第2章 第4節 彼女は溺れていない
She Never Drowned
"She never drowned," Gabriel said, once the tape fell silent.
Nora stared at him, unable to make the words hold meaning.
"The sea gave back no body because the sea took no one."
"Your mother faked her death and hid herself away for years."
He told Nora that Marion had planned every with care.
She had left her coat on the rocks and let the do the rest.
"But why?" Nora asked. "Why leave me believing she was dead?"
"Because staying would have killed you both," Gabriel answered softly.
He said that a man in the town had wanted her silenced forever.
Marion had chosen a false death over a real one, for Nora's sake.
"She has watched you from far away all these years," he added.
"She has sent tapes, and I have kept every single one."
Nora pressed her hands against her eyes, her whole world tilting.
Everything she had grieved had been built on a careful lie.
"Then where is she now?" she asked. "Take me to her at once."
Gabriel did not answer, and his face slowly darkened.
"That," he said heavily, "is what frightens me most of all."
He told her that the tapes had always come like .
One arrived every month, hidden, from a place he had never known.
"Three weeks ago," he said, "the tapes stopped coming."
The silence in the station suddenly felt like a held breath.
"Something has happened to her," Gabriel whispered. "I am sure of it."
Nora rose, the fear in her chest turning cold and sharp.
Her mother had survived a false death for twenty long years.
Now, just as Nora had found her, she had vanished again.
"Then we find her," Nora said. "Before it is too late."