# Chapter 39: The Stars Behind the Clouds
Hello everyone, it's me again! How are you all doing? Today I will continue to walk with you and review Chapter 39 of "Forget You Saw Her free digital audiobook." This is a chapter that feels like standing in a cemetery at dusk while old summer light flickers back to life. It is about memory, mother-love, failure, forgiveness, and the terrifying possibility that two opposite truths can live inside the same heart.
We begin with Isabel’s mother holding a glossy Polaroid. It is a photograph from a family vacation to Bear Lake when Isabel was fifteen—the last summer before Sariah went to BYU, the summer before everything fell apart. In the photo, Isabel stands knee-deep in turquoise water, sunburned and windblown, grinning ear to ear. Her hands are on her hips, her elbows linked with two other sets of sunburned arms just outside the frame. Her sisters. The image is pure joy, a moment frozen in light.
Then the moment breaks. Isabel’s mother sobs, “I love you, Isabel. And I’m sorry.” Her trembling hands slide the Polaroid into the plastic sheeting of the grave marker, covering the Jane Doe image taken of Isabel in the morgue. She whispers, “I don’t know what to believe anymore,” like a confession. The anger burning through Isabel cools, just slightly. For the first time, she considers that maybe two things are true: her mother failed her, and her mother loved her fiercely. Like Abraham must have, while he held the knife.
Isabel lets herself sink into the memory. She watches her sisters and herself coat their blonde hair and faces with “mud masks” made from the soft, silty sand beneath their feet. Abish laughs so hard she squeals, “You’re gonna make me pee my pants!” Eve cackles and whips her muddy hair back and forth like a head-banging mermaid. Isabel wraps herself in the memory of pure bliss and belly laughter. She sees her fifteen-year-old self float on the salty surface of the lake, hair fanned out, still giggling. It was a perfect day.
Her sun-kissed teenage self starts a game of Marco Polo, dashing through waist-high water while Sariah closes her eyes. Isabel turns to look at the flapping blue shade shelter. Her mother sits in a camp chair beside her napping father, an open book on her lap, her hand resting on top of his. She is watching them. Isabel moves closer, close enough to see her mother’s serene smile and the way her eyes crinkle behind her sunglasses. Pure joy. Pure adoration.
After a few minutes, her mother stands, smooths the front of her modest black swimsuit coverup, and arranges a picnic: ham sandwiches, Capri Suns, and peanut butter cookies she made for the trip. “Girls, I’ve got lunch for you!” she calls. Four teenage girls rush back, squealing, and sit on towels to wolf down the food without a thank-you. Their father stretches, yawns, and puts a hand on her back. “Thanks, hon. That was great.” Fifteen-year-old Isabel asks hopefully if there are more cookies. Her mother, who had just pulled out the last one for herself, smiles and gives it to her instead. “You betcha. You girls have been playing so hard.”
Then Isabel asks the question that matters: “Will you and Dad come play with us? Chicken fight? Please?” Her mother hesitates, glancing at her book, still open to pages two and three. Isabel knows what she really wants is to read. She knows the game is her least favorite because her carefully styled hair will get wet and sandy. But Isabel also knows her mother will say yes. “You’re sure lucky I love you so darn much,” her mother teases. She takes off her coverup, kicks off her flip-flops, nudges her husband, and runs into the sparkling blue water, whooping like a child. The girls and their father follow with happy cries. Later, they get raspberry shakes, and the sisters stay up far too late watching old *Little Rascals* movies on VHS.
Isabel reluctantly draws back from the memory and searches for others like it. They glow like stars emerging among thick clouds—endless and sparkling, as if new, even though they had been there all along. She remembers the day she came home crying in third grade because a boy on the bus kept pulling her hair. The next morning, her mother got on the bus with her—the only mom Isabel had ever seen there—and politely told the boy that if he did it again, she would ride the bus home with him and talk to his mother. When Isabel was eleven and embarrassed to buy her first bra, her mother took her to the store after hours, because a woman in their ward was the manager, and let her try on every single one until she did not feel ashamed. The summer Isabel turned fifteen and failed her driver’s test twice, and told her mother she was not trying again, her mother took her to an empty parking lot at six o’clock on a Saturday morning. She set up orange traffic cones and a cinder block with googly eyes that she named “Judge Judy” so Isabel could practice.
Then there is the memory after Dennis Beaumont. Isabel told her mother she hated her and meant it—really meant it. The next morning, her mother made her lunch for school and added a note: “Still love you. Always.” When Isabel turned eighteen and told her she did not believe in the Church anymore, and did not want to attend on Sundays, her mother stood silent at the counter, preparing dinner, for what felt like an hour. Then she put Isabel’s favorite casserole in the oven and said quietly, “You’ll still eat, won’t you?” And the night Isabel left home for good, when she came back to grab a few more clothes, she found her mother on her knees in Isabel’s bedroom, praying. “Just stop,” Isabel had told her angrily. “Why are you doing that?” Her mother stayed on her knees but lifted her chin in a mirror image of Isabel’s own defiant look. “I won’t stop,” she insisted, her voice breaking on the last word. “I don’t know how to reach you anymore, but I have to believe that God does.”
In the cemetery, an owl hoots softly, a warning that dusk has fully arrived. Isabel latches onto the sound and pulls herself back to the present. Her mother is murmuring, “Please forgive me, Isabel.” Isabel does not know what she means by that. She wishes she could ask. But even more, she wishes she could tell her mother that she can finally see the stars through the clouds again—and they are as beautiful as the clouds are dark.
“I know you tried, Mom,” Isabel says. She holds the memories tight and tentatively lays her hand on her mother’s arm again. This time, her mother does not flinch away. This time, Isabel does not try to persuade her to think about Dennis Beaumont. She focuses all her thoughts on those bright pinpricks of memory that light up the sky through the darkness. There is no way to tell if it works. But after a few seconds, her mother takes a shuddering breath and wipes her tears. Her eyelids move back and forth in tiny movements, like she is dreaming while she stares at Isabel’s photo on the grave marker. “Do it for me, Mom,” Isabel whispers. “Because you love me despite everything. Please.” Her mother’s eyes fly open.
Reader's Impressions & Star Rating: This chapter is devastating in the quietest possible way. It does not simply redeem Isabel’s mother or condemn her—it lets her be both a woman who failed and a woman who loved with everything she had. The Bear Lake memory is so warm and alive that it hurts, especially because we know it is being pressed over a morgue photograph. The small recollections—the bus, the bra, Judge Judy, the note that said “Still love you. Always”—build a portrait of love that was imperfect, stubborn, and real. The Abraham metaphor is chilling and unforgettable. And that final image of the mother’s eyes flying open is the kind of cliffhanger that makes you hold your breath.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4.9 / 5 Stars
Next Chapter Prediction: That sudden eye movement feels like a breakthrough. I predict the next chapter will show whether Isabel’s mother has truly sensed her, heard her, or finally allowed herself to believe. She may speak Isabel’s name, or she may finally confront what happened with Dennis Beaumont. Either way, the wall of denial is cracking. Isabel may also discover that her presence can do more than haunt—it can guide. But the cemetery at dusk is not safe, and whatever opens next may bring grief, revelation, or danger.
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