The Mother 3 - The End (Pages 317o - end)

 RATING: VERY GOOD

SPOILERS!!!

I was right about the murderer of baby Noah. 

The last part I read starts with Maddie finding Frank, the man who was the only man who cared for Lydia/Sarah. Frank is 95 and in a nursing home, and he tells Maddie how her mother went through horrible experiences because of her mother. Mae kept Lydia locked in a cupboard for long periods of time and didn't give her food or water, and then she prostituted her own daughter. Frank tells Maddie that Lydia was a very traumatised little girl, and what she did is a consequence of her own upbringing. This is something he discovered just later or he wouldn't have kept the relationship with Mae for so long. 

On the way back Mae has an accident with the car when she has one of her blackouts, and in hospital they tell her that  the reason why she has blackouts is because she suffered very brief seizures which made her lose all that time, and she is to have a treatment from then on. 

On the way back she stops to talk to Candace, her sister-in-law, who wants to confess something. She says that the day Noah, she went into the nursery to change her nappy, and she felt ashamed when the boy couldn't stop crying, and that is why she turned off the baby monitor. She has been plagued by guilt because if she hadn't turned the baby monitor off, Maddie may have heard him that night. I have to say that this part of the book doesn't read real for me. Her reasons for turning off the monitor are a bit iffy.

And then comes the big revelation. Maddie picks up Emily and Jacob, and the girl keeps complaining about the boy who has a cold and even vomits in the car. At home Maddie puts the boy in the bath and asks Emily to keep an eye on him. When later she goes to check on him, he finds him facedown in the back and Maddie quickly rescues him, and she is angry with Emily. When she talks to Emily, the girl keeps saying that she didn't want brothers and they were happier before they came, and she says that they cry too much. And then she says that her mother shouldn't be this sad about Noah because they had only had him for two months. And then Maddie is horrified to discover that Emily killed her own brother, and she is neither sad nor remorseful.

Maddie goes to talk to her mother, who she has realised knew what happened to Noah. They talk and Sarah tells her that for some reason Emily can't feel empathy, and that is the way she is. Maddie can understand what her mother did to that little girl because of what she had to go through, but Emily hasn't never wanted for anything, and she realises that she is a psychopath.

At home Maddie goes to Emily's room. The girl is sleeping, and Maddie keeps thinking. She can't tell the police about Emily because she could end up in prison, and she would go through the same as Sarah, living a half life. And what if she had children? Maddie thinks that there is a bad seed that she passed on to her daughter. Sarah's grandfather raped his own daughter, who got pregnant with Mae, and then Mae also did horrible things to her daughter. Maddie doesn't know if that wickedness is genetic or if her mother and grandmother did what they did because of their experiences in life. But what about Emily, who had everything in life? The last paragraph of the chapter shows Maddie grabbign a pillow, hinting that she is going to kill her own daughter.

The epilogue that happens six months later shows Lucas and Maddie on the beach with Jacob, who has come out of his shell, and now that it is just the three of them, not shadowed by an older sister or a cute baby, he has bloomed. We get to understand that Emily is dead, but then Sarah and Emily appear. We discover that Maddie considered killing her but she couldn't. So the solution that she came with was to send her to live with Sarah, who could help her as she had lived a similar life. Maddie, who has been wounded by all the secrets between her and her husband, told Lucas about Emily, and he wasn't happy to let Emily go unpunished, but he agreed to send her with Sarah. What he wasn't happy is to let Emily have contact with Jacob, but they agreed that she would never be alone with him. Emily welcomed the idea of living with her grandmother, and Maddie thinks that in this time her daughter has also improved, and from the way she treats her little brother when they see each other, Maddie thinks that they are going to be good.

I loved the book. It is a very uncomfortable read, especially the parts about Lydia's childhood, but it is honest and hard as it describes very real scenarios.