Chapter 4 - MARA
Mara asked to speak to me.
I said no.
Then I changed my mind and agreed to a therapist-supervised video conversation from the hospital.
I needed to know what a seventeen-year-old had seen inside that house.
Mara appeared on the screen wearing a gray sweatshirt borrowed from child services.
Linda was her mother.
Trent was her half brother, born eighteen years before her.
Their father died when Mara was eight.
She looked younger than seventeen without makeup.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
I did not answer.
The therapist said:
“Mara, you are not here to ask Emily to forgive you. You asked to share information.”
Mara nodded.
“Mom said they were going to scare you.”
“By burying me?”
“She said it was an old farm thing. Like making someone understand consequences.”
“Did she do it before?”
Mara looked down.
“To me? No.”
“To anyone?”
“I don’t know.”
That answer sounded rehearsed but not necessarily false.
“What did Trent tell you?”
“That you were trying to steal the farm and take his baby.”
My throat tightened.
“My baby?”
“He said you were going to leave after you got control.”
“Control of what?”
“I don’t know. They stopped talking when I came in.”
She rubbed her hands together.
“Two weeks ago I heard Mom say the birthday clock had ended.”
“What birthday?”
“Yours.”
There it was again.
I asked why she had not called police when they buried me.
Mara began crying.
“Mom took my phone. Trent said if I helped you, I’d be sent to a group home because Mom would tell everyone I was violent.”
“Are you?”
“No.”
“Has she said that before?”
Mara nodded.
“She has a therapist who writes things.”
Naomi, sitting beside my bed, looked sharply toward the screen.
“What therapist?”
“Dr. Fenton.”
Naomi wrote the name down.
Mara continued.
“She tells him I’m unstable when I don’t do what she wants.”
A pattern.
Use mental health language.
Create records.
Make resistance look like illness.
Exactly what Trent tried to do to me.
The therapist interrupted before questioning became too intense.
“Mara, what else did you want Emily to know?”
Mara wiped her face.
“The papers weren’t the first set.”
My body went cold.
“What do you mean?”
“I saw Trent burn papers last month.”
“Where?”
“Fire pit.”
“What were they?”
“I only saw one page.”
“What did it say?”
She hesitated.
“Reed.”
My maiden name.
“And something about voting.”
Naomi leaned closer.
“Mara, do you remember any numbers?”
“No.”
“Any company name?”
“Carter Ridge Land Holdings.”
My heart pounded.
Mara looked at me.
“Emily, I think they knew who you were before Trent met you.”
The therapist stopped the session there.
Not because Mara had said too much legally.
Because the sentence had changed the entire emotional frame.
Trent and I met at a charity auction four years earlier.
He told me he had no idea who my family was.
He joked that my father’s construction company sounded vaguely familiar.
He said our relationship was fate.
Now a frightened seventeen-year-old was telling me my maiden name had been inside family legal files before I married him.
Naomi closed her notebook.
“Do you remember who introduced you to Trent?”
May you like
I did.
Linda.
