming.
I started around $17 an hour.
“I’ve seen pictures of your grafts,” Ingred told me on my first morning. “I haven’t seen your thinning. Show me.”
Ruth called that week.
“Your mother called me,” she said. “She didn’t ask where you were. She asked if you’d said anything to anybody.”
That was the entire search.
I finally understood why.
You can’t ask people to help find a daughter you’ve spent years declaring dead.
