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He was devastated. Numb. After she’d been dead for three months, I was growing impatient. We’d only had sex twice since her death, and he hadn’t even kissed me with tongue either time. It’s like he was disconnected from me, using me to get off, to feel better, to get a quick rush of something other than agony. I wanted more than that. I wanted the old Jeremy back.
In this quotation, Verity is expressing impatience about the fact that Jeremy is not interested in sex after the death of their daughter Chastin. Previously, she and Jeremy had used sex as a way to connect, and she had also covertly employed it as a way to control and manipulate him. However, in the midst of his grief and loss his libido lessens, so she feels that her power over him is ebbing. She says that she feels disconnected from him, which refers both to the lack of physical sexual connection and to their lack of emotional intimacy. She describes his agony at the death of their daughter as being almost a replacement for sex, as if sex can displace it. Verity and Jeremy experience grief in vastly different ways. While Jeremy is sunken in despair, Verity wants to get the “old Jeremy back” as quickly as possible.
I couldn’t sleep, so I went to my office and opened my laptop for the first time in over six months. Imagine it for a moment. A mother, grieving the loss of both of her daughters, writing a fictional work–up that accused one of them of murdering the other.
This quote comes from the end of Verity’s final letter to Jeremy. She describes returning to her office after the death of her daughter Harper and continuing with her “antagonistic journaling.” In the letter, Verity maintains that she is innocent of all wrongdoing and didn’t kill Harper deliberately. Contrary to what the autobiography says, Verity writes that Harper's death was a complete accident, and that she was emotionally destroyed by it. She continued her antagonistic journaling as a way to exercise herself of all of the grief, loss, and guilt she felt after the canoe accident. She felt like she was the real cause for Harper's death as she was unable to save her, and so she gets all of her bad feelings out by journaling as if she were responsible. She asks Jeremy if he can imagine the sort of person who would need to do so, as a preamble for explaining that he will never understand the mind of a writer.
And even if Jeremy really was the reason for her wreck, I can’t blame him. He believed Verity maliciously murdered his child. I can’t even blame him for ultimately following through with her murder when he found out she had been deceiving him about her injuries. Any parent in his position would have done the same. Should have done the same. We both believed in our hearts that she was a threat to Crew. To us.
In this quotation, Lowen explains that even if Jeremy did try to kill Verity, as her letter records, she understands why he would do so and forgives him. She doesn't blame him, even if it's true. In fact, she sympathizes with Jeremy. She understands a grieving father wanting to kill the person who maliciously murdered his child, and argues that any parent in his position would have done the same. At this point, Lowen is herself pregnant, and feeling very protective of her fetus. She bolsters her support for Jeremy, reasoning that at time when they killed Verity, they both believed that she was a criminal who was capable of murdering her own children.
