“Then we came to the mouth of the tunnel. We zipped ahead, went over the lip at the tunnel’s entrance, the bump that supposedly sent Mummy’s Mercedes veering off course. But the lip was nothing. We barely felt it.”
Describing the moment, Harry wrote: “I leaned forward, watched the light change to a kind of water orange, watched the concrete pillars flicker past. I counted them, counted my heartbeats, and in a few seconds we emerged from the other side.
“Is that all of it? It’s… nothing. Just a straight tunnel.
“[I] always imagined the tunnel as some treacherous passageway, inherently dangerous, but it was just a short, simple, no-frills tunnel.”
Harry then reflects on the emotional impact of the drive, admitting he ultimately wished he hadn’t gone through with it.
“I’d had plenty of bad ideas in my twenty-three years, but this one was uniquely ill-conceived. I’d told myself that I wanted closure, but I didn’t really.
“Deep down, I’d hoped to feel in that tunnel what I’d felt when JLP gave me the police files—disbelief. Doubt. Instead, that was the night all doubt fell away.”
Though the experience brought him a form of resolution, it also left him with deeper pain.
“She’s dead, I thought: ‘My God, she’s really gone for good.’
“I got the closure I was pretending to seek. I got it in spades. And now I’d never be able to get rid of it. I’d thought driving the tunnel would bring an end, or brief cessation, to the pain, the decade of unrelenting pain.
“Instead it brought on the start of Pain, Part Deux.”
