The Secret Keeper

by Kate Morton

It was unsettling, Laurel thought, suppressing a shiver, how quickly a person’s presence could be erased, how easily civilization gave way to wilderness.

Because people who’d led dull and blameless lives did not give thanks for second chances.

What had happened to make Ma seize her second chance so firmly, to turn her into the kind of person who could kill the man who threatened to bring her past back home to haunt her?

Perhaps all children were held captive, in some part, by their parents’ pasts.

“I fell asleep beside the creek back home and I haven’t woken up yet.” Everything that had happened since, she told me—the news of her family’s motorcar accident, her removal like an unwanted package to England, this long sea voyage with only a teacher for company—was nothing more than a great big bad dream.

and I was able to gather from what she said that she has come to believe the death of her family was her fault in some way.

the belief system acquired in childhood is never fully escaped; it may submerge itself for a while, but it always returns in times of need to lay claim to the soul it shaped.

Was that what her mother had been thinking about that day in the hospital when she’d told Laurel she should marry for love, that she shouldn’t wait, that nothing else was as important? Had Dorothy waited too long, and wanted too much, and in the meantime lost her lover to the other woman?

She’d never been interested in the children or the play or making amends with Vivien. She’d merely seen an opportunity.