By late afternoon, rain covered the roads.
Mud and water pushed the car through a damaged guardrail and into a flooded ravine.
Tanya and Phoebe survived.
Marissa’s body was recovered the following morning.
Teresa was never found.
Sheriff Daniel Kahn told me the river had likely carried her downstream.
Search teams worked for two weeks.
Then the current became too dangerous.
Months later, Teresa was legally declared dead.
I buried an empty casket.
The hardest part came after the funeral.
I returned home and found the pale blue dress hanging from her bedroom door.
Waiting for a night that had already passed without her.
For four years, I barely entered that room.
Every spring, I stood in the doorway and imagined how she would have styled her hair.
Whether she would have worn silver shoes.
Whether she would have danced.
Whether someone would have told her she looked beautiful.
My therapist, Dr. Kim, eventually asked me to write Teresa a letter.
“Not about her,” she said. “To her.”
I wrote for three hours.
I told Teresa I loved her.
That I would have entered the water if I had known where she was.
That I would have traded every year I had left for one more minute.
Most of all, I apologized.
I told her I was sorry I had not been there.
Sorry she had died alone.
Sorry that when she needed her mother, I had been setting the dinner table and waiting for a door that would never open.
A week later, I folded the letter.
I placed it against the gown before packing the dress for donation.
I must have pushed it beneath the lining without realizing.
Now, twenty years later, I sat at my kitchen table and read every word again.
