Chapter 5: The Sunrise Service
I sat in the dark of my trailer and dialed my brother’s number. His voice was heavy, weighted down by years of corporate bourbon and a marriage built on a foundational lie.
“It was me, Stace,” Mitch confessed, his voice cracking in the Washington night. “The lie. I started it.”
He explained the origin of the rot. In 2014, shortly after my hospitalization, a young, grieving Avery had broken down at a college party, crying over her brother Trip, who died in a fiery car crash. Desperate to connect, desperate to share her profound agony, Mitch had blurted out, ‘We lost my sister in February.’ He meant the psychiatric ward. He meant we lost the girl I used to be. But Avery heard a eulogy. She threw her arms around him, sobbing that finally, someone understood her trauma.
“I was a coward, Stace,” Mitch wept over the line. “I didn’t correct her the next morning. By Easter, Mom found out. Mom said the Lockhearts were aristocracy. She said they ‘understood grief, not madness.’ She decided your death was a cleaner narrative than your sickness.”
He begged me to uphold the lie. He was a project manager at Lockheart Construction now. His entire financial and romantic existence depended on Avery never discovering he had buried his sister alive.
The next afternoon, I received a call from my father. He was sitting in his idling sedan in a bank parking lot. He didn’t apologize either. Instead, he handed me a ghost story.
“Your mother had an older sister named Rosalind,” my father stated flatly. “In 1982, Rosalind developed severe schizophrenia. Your grandparents locked her in the state psychiatric hospital in Tuscaloosa. When the family moved to Hoover, they told the new congregation Rosalind had ‘gone home to the Lord.’ Your mother was sixteen. She learned that sickness is a sin you bury, and grief is a tragedy you cater.”
He paused, the rhythmic ticking of a turn signal echoing through the phone. “The woman at the funeral in the green cardigan? That was Rosalind. I’ve been secretly visiting her for years.”
I hung up the phone, the generational trauma settling over me like a suffocating blanket. My mother wasn’t just a monster; she was a meticulously trained disciple of erasure.
I requested twelve days of leave from Ingrid. I booked a flight to Birmingham.
On Good Friday, I walked into the sunroom of the Tuscaloosa psychiatric facility. Rosalind Hadley was sixty-three, possessing my mother’s cheekbones and a fractured, beautiful mind. She showed me a yellowed church bulletin from 1983, confirming her own fabricated funeral. We were mirrors of the same tragic legacy.
That afternoon, I drove straight into the belly of the beast: Mountain Brook. I found Suzanne Lockheart kneeling in the pristine dirt behind her church, violently pulling weeds beneath the sprawling canopy of my Cherokee Princess dogwood.
She looked up. Her eyes locked onto my face. The face from the mantle.
“Anastasia,” she breathed, dropping her trowel.
We retreated to her immaculate kitchen. I didn’t yell. I didn’t scream. I simply pulled the yellow notebook from my bag and slid it across the marble island. I watched her perfectly manicured finger trace the black tally marks. She matched the dates to her own memories. The 4th of July cookout. The engagement dinner.
“All those suppers,” Suzanne whispered, tears spilling over her lashes, ruining her makeup. “You were sitting forty-five minutes away in a peach orchard while we wept over your grave.” Her finger stopped on entry 211. “This was the night I touched your bedroom door.”
“I was outside, hiding in the azaleas,” I replied, my voice devoid of mercy.
My phone vibrated violently on the marble. Mitch. Don’t do this to me, Stace. Don’t destroy my life.
Suzanne stared at the buzzing phone, then up at my hardened face. “What exactly do you want, Anastasia?”
“I want the truth to see the sun,” I said. “If you read my name on Sunday, I disappear forever. If you don’t…” I left the threat hanging in the sterile air.
Easter morning dawned brutally cold and piercingly blue. Eighty folding chairs were aligned on the manicured lawn facing the brick wall and the blooming dogwood. The granite tombstone still rested at the roots.
I didn’t sit. I stood militantly beside the trunk of my own memorial tree.
At 6:20 AM, my parents walked through the wrought-iron gates. My father froze mid-stride, the blood draining from his face. My mother took two more steps before her eyes snapped to mine. I watched her terrifying intellect calculate the variables in real-time. Who had seen me? Was the narrative salvageable?
She aggressively marched across the damp grass, plastering a horrific, serene smile on her face for the benefit of the onlookers. “What the hell are you doing here?” she hissed through gritted teeth.
“I am standing where the light can hit me,” I replied.
Avery and Mitch sat in the front row. Neither dared to turn around.
At 6:30, the sun breached the rooftops. Suzanne stepped up to the wooden lectern. She read the names of the genuinely deceased. A mother. A husband. A child lost to leukemia. The garden breathed in collective sorrow.
Then, Suzanne lowered the parchment. She looked directly at the Cherokee Princess.
“This tree,” Suzanne’s voice boomed, cutting through the frosty air, “was planted in profound error for a young woman we were led to believe had perished. She is very much alive, standing with us this morning. And I have asked her to read one final name.”
A collective gasp sucked the oxygen from the garden.
I stepped up to the microphone. Suzanne handed me a crisp index card. I didn’t unleash a venomous monologue. I didn’t point fingers. I simply looked at Avery, who was staring at me with wide, horrified eyes, connecting the face at the lectern to the girl who sold her the tree.
“Thomas Lockheart the Third,” I read, my voice echoing off the brick. “Trip.”
I stepped back. The silence was absolute, heavier than wet concrete. The illusion shattered into a million jagged fragments. An elderly woman beside my mother slowly, deliberately shifted her folding chair six inches to the left, recoiling from the epicenter of the lie.
When the dismissal prayer ended, my mother lunged toward Suzanne. “Suzanne, I swear to God, I never explicitly used the word dead!”
Suzanne looked at my mother with something infinitely more devastating than rage. It was absolute, clinical disgust. “No, Lynette. You simply permitted me to grieve her.”
My mother spun toward me, her eyes begging me to deliver the lie we rehearsed. Tell them I ran away. Tell them they didn’t know.
I reached up, snapped a twig off the dogwood, and scraped the bark with my thumb. It bled a brilliant, vivid green. I dropped the wood at my mother’s expensive shoes.
Behind us, a confused elder in a seersucker suit clapped my father on the shoulder. “Glenn, who on earth is this young lady?”
My father looked at the shattered remains of his wife’s social empire. He looked at the granite stone. Then, he looked at me. It took him twelve years to find the courage.
“That,” my father said, his voice finally steady, “is my daughter.”
My mother grabbed her leather purse and fled the garden, her heels clicking frantically against the pavement. She was the first one to leave the room.
Epilogue: Green Wood
The church maintenance crew excavated the granite stone two weeks after the catastrophe. Suzanne called me in Washington, asking where it should be discarded.
“Ship it to my mother’s front porch,” I instructed.
She did. A few days later, a pathetic text arrived from my father: The stone is in the garage. Facing the drywall.
The Cherokee Princess remained in the garden. It was a resilient graft; it deserved the soil.
I flew back to Wanachi just as the Cosmic Crisp blocks were erupting into magnificent white blooms. I stood in the freezing rows with Callum, his arm wrapped firmly around my waist, watching the king blossoms reach for the Pacific Northwest sun.
The fallout in Alabama was predictably messy. Mitch and Avery separated for a brutal month. They are currently navigating intense marriage counseling in Birmingham. Avery occasionally texts me, mostly to ask frantic questions about yellowing gardenia leaves. I answer her. It feels like the fragile scaffolding of a beginning.
Mitch calls me every Sunday afternoon. I answer the phone perhaps once a month. During our first conversation, he didn’t offer a hollow apology. He offered the truth: “I don’t know how to be a brother, Stace. But I want to learn.”
My mother has never apologized. I have stopped holding my breath for a miracle. However, my father drives her to the Tuscaloosa psych ward once a month now. She sits in the sunroom and helps Rosalind complete the Sunday crossword puzzle. The generational curse hasn’t been cured, but the bleeding has finally stopped.
Suzanne Lockheart transformed the scholarship. It is now named for Trip, awarded annually to a senior who works exclusively with their hands—in soil, timber, or engines. Mr. Wickham emailed me a photograph of the first recipient: a teenage girl holding a certificate, dark loam permanently wedged beneath her fingernails.
On the final Friday of May, my phone buzzed in my canvas vest while I was thinning the Honeycrisp rows. It was a photograph from Casey Tidwell back in Chilton County.
The image showed a misting bench inside Ruth’s humid greenhouse. Dozens of small black plastic pots sat under the spray, holding delicate, severed cuttings. With Suzanne’s enthusiastic blessing, Casey had taken softwood cuttings from the dogwood tree planted for my death.
Every single one of them is showing green, Casey’s text read. They’re going to root.
That evening, sitting at the laminate table in my trailer, I pulled the yellow notebook from my drawer. I flipped past the 211 black tally marks, past the dates of my forced exiles, past the heavy line I had drawn in Memphis. I don’t keep that kind of ledger anymore.
I uncapped my pen and wrote a single, solitary word on the blank page.
Green.
For eight agonizing years, I operated under the delusion that I was a creature built exclusively for leaving. I was trained to disappear quietly, to lock doors from the inside, to let other people dictate the parameters of my existence. But the soil in Washington taught me a different truth. I wasn’t meant for leaving. I was simply a scion that hadn’t found the proper rootstock to anchor into.
They spent a decade telling me when to vanish. From now on, I alone decide where I grow.
