The Girl in the Woods (Emma Griffin™ FBI Mystery Book 15) by A.J. Rivers

Author:A.J. Rivers [Rivers, A.J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Season Three Book #15
Publisher: A.J. Rivers
Published: 2021-09-28T16:00:00+00:00

August

It’s been almost a year since I’ve climbed the stairs into the attic and walked through everything into the small room on the far side. This room is one of the pieces of my early life my mind blotted out of my memory. The therapist I was once tasked with talking to regularly once told me the mind does that to protect you from things that are too hard to handle.

I know that’s the generally accepted view of why swathes of time disappear from memory, but I struggle with the idea. There are definitely things I forgot that may have been better left in the darkness of oblivion, but there are others that could have helped me or given me so much comfort. And some things were left vibrant and very visible in my mind when I wish they would go away. If the mind really does make some memories disappear as a means of protection, it feels like mine must have run out of space in whatever closet or dungeon they’re stored in. Or my mind is especially vindictive and figures I don’t really need all the protection.

When I first came back to Sherwood and reclaimed the house where my grandparents lived, I had plenty of memories of the home. I spent some of my happiest times here when I was young. Holidays. Summer vacations. Stretches of school years that meant I got to spend time with Sam.

But one thing I didn’t remember was this room.

To anyone who might have come inside, it seemed like the house had forgotten it, too. The wall was smooth with no sign of the door. I didn’t discover this room until I was trying to hunt down a woman who no one else believed existed and discovered the anomaly with the blueprints of houses in the rest of the neighborhood.

Breaking into it was like opening a time capsule that should have remained buried. This is where my grandmother kept all the mementos of the son they had to cut from their lives and who everyone thought was dead. She couldn’t bear to completely remove him and pretend he never existed. So she put everything that had to do with him in that room and sealed it up. She likely thought it would never be found.

The signs of Jonah are gone from it now. They’re boxed up in a storage unit, tucked completely out of sight. I haven’t been able to make myself throw it all away. My grandmother kept it. Those things mattered to her. He mattered to her. And one day Dean might wonder. I don’t think he can put his mind in that place yet, but I won’t be the one to make the choice to destroy the tangible remnants of a life before all of this.

At least, that was what I told myself about the boxes when I put them away and what I still tell myself every time I think of them since. I didn’t have to worry about them.

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