Forget Me Not

Claire makes her way back to Galloway in the dark, holding the necklace. At just about three in the morning, she enters the guesthouse and pockets her phone. She hurries inside to finish the diary. She looks at the picture of Natalie, happy and alive, with the necklace dangling from her neck. Claire had thought she’d taken it off because she outgrew her, but instead she’d lost it. She now suspects it was Mitchell who was Natalie’s older boyfriend.

She starts to cry, but as she looks again at the picture, she sees someone she hadn’t noticed before among the coworkers. She recognizes the teenage face and is stunned. She hurries to the desk to get the gun, but it’s gone. She realizes one other person has the key to the guesthouse. Liam pushes the gun into Claire’s back, telling her he’s sorry.

As Liam marches Claire to the shed, she realizes he recognized Claire from the first day onward. He admits this is true, since Claire looks just like her sister. She wants to know why he didn’t just tell her to go away and he says he’s selfish.

Looking for an escape route, she glances toward her car but the tires have been slashed. She has no phone and no way to escape the isolated location. Her best chance is to go along. Liam chains her to a workbench. She asks him why he’s doing this, when it dawns on her that he must be Marcia and Mitchell’s son. Claire starts to think that it was Liam whom Natalie was seeing and that he lured her much the way Mitchell lured Katherine, Marcia, and Lily.

She asks if he killed Natalie but Liam says it wasn’t like that. Liam reveals that Natalie was his half-sister.

Liam explains he’d found the camper a few years before he met Natalie and it was his escape. He’d brought Natalie and some friends to see it. Natalie thought it was interesting and, while exploring it, found the roll of film and Marcia’s diary, with the picture of Annaliese inside. Natalie and Liam thought this was strange.

When Annaliese, Alan, and Claire came to visit, Annaliese made Natalie quit. Annie revealed that she had gotten together with Mitchell after briefly breaking up with Alan after her parents died. Natalie’s father was Mitchell, not Alan. Claire suddenly realizes that Natalie was avoiding her that summer because she didn’t want her to be hurt by the truth that they were only half-sisters.

Liam reveals that Natalie told Alan and that was why he moved out of the house. Natalie kept sneaking out to meet Liam, to talk. He loved having a sister but it started to get complicated when Natalie started digging into Mitchell’s past. Claire demands to know how she died, but Liam abruptly leaves.

Liam locks her inside and Claire can’t see a way to free herself. Worried and scared, she tries to figure out what happened. She realizes that the silver note she’d found in the diary was the license plate number to Katherine’s camper, and it must’ve been Natalie who wrote it down. She starts to dwell on the irony that Mitchell will kill her too and hide her body where he hid her sister’s.

Claire is motivated not to let this happen to her mother again. She remembers loose floorboards caused her mom’s accident and examines the shed’s floor to find a loose spot. If she can destroy the board around the leg of the bench, the chain will slip off. Although she injures herself, she manages to break the board and release the chain. She searches the workbench for a weapon, finding some garden shears. She heads to the door but remembers she’s still locked in—and hears someone is approaching. She sits back down and holds the shears behind her.

Marcia enters and Claire is filled with hope, until Mitchell and Liam walk in after her. She realizes that Marcia told Mitchell about her switching the tea. She tells her that she doesn’t have to do this, but Marcia ignores her, her gray eyes staring off into space. Claire envisions the picture of Marcia taken the night of Carmen’s murder. Marcia’s eyes were blue. She realizes by the gray eyes of the woman in front of her, that this is actually Lily.

Claire asks Lily what she did and Lily simply responds, “She wasn’t committed” (286). Since Claire liked to pretend when she was little, donning the costume/identity of her sister, she understands that Lily did the same. She realizes she was jealous of people who had people who loved them and was willing to do anything to preserve her own makeshift “family.” Mitchell approaches and tells Claire that Liam wants her to die without pain. He is holding a mug. Claire condemns Mitchell for killing the mother of his son and his daughter. Lily defends him by saying blood relation doesn’t guarantee family ties.

Mitchell denies he killed anyone and says he didn’t know about Natalie until she came making accusations. Claire appeals to Liam, telling him it isn’t his fault that Natalie was hurt. Mitchell contradicts her, blaming Liam. Claire realizes that when Liam was talking earlier about his limited travel, he was talking about having never left the farm. She’d been so concentrated on Mitchell’s wife that she hadn’t realized it was Liam who was the prisoner.

Mitchell tries to force her to drink the poisoned tea, saying it will be over for her in less than half an hour. She’s tempted, but then she thinks of her life, her mother, Ryan, and her still unanswered questions about Natalie. She stabs Mitchell in the neck with the shears.

Lily runs to the dying Mitchell, screaming for Liam to shoot Claire. Liam blocks the exit, but then walks to Mitchell’s body to retrieve the keys. He gives them to Claire and tells her to flee. He turns to point the gun at Lily, but Claire urges him not to kill her. She wants Lily to feel regret or be punished for her crime. Liam shouldn’t bear the blame.

Liam then locks both Lily and Mitchell inside the shed. He tosses the gun aside and seems shell-shocked. Claire realizes that Liam didn’t realize his mother wasn’t really Marcia. Liam explains how he trusted Natalie, telling her about his life, how he never went to school, never had a birth certificate. He confesses he had no idea how strange his life was until Natalie and he bonded.

On the night she died, they had been planning on running away. He explains that Natalie, having figured out that the camper belonged to Katherine Ann Prichard, went to the police. She told him that Liam was being held captive. Claire suddenly realizes that Chief DiNello was “Montana,” the early follower of Mitchell’s. He told Natalie he’d go with her back to Mitchell’s. Liam didn’t see what happened, but putting together the pieces, knew that Natalie had tried to run, but Marcia/Lily coaxed her back in to talk it out, only to give her a cup of poisoned tea. The Galloways used DiNello to blackmail Liam into staying quiet.

Liam tells Claire how much she and Natalie are alike. Natalie risked her own well-being to help Liam, and Claire risked her own well-being to help who she thought was Marcia. Liam says he’ll turn himself in to the police, although not DiNello. A car approaches down the road. Claire realizes it’s Annaliese, coming to help.

The trio drive to the city of Draper’s police department so Liam can talk to someone about the disappearance of Marcia Rayburn. Claire and her mother wait in a restaurant across the street. Claire asks her mother about Katherine Prichard and what happened on the farm. Annaliese explains how when her parents died, she wanted to destroy everything around her—including her relationship with Alan—and start anew. Then, Eric/Montana introduced her to Mitchell. Since he wanted to be a future cop, Annie trusted him.

Claire doesn’t understand how when Annie went to the vineyard, she was surprised that Natalie was working there with Mitchell. Annie reveals that the original farm was in a different location than where Galloway is now. Claire asks her mother if she remembers the way there, and Annie says she does.

They drive out to the old, dilapidated barn where Marcia met Lily, Annie, and Montana. Claire discovers where Lily engraved her name in the barn’s wall. Annaliese explains how Katherine never belonged there and had planned to go back to Berkeley after the summer, but Mitchell wouldn’t let her. Claire emphasizes it was Lily who wouldn’t let her. Annie agrees, noting that Lily was afraid he’d leave permanently.

The night before Katherine was supposed to leave, Lily brought her something to drink. She got pale and started talking nonsense, but Mitchell assured Annie, who wanted to take her to a hospital, that she was fine and just needed sleep. When Annie woke up, Katherine was gone but her camper wasn’t. Certain they killed Katherine, Annie escaped the family by going out a back door of one of the homes that they raided for supplies.

She immediately went back to Alan, who accepted her, married her, and bought a house. She never wanted Natalie or Claire to know. Although she thinks Alan knew the truth about Natalie, he pretended until Natalie confronted them with the truth of her parentage.

Claire realizes that DiNello never intended to investigate the case and framed Jeffrey Slater. Annaliese reveals how scary it was that Lily found their home. She took it as a warning that showed what they were capable of. Claire asks why her mother never confided in her, and she says she liked Claire being far away, somewhere safe. Claire, overwhelmed with emotion, takes a moment for herself, spies the diary, and opens it to read the last pages.

Marcia has a baby boy (Liam) and is planning her escape from the Farm. She can’t forget Carmen’s death. Lily had made her run from the scene of the crime. Before she did, she grabbed the undeveloped film. Montana asked what Lily did, but she told him to drive away. They went to a new place Marcia had never seen before. However, she recognized the man who greeted them as the regular “client” of Mitchell’s, Steven Montague.

It’s now months later as Marcia writes in the diary. Lily says the baby has pretty eyes and that he got them from Marcia. Ever since the day of the cop’s murder, Marcia has felt that Lily has been watching her. Lily tells Marcia that yarrow will be healing for her and that she’ll make her a cup of tea. Marcia has never mentioned that she’s wanted to leave again since that day in the cop’s house, going through the entire pregnancy and birth at Galloway Farm. Deep down, though, Marcia is worried about their new locale since they are now so remote and isolated.

Marcia has a solid plan to leave that evening. She knows from Montana that the police are looking for Lily. She makes her way to the camper and wedges her diary next to the roll of film hidden between the wall and the mattress. She then returns to Lily, who has a white mug clutched in her hand.

Six months later, Claire’s story about Lily and Mitchell is front page news and she’s cohabiting with Ryan back in New York. She’s pleased because the whole reason she decided to become an investigative journalist was “to make sure lost girls are never forgotten” (318). She’s rounded out the lives of the victims—Katherine, Marcia, Natalie. The paper has published many pictures in the long-form piece, including one of the field of forget-me-nots, which Liam had planted for Natalie since they were her favorite.

After Liam confessed to the police, they all went to the Farm, where Lily was arrested. At first, Claire and her mom were told to leave, but then they gave the diary to the police. Liam led them to Marcia, Steven, and Natalie’s bodies under the floorboards of the shed. The Campbells had a funeral for Natalie, and Jeffrey Slater was freed while DiNello was prosecuted.

Now, in the present, Liam has texted Claire a picture of him with his grandparents, the Rayburns. He was never charged since he was a minor when Natalie died. Claire ends the book satisfied she has helped Natalie and Marcia get justice.