The first person she recalled telling her she was “allowed to be angry” was a school counselor in the—what?—the third grade? Yes, she was in Mr. Masterson’s class at the time, so it was the third grade. She didn’t get long division, so Dad got her a tutor. And when she still had trouble with long division, despite the private tutor, she saw the school counselor.
Why wasn’t she paying attention in school? Why did she seem so distant? Was she angry about her mother? You’re allowed to be angry, she was told. She was barely nine years old. What was there to be angry about?
Sometimes Ramona wondered how much she even remembered about her mother. Her dad was good about keeping photographs of her around, like that one of her and her mom by the bears statue. He also talked to Ramona about her—not so much anymore, but while she was growing up. She knew that memory could play tricks on a person. You could convince yourself from pictures and stories that you remembered a person, when really all you knew were two-dimensional images and rehashed anecdotes.
But Ramona was confident she had at least some true, authentic memories of her mother. Her name was Gabriella. Her girlfriends had called her Gabby, but at home, Ramona’s father always called her Gabriella. She wore this lotion that smelled like ginger and honey. When she was done applying it, she’d run her still-slick hands along Ramona’s forearms and say, “Now you and Mommy smell just the same.” That wasn’t a story Ramona’s father had ever told her, and someone can’t make you remember a fragrance that distinctively. That’s how Ramona was certain she really did remember her mother, Gabriella Langston.
Oddly, though, she could not remember learning she had died. She knew, because she certainly had been told, that her mother died shortly after Ramona’s fifth birthday. She knew because she had been told much later that a car on Egypt Lane had struck her mother during her ritual walk home from the Hamptons Equestrian Stables. She knew that the state police department’s accident-reconstruction experts believed that the car involved was a red Pontiac of some kind. Something about the tire tracks and paint transfer. A hit-and-run, they said. Probably a drunk, though there was no way to know since they never caught the guy. Ramona also knew that her mother’s ashes had been scattered in the ocean at Montauk, because she had loved the taste of the salty wind hitting her face as she stood on the rocky beach’s edge.
And she knew that, not eighteen months after her mother’s ashes had been scattered, her father had married Adrienne. She had been working as a nanny for another family in the building, back when she was still Adrienne Mitchell. The transition from neighbor’s nanny to supportive presence to new wife and stepmother was quick.
Then Ramona was in Mr. Masterson’s third-grade class and couldn’t do long division and got asked a lot of questions about being angry.
Then, in the fifth grade, she started complaining about being tired in the mornings. Her father sent her to her first therapist, who also asked Ramona if she was angry. In fact, she may have been the first to throw in the bitter word, not Mr. Masterson. The therapy sessions got down to once a month until a couple of years ago, when her father found pot in her purse. Somehow pot meant she needed to talk to a doctor once a week, like so many of the kids Ramona knew. And somehow all these trained experts seemed to think that Ramona should be angry.
The truth was that Ramona just wasn’t the angry type. She only remembered getting really angry about her mother’s death once. It was the first time Adrienne had tried to discipline her. Ramona must have been eleven. She pierced her ears without permission, and Adrienne had dared to express her disappointment. Ramona screamed at her—“You’re not my mother, Adrienne!” emphasizing the use of her first name—then ran to her bedroom. She could hear Adrienne crying in the living room but couldn’t bring herself to apologize.
When her father finally came home from work, she heard their voices in the kitchen. Maybe Adrienne wouldn’t mention the episode to him?
But then her father had come into her room and sat on the foot of her bed. She’d never seen him like that before. He was usually so flat in his affect. He didn’t show emotions. But that night, after putting in thirteen hours at the law firm, he had cried in front of his daughter. He said how much he missed her mother. He talked about the day he first met her, at a jazz concert in the Museum of Modern Art’s sculpture garden.
She would never forget how matter-of-factly he had said that Adrienne was not Gabriella. Love at my age isn’t the same as meeting someone when you’re in your twenties, he had said. She hadn’t even questioned it at the time, because children instinctively think of their parents as old. But in retrospect, he was all of forty-six at the time but reminiscing as if his best days were already past. Adrienne wasn’t Gabriella, he had said, but Adrienne was a good person. She was young. She brought a different energy into the house. She was fun. She made him feel happy again. They had been married four years by then, and she was still helping him learn how to be happy without Gabriella. “And,” he said, “she loves you and really wants to be a mother to you.”
But Ramona wasn’t done pouting. “She’s not my mother.”
And so her father told her that her mother hadn’t really been her mother either, not according to the DNA. They had tried. They kept a calendar. She took all the expensive drugs that were available. They tried one round of in vitro, but still nothing. Some of their friends resorted to surrogates and egg transplants, but Gabriella cared more about being a mother than about the biology. They called a lawyer. They arranged a private adoption. Gabriella had been the one to choose the name Ramona.
Adrienne wasn’t her mother, but neither was Gabriella.
And so just as the baby version of herself must have come to accept Gabriella as her first mother, she resolved to accept Adrienne as her new one. Now, five years after that episode with the earrings, she didn’t think of her as a stepmother. Or an adoptive mother. Adrienne was her mother. She had never again questioned the truth of that relationship, not only because she’d made a promise to her father, but because Adrienne had earned it.
Ramona returned her gaze to her mother’s computer screen, the browser open to the page that had appeared when she had typed in the password.
The website was called Second Acts: Confessions of a Former Victim and Current Survivor. And the page wasn’t the blog as it would appear to any casual reader. No, Ramona was looking at the administrative “dashboard” on a blog-hosting service called Social Circle. This was the place where the author of the blog could draft new posts, delete comments, and modify content.
Ramona was always so proud of the fact that, unlike her friends, she had a “real” relationship with her mother. But here she was—alone in her mother’s study, snooping around on her mother’s computer when she should have been in school, finally discovering why her mother had seemed so secretive lately.
Her mother was a sex abuse survivor. Her mother was the author of this blog.
And now, after all these years of being told that she had every reason to be angry, Ramona Langston was actually angry.
Someone was threatening her mother.
Five miles south, at NYPD headquarters, Ellie and Rogan were also reading the “Second Act” blog, paying special attention to the threats that had been posted since Julia’s death.
“Can you tell if Julia accessed the blog anytime after that comment on Saturday night?” Rogan asked. They had evidence suggesting that Julia had been the one to post the first threatening comment on Saturday. Clearly she had not authored the threats written since Monday, but she was still alive on Sunday and may have checked in on the blog then.