Chapter Thirteen: Camden

CHAPTER THIRTEENCamden

For a few seconds, just the space of a couple of heartbeats, really, a stunned silence hangs over the table. It feels good, watching the wind visibly slip from their sails, and I savor it more than the expensive champagne in my glass.

Then I feel Jules’s hand on mine.

Her expression is stricken, her skin pale, and any satisfaction at getting one over on the McTavishes drains out of me in an instant.

I should have told her. I know that. I had plenty of chances before now, and ever since Nathan’s phone call this afternoon, I’ve known this was coming. But something held me back.

No, not something. Someone.

Ruby.

“You knew,” Ben says, and I squeeze Jules’s fingers, pleading with my eyes for her to understand before I turn to look at Ben.

He’s still standing at the head, his face almost as pale as Jules’s except for two red flags of color on his cheeks. Both fists are planted on the wooden tabletop, his body practically vibrating with anger. I take a deep breath, make myself have another sip of champagne before I answer.

“When I turned eighteen,” I say, looking at Nelle and Libby, both of whom are frozen in their chairs. “She brought me into her office––”

“My father’s office,” Nelle says, the words brittle, and I ignore her.

“And she told me that she’d had some lab run a DNA test. She used your hair to do it, Nelle,” I say, nodding at her as she seethes in her chair, her knobby fingers tight on its arms.

I can still remember how it felt that afternoon, the winter sunshine coming through the windows, a fire crackling in the hearth, making the room too warm, and the scent of Ruby’s lavender hand lotion kicking off a sick, pulsing headache behind my eyes.

Or maybe it hadn’t been the scent. Maybe it had been her words, so calm and cool, so classically Ruby.

Anyway, it’s the sort of thing I think you should know,she’d said, like she was telling me what the code to her safe was, or which funeral home I should call when she died. Just a normal bit of business, mother to son, matriarch to heir.

“It’s funny,” I go on, tapping the edge of my knife against the table with one hand, Jules’s cold fingers still clutched in the other. “You’re actually the reason she got the test done.” I nod at Nelle. “Well, you and Howell. She knew, by the way. About the two of you taking her hairbrush, sending it out for testing. She was just smart enough to get ahead of you.”

She’d actually been amused by it, chuckling as she’d shaken her head.

Science, darling. Who knew it would come for me in the end?

Nelle’s mouth works, lips trembling as little flecks of spit appear in the corners. “I knew it. I knew she’d interfered somehow. Howell said I was being paranoid, that she couldn’t have done such a thing, but he never knew Ruby like I did. None of you did. A snake in the grass from the day she slithered into this house.”

Honestly, this might be the first time I’ve liked Nelle,Ruby had said. No idea she had it in her.

I still don’t know how Ruby figured out what Nelle and Howell were up to, or who she paid off to make sure that particular DNA test came back declaring that she was just as much a McTavish as they were. Ruby only ever shared what she thought was necessary.

Still, to her credit, she decided it was necessary for me to know the truth she’d hid from the rest of the family: that she’d had her own testing done, and there it was, in black and white. She had no biological link to Eleanor McTavish, no miraculous recovery for Baby Ruby after all. Just a child stolen from poor parents to replace the one the rich parents had been too careless with.

Or at least that was the story Ruby had told me then. I had always suspected there was more to it, but what did it matter now?

My mouth is dry, but my glass is empty, so I clear my throat before saying, “Nathan called me this afternoon. He’d gotten a call from someone at First Carolina Bank, saying that a McTavish had been in with the key to a safety-deposit box that Ruby had set up in 2010. You, I’m guessing?”

I nod to Ben, who is now almost purple with rage.

“You knew,” he says again. “You’ve known for the past fourteen fucking years that she had no right to give any of this to anyone. She had no right to it herself.”

“She had every right,” I fire back, my own temper sparking. “Blood doesn’t fucking matter, Benji. Mason left it all to her. Not to the eldest surviving McTavish, not to the ‘heirs of his body’ or whatever bullshit term you want to pull out of your little legal hat. He left it all to Ruby. Who then left it all to me.”

“You grasping little bastard,” Nelle says, rising shakily to her feet, one hand still clutching her chair. “Waltzing around here these last few days like lord of the manor. No wonder she loved you. Like calls to like, and you were both trash.”

“Nana,” Libby says, reaching over, but Nelle shakes her off.

“I won’t have it!” she goes on, her voice breathless and shrill.

“You really thought you’d uncovered something, didn’t you?” I say, almost laughing now. “Let me guess,” I continue, turning to Ben. “When Howell died, you started going through his things. His office, right? Which used to be Ruby’s. You found that key taped to the back of a drawer. Which your dad never did because he wasn’t nearly as diligent as you. Or as desperate.”

I remember Ruby putting it there, tapping the handle once she was done.

First Carolina Bank, Box 1306. I’ll ask you to keep this information between us, but once I’m gone, do with it what you will.

Another burden, another responsibility bequeathed to me that I’d never asked for, never wanted.

And now you know my biggest secret,Ruby had said, her eyes twinkling, and then she’d given a little shrug.

You could destroy me with it if you ever wanted to, I suppose.

I wouldn’t, I’d said, and I’d meant it. Wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t want to.

She’d smiled at that, and reached over, squeezed my hand, her fingers cold, the skin papery thin. You and me …

Against the world,I’d finished.

Because it really had been the two of us against everyone, against it all. And even after everything that had happened, there was still a part of me that was instinctually loyal to Ruby, that had sworn to keep her secrets and had chosen to do so, over and over again.

Even from my own wife.

---

THE LAUGH DIES a bitter death in my throat, and I swallow hard. “And then what? You go to the bank, you find the safety- deposit box. You read the DNA report. You learn the truth about Ruby. You must think you’ve really blown the case wide open, don’t you? You’re certain you’re going to find some kind of loophole in the will now. Something that yanks all this shit away from me and hands it back to you, right?” I pause, staring intently at Ben. “I mean, I assume that was your big reason for becoming a lawyer. And not just any lawyer, but one who specializes in estates. You’ve spent the past decade trying to figure out a way to screw me out of my inheritance, but there isn’t one, is there?”

When he doesn’t answer, I shake my head. “No. I know there isn’t, because I had Nathan Collins go over every bit of that damn will with a fine-tooth fucking comb a decade ago. Ruby was too smart for you.”

I look around the table, at everyone but Jules, who I can feel staring at the side of my face.

Later. I’ll apologize. I’ll make her understand.

“She was too smart for all of you. Still, you wanted to play out this little scene. You figured I’d be shocked, figured I hadn’t done my own homework because––what is it I am again?”

I swing my gaze to Ben. “‘Hillbilly trash’?”

Back at Nelle. “A ‘grasping little bastard’?”

“Okay, can we all just stop talking about this now?” Libby says, dropping her forehead into her hand, and I pluck my napkin off my lap, throwing it onto the table.

“I have nothing left to say.” I shrug. “Except, go ahead. Tell the world Ruby wasn’t a McTavish. Make a big thing about it, if you want. Tangle us all up in court for a million years until every dime of your precious fucking money is in lawyers’ pockets.”

I stand, bracing both hands on the table and leaning in. “Meanwhile, I thank God every goddamn night that I’m not related to any of you,” I say. “And honestly, I think Ruby did, too. So if we’re done––”

“We’re not!” Nelle all but shrieks, thumping the table with one fist, and now Libby gets up, going over to her and putting an arm around her shoulders.

“Nana Nelle,” she says, her voice sharper. “You shouldn’t upset yourself, your doctor said––”

“Your doctor said you had to be careful with your health,” Ben finishes, but he’s still looking at me. He’s not nearly as purple now, and there’s a light in his eyes that has something cold settling in the pit of my stomach.

“Your mother died young,” Ben goes on, speaking to Nelle but watching me. “And your father wasn’t all that old, either. Ruby, of course, lived to be seventy-three, but then she wasn’t actually your sister. I wonder how long she might have lived if she’d had a … natural death.”

Next to me, Jules stands, her hand curling around my elbow. “Camden, let’s go upstairs,” she says, but I feel frozen to the spot.

Even my lips feel numb as I say, “Is this what we’re doing, Ben? Rewriting the past? Ruby died in her sleep. Doesn’t get much more natural than that.”

I say it so easily, another lie that slips off my tongue.

Another one of Ruby’s secrets, locked inside my chest.

The memories are there, pushing against the back of my eyes, threatening to drown me, but I’ve had a lot of practice keeping things hidden over the years, and even as Ben smiles at me in a way that has my teeth clenched and sweat dripping down my back, I meet his gaze.

“Thing is, Cam,” Ben says, shoving his hands in his pockets and rocking back on his heels in a way that reminds me so much of Howell it’s eerie, “things weren’t great with you and Ruby at the time, if I remember. You weren’t even speaking to her, were you?”

I don’t answer, and Nelle sinks back into her seat, still trembling, but her gaze is turning triumphant now. I think of Howell’s email again, Nelle insisting Ruby killed herself, the only one who ever suspected the truth.

Libby stands there in her pink dress, her lower lip pulled between her teeth.

“And of course,” Ben adds, “you were here at the house that night. The night she died.”

“Yeah, I was,” I say, fighting the urge to curl my fingers into a fist. “You know that. I came back to get some more of my stuff. But I never even saw her that night.”

I’ve repeated that lie so many times that I can almost believe it’s true, can almost see myself at twenty years old, sullenly putting X-Men comics I hadn’t read in years and an old clock radio in a duffel bag, rain howling outside and Ruby far away in her own bedroom.

“It’s weird, though,” Ben says. “I mean, I wasn’t here that night, and Nana Nelle was up in her room asleep early. But Libby was here. And…”

Trailing off, Ben shakes his head. “Man. I hate to say this. Hate to even think it. But Libby says she saw you coming out of Ruby’s room. Thought it was weird you told a different story to the police when they came, but hey.”

Ben flashes that grin, but his gaze, when it meets mine, might as well be stone. “We’re family, right? We keep each other’s secrets. Until we don’t.”

Time feels slow now, my heartbeat a steady thud in my chest, my ears ringing.

I look over at Libby.

She wasn’t here that night. I remember. Her car passed mine coming down the mountain as I was going up, the window barely cracked because of the rain, but the firefly glow ember of the tip of a cigarette catching my eye. We’d looked at each other, her mouth twisting into a sour scowl, and then she’d flown past me, tires skidding a little on the muddy road.

“Isn’t that right, Libby?” Ben says, a little too loud, and she presses her lips together, twists one of her bangle bracelets around her wrist.

“Yeah,” she says at last, the words coming out as a sigh before she straightens her shoulders and says it again, firmer. “Yeah. You came out of Aunt Ruby’s room, and you were really upset. Shaking. I thought you’d been crying.”

She’s warming to the story now, looking over at Jules, who I still can’t bring myself to face. “It freaked me out, honestly, but like Ben said, we’re family, so…”

Libby shrugs. “But now I guess we’re not.”

“Plan B, huh?” I say. I’m actually smiling, but it’s like there’s broken glass in my throat. “Can’t scare Camden off with the big Ruby reveal, so we threaten to accuse him of murder instead?”

“Okay, this is officially insane now,” Jules says, the first words she’s spoken in what feels like ages, and Ben cuts his eyes at her.

“You wanted to be a McTavish, right?” he says. “Well, this is what it looks like, sweetheart.”

She scoffs, about to fire back with her own retort, but I don’t give her the chance.

“Fine,” I say. “You know what, Ben? You win. Keep your money. Keep this house. It’s worth it never to have to see a single one of your faces again. Fuck all of you. And fuck Ruby for ever bringing me here.”

With that, I reach for the bottle of champagne, still half-full. I snag it with one hand, and reach for Jules with the other.

She lets me lead her from the room, and as we make our way to the staircase, I can hear the others all start talking at once, but I ignore it. My only thought is getting upstairs, packing our bags, and heading back to Colorado as soon as humanly possible.

I’ve already got one foot on the bottom step when I realize Jules is tugging at me, her feet planted.

“Camden,” she says, and I turn, bottle of champagne still in hand.

“Can you believe that shit?” I ask her, gesturing with the bottle. “Now do you get it? Now do you see why I never wanted to come back here?”

“They’re assholes, I know,” she says, dropping my hand. “No disagreement from me on that score. But … you’re just going to let them win?”

I stare at her. Some of the adrenaline is wearing off now, and it’s making me feel muddled, confused.

“They’ll always win,” I tell her, but she shakes her head.

“No. No, they don’t have to. Jesus Christ, Cam, you can’t think this plan of theirs would actually work? That anyone would believe them?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I tell her, wishing she weren’t wearing Ruby’s dress, wishing I didn’t feel Ruby’s eyes boring into my back from her portrait at the top of the stairs. “I mean … what do you want me to do, Jules? Fight them? Spend the next decade tangled in legal shit with people I hate? People who hate me?”

“Of course, I don’t want that,” she says, but the words come out too fast, and she keeps glancing back toward the dining room.

Any relief I was feeling starts to drain out of me as I look at my wife, planted at the foot of the stairs.

“You do,” I say, slow. “You do want that. You want me to fight it. You want this place, and everything that comes with it. Even after that display. Even after what they accused me of.”

Jules climbs a couple of steps, her hand resting on the banister, the simple wedding set I bought for her catching the light. “I just don’t understand why you’re giving in so quickly. And why didn’t you tell me about Ruby? About knowing she wasn’t a McTavish?”

A headache is starting to pound behind my eyes, and I want to fall asleep almost as badly as I want to get in the car and get out of here.

“It didn’t matter. They’re the ones obsessed with blood, about some kind of clannish bullshit and who has the right to what.”

“But you have rights, Camden,” she fires back. “And a damn good lawyer. Call Nathan. Tell him about the shit they just pulled, what they’re accusing you of––”

“It’s not fucking worth it, Jules! How many times do I have to say it?”

I have never raised my voice to her since the day we met. I’ve hardly ever yelled at anyone, and now my words seem to echo around the cavernous hallway as she lifts her eyes to mine, her expression turning stony.

“Fine,” she says, moving past me. “Fine. Let them have it all. We’ll go back to the rental, and you’ll go back to teaching, and they can live the sweet life because two hundred years ago, their ancestors did a thing and ours didn’t. Got it.”

“Jules,” I say, all the fight gone out of me now, but she just keeps moving up the stairs, and I watch her go, eventually hearing the distant slam of our bedroom door.

Sighing, I trudge up the stairs, too, but instead of making the turn to our room, I go down the other hallway, almost without thinking.

I’m at Ruby’s room before I quite realize it, and when I push open the door, that familiar scent hits me. Lavender and cedar, still preserved just as I remember it, like everything else in this bedroom.

Her dressing table, her tiny watercolor paintings that she’d bought at a yard sale and proclaimed “delightful,” plopping them down alongside a genuine Degas sketch in a silver frame.

The Belgian lace bedspread that scratched the back of my legs when I’d sit in here after soccer practice. She always insisted I come in and tell her about my day.

I sink heavily onto the bed now, setting the champagne bottle on the nightstand with a thunk before dropping my head into my hands.

The real reason I can’t stay and fight is because I got lucky tonight. If I leave now, if I cut every string tying me to my past, I might be okay. But if I stay here, if I go toe to toe with Nelle and Ben and Libby, those strings are only going to get tighter and tighter until they finally choke me.

And I can never tell Jules why.

I look back to the champagne, but then I think of something else, sliding open Ruby’s nightstand drawer.

I expect it to be empty, but her things are still there. Reading glasses, an old Reader’s Digest, a pot of lip balm.

And her pills.

She had dozens of them, all kept in a little silver pillbox, and I close my hand around it now.

Even in the darkness, I know the shape of the one I’m after.

I’ve never taken anything to help me sleep, figuring I deserved whatever bad dreams or sleepless nights I got, but tonight, I want oblivion.

A bitter white square under my tongue, a swig from the bottle, and I curl up on Ruby’s bed, still in Ben’s suit, only my shoes kicked off, and let the blackness take me.

---

ISLEEP LIKE the dead, waking up in the gray light of dawn, my head stuffed with cotton, my mouth dry, and it takes me a second to become aware that something is happening outside.

I hear running feet, a slammed door, and I sit up, trying to blink away the fog, wishing I hadn’t taken the damn pill in the first place.

I’ve just managed to sit up when there’s a sound that pierces that haze like a bullet, sending me shooting to my feet even as the room spins dizzily around me.

It’s Jules.

Screaming.

From the Desk of Ruby A. McTavish

March 30, 2013

Now, where were we?

Ah, yes. My biggest secret. The family shame.

All of that.

The Darnells had not had an easy time of it since 1944, the year I was reunited with my family, and Jimmy Darnell was shot trying to escape the local jail. His wife, the woman who claimed she was my mother, had moved away from Alabama shortly after, and had gone back to her maiden name.

It took some doing before I was able to track her down. When I did, it was only to discover that she’d died in 1984.

God, how that frustrated me. So close! A year earlier, and I could’ve met her. It sounds silly, probably, but I was so sure that if I simply saw her, I would know immediately whether she was in fact my mother. Finding out that she was dead made me almost abandon the whole enterprise altogether.

But then, the very discreet—and even more expensive—detective I’d hired called to inform me that while Helen Darnell had died, her daughter, Claire, was still alive and living in Tallahassee.

Claire.

I remembered seeing the name all those years ago in Daddy’s office, thinking how pretty it was. It was even prettier to me now because Claire might be my salvation.

A side note—one rarely finds salvation in Florida.

Claire was forty-two in 1985, just three years younger than me, but she looked much older when she opened the door of her little apartment in an ugly square building surrounded by other ugly square buildings. I’d tried to dress down for the visit, knowing better than to swan in wearing Chanel, but my Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and Halston blouse were still entirely too much as I saw very clearly on Claire’s face.

She was wearing a T-shirt over cutoffs, her face bare, her hair—the same deep brown as mine, I noted—scraped back into a messy ponytail. Her expression grew wary as she stared at me from her doorway.

“Is this about Linda?” she asked.

I had no idea who Linda was, so I shook my head, sweat already sliding down my lower back, my sunglasses—which, I realized too late, were Chanel, goddamn it—fogging up in the humidity. “No, I … my name is Ruby McTavish.”

Her expression cleared then, lips curving into something that would’ve been a smile if there hadn’t been such a mean edge to it. “No,” she said. “You’re Dora Darnell. I wondered if you’d ever turn up one day.”

With that, she turned to go back into the apartment. I stood there, stunned, and she waved a hand for me to follow her. “Come on in. Sit down.”

The apartment was cool, a window unit rattling in the living room. A little girl sat on the green carpet in front of it, two Barbies in her hands. She looked to be about eight or so, her dark blond hair neatly braided, her pink overalls and clear jelly shoes meticulously clean. The whole apartment was clean, I noticed. Small and shabby, but neat as a pin.

Claire poured me a glass of sweet tea, and we sat down at the kitchen table, studying each other.

“Linda, baby? Go play in your room,” Claire called, and the girl pouted.

“It’s too hot in there.”

“Then go in my room. You can watch TV.”

Magic words, apparently, because Linda happily trotted off toward the small hallway, opening the first of three doors.

After a moment, we heard the muted blare of music, and Claire shook her head. “She’s not supposed to watch MTV, but it’s a special occasion, I guess.”

She turned her head to me. “You have kids?”

“No,” I said, my mouth dry, the tea so sweet it made my teeth ache.

Claire tapped her fingernails on the side of her glass, right over the grinning face of some cartoon character. “I didn’t think I would. Have kids. I was thirty-four when she was born. One of those things, not quite on purpose, not quite an accident.”

She flashed me a smile, and I sucked in a breath, thinking about Andrew’s portrait of me hanging at Ashby House. The smile on Claire’s face was the same as mine. “Her dad ain’t worth shit, but he was good-looking at least. So she’s got that going for her.”

“She’s a very pretty child,” I said, the words prim in my own ears, and Claire smirked, leaning back in her chair.

“When did you figure it out?” she asked, and I didn’t bother pretending to misunderstand.

“I haven’t yet. I’ve always been curious, though. I’d read the stories, and I suppose I––”

“You suppose you started to wonder if my mama wasn’t a liar?” Claire finished, and I wondered how I was already so helplessly on the back foot.

“Something like that.”

She tilted her head, looking at me for a long time before saying, “If it makes you feel better, you were pretty expensive.”

The room had felt too cold earlier, but my skin flushed hot at that, and I took another sip of my tea, my throat so tight that I nearly choked.

“I don’t know how much, exactly. The number changed a lot over the years, but the story stayed the same. Little girl missing, rich family in North Carolina. They saw her picture in the paper, Mama and Daddy, and Mama said it tore her heart up because she looked so much like you. And later she said she wished she’d never said that because if she hadn’t, Daddy might not have ever thought about it.”

She rattled the ice in her glass. “But he did. She never knew how he got in touch with your family, but your daddy sent someone down in a fancy suit to look at you, and then he came himself.”

I pictured Daddy—my daddy, with his big mustache and his Acqua di Parma and his white suits that never got dirty—sitting across a table from Jimmy Darnell, and suddenly I could see that table.

No, I couldn’t just see it. I remembered that table. One leg just a little shorter so that it always wobbled when someone leaned against it.

“His wife was beside herself, he told Daddy. Or that’s what Mama said he told Daddy anyway. Mrs. McTavish blamed herself, I think. She was the one who told Ruby to go find the nanny, to leave her alone for a little while. Said she saw her walk up the hill and out of sight, but thought the nanny was just on the other side. Only the nanny had already started packing things up and carrying them back to the car, and she didn’t know Ruby was headed her way.”

I could picture that, too. The little girl, toddling along the forest path, her eyes searching for a familiar figure, but not seeing any. Her little brain whirring, her legs carrying her deeper into the forest, thinking her nanny—Grace—must be there.

I waited for that image to have the same whiff of memory, but it didn’t. It was just my imagination. And my imagination kept going, carrying the child deeper into the forest, until there were too many trees, until she was confused and scared, sweating and whimpering, looking around for Grace, not seeing the drop ahead …

“He was afraid it was going to eat her up,” Claire continued, and my mind, still fixed on Baby Ruby, conjured up a bear now instead of a steep cliff; a mountain lion, maybe. But then I realized she meant Mama, and her guilt.

No, not my mama. Not if what Claire was saying is true.

Anna. Anna McTavish.

“Mama never would’ve let you go,” Claire said, and the air-conditioning clicked off, the room suddenly quiet. “Even after it was all agreed on and the money was stuffed under the mattress, she kept telling everyone you were hers. Nobody listened, though. Not with Daddy confessing.”

She lifted one hand off the table, zooming it through the air. “So off you went to North Carolina, Daddy right behind you. Only you went to a mansion and he went to the county jail.”

A headache started behind my eyes, sweat soaking through my silk blouse. “And what? That was your father’s grand plan, to just go sit in jail? Go through a trial for something he didn’t do?”

“Of course not,” Claire scoffed. “McTavish told him he’d fix it. Said if Daddy confessed and just sat tight in the county jail for a couple of days, he would make it so that Daddy could ‘escape,’ and get him back to Alabama. He’d given us enough money to start a brand-new life somewhere else. Mama said Daddy kept talking about Mexico, maybe South America.”

She scoffed again, took another sip of tea. “That would’ve been nice, I guess. Growing up down there. Wasn’t in the cards, though.”

“The escape was planned, then,” I said slowly. “And went wrong.”

The look Claire gave me is one I’ve never forgotten. In part, because she had my eyes, a dark hazel that changed from green to nearly black in the light.

But mostly, because it was the first time in my life anyone had ever looked at me with such pity.

“There was no escape plan,” I said, understanding washing over me.

Claire made a gun of her finger, fired it at me. “McTavish had what he wanted. He had you. He didn’t need some Alabama farmer who could barely read holding a secret like that over your heads for the rest of his life.”

I told myself there was no way Claire could know that for sure. She was a baby when all this happened; plus, it was coming to her from her mother, a woman who’d had her life shattered by Baby Ruby’s disappearance. Of course, she’d think the worst of Daddy. Of all the McTavishes.

But here it is, darling: I knew it was true. I felt it, as certain and primal as I’d ever felt anything. And I knew that Daddy had that man killed. I could practically see Jimmy Darnell dashing through the dark woods of Tavistock County, thinking to himself that just through the trees, he’d find a car, ready to take him home to his wife, his baby girl, and all that money.

I bet the last thing that went through his head before that bullet hit was a vision of crystal-blue water and white sands.

And the reason I knew? It’s exactly what I would’ve done, if I were Daddy.

“The real kicker,” Claire said, sighing as she rested her elbows on the table, “is that Mama had proof of the deal. She had all that cash. Like I said, I never really knew how much it was. Thousands of dollars, for sure. But the night they took you and Daddy, she burned every last bill. Big stacks of cash, going up in smoke in the yard.”

Claire pushed a loose strand of dark hair behind her ear. “‘What kind of mother would I be if I took that money?’ she always said. ‘What kind of mother sells her own child?’ Sometimes, I’d be like, ‘Well, hell, Mama, probably a bad one, but at least you would’ve been a rich one!’”

She laughed, but the sound faded quickly, her smile dimming. “That was before I had Linda, though. I understand it better now.”

Heaving a sigh, she stood, the chair squeaking across the linoleum. “We’ve managed okay, as you can see, but Mama never got over it. She died last year, but I sometimes think she’d been dead for forty years before that. She was just marking time.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said, and Claire looked at me, eyebrows raised.

“You didn’t do anything,” she said. “You were just a kid. Although I admit, I used to be jealous of you when I was younger. We didn’t get much North Carolina news down here, but sometimes you made the bigger papers, and I used to dream about what it would be like to live in a big house and have all that money. It wasn’t very nice of me, but when your first husband died, I thought, ‘Well, that’s what she gets, isn’t it? Her daddy had my daddy shot, and now someone’s shot her man.’”

She kept looking at me, her gaze steady. “And then I read about your second husband, and thought, ‘Shit, maybe God really does dole out vengeance.’ And when the third died, I thought, ‘How is one woman this unlucky?’ It wasn’t until the fourth one that I understood.”

The sweat prickling on my skin suddenly turned cold. In the bedroom, the TV clicked off, the door opening as Linda dashed out, crying, “Debbie’s outside, I’m gonna go play!”

“Stay by the building!” Claire called back as the front door opened and slammed shut, but she never took her eyes off me.

“You may have been born a Darnell, Dora, but they made a McTavish out of you in the end.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

I stood abruptly, my hands fluttering nervously in a way they never did. “It … it sounds so crass to say this, but I’d like to … if there’s anything I could do, or … your child might need…”

Claire let me ramble on, making me feel smaller and smaller until finally my words came to a stop. I didn’t even manage to get out a full sentence.

“That’s really sweet of you to offer, Mrs. McTavish,” she said after a long silence. “But I think this family’s done with y’all.”

I nodded meekly. “Thank you,” I said. “For the tea. And … well. Thank you.”

I moved to the door, but before I opened it, slipped my hand into my pocketbook, pulling out one of my calling cards. It looked ridiculous, made me feel ridiculous, that heavy eggshell card stock with its swirling black print, Mrs. Ruby McTavish, Ashby House.

Scribbling a number on the back, I said, “In case you change your mind,” then laid the card on top of a wicker and glass table by the front door.

“I won’t,” Claire replied, but I pretended not to hear.

I thought it would feel better.

Knowing at last. The true story, the one that made the pieces click into place. Mama’s weeping and drinking, her face sometimes crumpling when she looked over at me. In her heart, she must’ve known. Daddy had thought the loss of Ruby would eat her up, and it had. My presence only made those teeth sharper.

And Daddy. My beloved father, ruthless in business and now, I knew, in everything.

His wealth and his family name were supposed to protect him and his own from tragedy. Parents lose children in a myriad of ways every day, but Mason McTavish was not supposed to be like ordinary people. He was supposed to be blessed.

Special.

He couldn’t accept his loss, so he did the only thing he knew how to—threw money at it until it went away. Until his world was right again.

No matter who got chewed up in the process.

I might have had my answers, but I didn’t know what to do next.

Amends felt called for, but Claire wouldn’t take my help, and I couldn’t blame her for that. Besides, if I had given her money, it would’ve made me just like him, like Mason (I couldn’t bear to think of him as “Daddy” for some time after that).

There had to be some way, though, something I could do. Something that would, if not right the wrong, then balance the scales of the universe somehow.

It would be almost ten more years before I’d figure it out.

I couldn’t give the Darnells back what they’d lost, but I could take from the McTavishes. What’s more: I could take and give to someone else, someone more deserving.

Claire’s question, about if I’d had children, kept coming back to me. I had never gotten pregnant despite my many husbands—the fear I’d had in Paris had proven unfounded—and I suspected I wasn’t capable of it. And by that point, I was in my midforties with no intention of marrying again, so that door was firmly shut to me.

It was yet another sign of my strangeness within my own family—well, not my family at all, I knew that now—that the question of who would inherit after me had never really raised its head until that moment. The money, the house, everything that came with being a McTavish … I had been happy enough to embrace it for myself with little thought to what would happen after I died.

Why would I care? Like Roddy, I had begun to live only in the present, terrified to look back, indifferent to what the future might hold. But Claire’s revelations changed things for me.

When I died, everything McTavish would go to Nelle. And if she died before me, then it was Howell’s. Cruel, stupid Howell, who had Daddy’s eyes and Nelle’s pinched mouth.

Howell, a real McTavish, as I was not.

It irked me, darling. The Darnells had given up everything for a shot at something more, something bigger. In a twisted way, I was the result of all of that, and it seemed … I don’t know. Unfair, I suppose. Unjust. Daddy had won, and when I died without children, the McTavishes would slowly reclaim what had always been rightfully theirs, the same way kudzu climbed the trees around Ashby House.

But there were other children out there. Children like me, without families.

And the more I thought of it, the more I became sure it was the way forward.

I would adopt a child, make him or her my heir. Mason’s will had been an exacting, exhausting thing, leaving it all to me, every last cent, every stick of furniture. At the time, I thought it was about preserving the fortune, that he didn’t want to see it divvied up into smaller shares, and that he trusted me to take care of Nelle and hers.

Now I wonder if it wasn’t his own form of penance, or else some sort of delusion? Maybe he’d convinced himself I was Ruby, and that the whole sordid business with the Darnells had never happened. Maybe leaving everything his family had built over three hundred years to me made that lie feel real in his own heart.

In any case, once this idea took hold, I couldn’t think of anything else.

But it couldn’t be just any child. I would have to feel it was the right one.

And of course, I’d keep an eye on them through the years. If their soul showed any signs of curdling under the influence of all our largesse, then I’d rethink the plan.

I know this must sound insane to you, but you have to understand, the sins of my family—my sins included—were too great for reasonable measures.

The rot had to be cut out, and this was the only way I could think to do it.

Took ages, though.

I became convinced that I’d know the right child when I saw him (and I knew it would be a boy by then. I can never decide if that was intuition or some sort of internalized sexism, but there you have it. I was born in 1940, I do the best I can).

I’d almost given up until the adoption agency I’d hired called. Until I looked into a pair of eyes, one blue, one brown. Sad eyes, like Andrew’s.

Camden. My beautiful boy. The one good thing I’ve ever done.

Oh, my darling.

I can’t wait for you to meet him.

-R