A man named Fenwick called the store on the second of January, identified himself as working for a magazine out of Portland, and asked, in a voice that assumed I'd be flattered, whether I'd be willing to tell my story, the true account at last of the Cinder Island escape, for a fee he named without my asking.
The true account at last is exactly what I don't have, I told him, and he laughed a little, the way people laugh when they think you're being modest instead of exact. He said readers wanted an ending, something definite, and I could give them the only ending anybody had, the ending where I chose loyalty over freedom and three desperate women vanished into the sea.
That ending is false in the first half and unproven in the second, I said, and I'm not selling either part of it to make your readers feel finished. He went quiet for a second, then asked, more carefully, whether I had a different ending to offer instead. I told him I had a corrected record filed with two government offices and no ending at all, and that was the only honest thing I had to sell, which meant I had nothing to sell him.
Collins was behind the counter when I hung up, close enough to have heard most of it, and he asked without much surprise in his voice whether that had been about the old business. I said it had, and that I'd told the man no. He nodded like a man confirming something he'd already guessed about me back in November, when I'd stood in his office and told him the truth before anyone could hand it to him twisted.
I'm not asking you to trust me the way you did before, I told him, because I knew what that promotion conversation had cost me, and I didn't want him thinking I expected it handed back now that a magazine wanted my name for free. He said he didn't recall promising to forget it either way, only to wait and see how I carried the knowing of it, and so far I'd carried it the way he'd have hoped, quietly and without asking for anything back.
That afternoon I walked down past the hardware store, past the bank, out along the road that eventually meets the shore road near Dunmere, further than I usually walked in January cold, until the land opened onto the strait. This was water I could actually see, not the black stretch I had spent seventeen years imagining beyond the prison wall. I stood there long enough for my hands to go stiff in my coat pockets.
I said their names out loud. I had spoken them to investigators, attached them to questions, carried them through explanations of what I had and hadn't done. This time there was nobody asking me to account for them, and I tried to say them without the apology that usually came first. Evelyn Shaw. Nora Bellamy. Tess Bellamy. I didn't say dead. I didn't say alive. I said the names plainly, the way you'd say anyone's name you were glad to have known.
Before leaving home that morning, I had filed the transfer acknowledgment beside my original carbon. The newspaper clipping went into a separate envelope marked Unverified report, 1978. I hadn't destroyed it, and I wasn't offering it as an answer. At the shore I thought instead of Tess's note, still folded in the shoebox: nothing about where they'd gone, only what my kindness had meant to her. Not evidence of survival. Not a promise kept or broken. Just a true thing a person had felt about me once, which didn't need to grow any larger to matter.
I am not the woman who chose to stay behind out of loyalty to a system that held all four of us the same way. I am the woman who tried the wall and found it swollen shut, who spent seventeen years letting a kinder lie stand in for that failure, and who has spent two months taking the lie apart piece by piece without once getting to replace it with an answer about what became of the three women who made it over before me.
That is the whole of what I know, and what I corrected, and what I am willing to say I don't know besides. I walked back toward Greyhaven as the light went that flat gray it goes in January, no further forward on finding them than I had been in November, and no longer carrying the one weight I had actually had the power to put down, which was the false shape of my own part in that night. The water never told me what happened to them. It was never going to. What it finally let me put down was only ever mine to carry.