Kitabı oku: «Happily Never After», sayfa 2

“Close enough to hear the wedding bells at my back as I drove out of town.”

“My God. You mean you left her waiting at the altar?”

“No,” he said, still smiling. “Technically, that’s what jilted grooms do. I believe the bride waits in an anteroom off to the side until her husband-to-be shows up and takes his place.”

She hesitated. “But you didn’t. Show up, I mean.”

“No.”

The pink cheeks had faded, leaving behind an ivory pall of shock. It was finally sinking in. Her gaze scoured his face, as if she wondered where her charming Tom had gone.

He wouldn’t be receiving cards from this one for the next decade, that was sure. Good. One tearstained ghost, annually rattling the rusty chains of his ruined conscience, was enough for any man.

She swallowed. “But why? Why didn’t you go through with it?”

For the first time, he hesitated, too.

“Let’s just say…I decided I’d make a rotten husband.”

Amazingly, she balked at that. She wasn’t ready to let go of all her illusions—or her plans.

“Oh, Tom,” she said, reaching out with gentling fingers. “Honey. Don’t say—”

He backed up a quarter of an inch and restored his tilted, insulting smile. “Why not? It’s true—I’m not good husband material. I think I knew that the night I almost screwed her bridesmaid.”

A gasp. And then, as if by instinct, she reared back and slapped him.

It would have caused quite a stir, except that, at the exact same moment, Trent Saroyan shoved Coach O’Toole over the yacht’s elegant teak railing and into the Atlantic Ocean and, as Tom had predicted, all hell broke loose at the party.

THOUGH IT WAS ONLY about eleven-thirty, the darkness out here in the rural Georgia woods was cool, deep and damp, the kind of night that predicted pea-soup fog in the morning.

Kelly stood at her worktable, so absorbed in cutting a very expensive sheet of purple drapery glass that she listened to the muffled twig-cracking sound several seconds before she realized it was the wrong sound at the wrong time. Most of the little animals that shared these woods with her went to bed early—and few of them were capable of producing such big noises anyhow.

Carefully she put down the glass cutter and listened. The sounds continued, quite close now.

It was probably nothing. Maybe something bigger than usual, like a deer, had wandered into her yard.

Still, a shiver of fear shimmied through her.

She stared at the studio window. She couldn’t see anything, of course. Nothing but her own reflection. The old, warped glass distorted a lot, but she still saw a skinny, scruffy redhead with a sad, wide-eyed face.

A sudden heavy, muffled thud came from just beyond the back door.

What was wrong with her? She couldn’t just stand here, frozen. When she’d bought this old place for her stained-glass studio three months ago, her ex-husband Brian had warned that she’d be a nervous wreck way out here with no neighbors. She hadn’t been, though. She’d done fine until two nights ago, when Lily had…

When Lily had died.

In the long, painful forty-eight hours since then, Kelly had been reduced to a mass of singing nerves and emotional confusion. Tears were never more than one thought away. And fear, too. Not active terror, but a shadowy sense that the world was not benign, or even neutral, but was instead somehow malignant, just waiting for you to make a mistake it could exploit.

Like Lily, who’d rushed through life and had never wanted to stop for boring maintenance chores, like putting brake fluid in an aging car.

Or like Kelly, working alone late at night in a falling-down studio with no locks on the doors.

The doctor who’d seen Kelly that night had assured her this reaction would be quite normal. He had prescribed sleeping pills, which she didn’t take, because they seemed to open the floodgate to dreams. She turned to her work instead. She had several commissions to complete in the next weeks, and besides, the precision and focus required calmed her. The careful piecing together of small, seemingly random shapes, which came together to create a coherent whole, comforted her. Stained glass, she realized, was a pretty good analogy for life.

It had only been two days, she reminded herself. The funeral wasn’t even scheduled until the day after tomorrow. Eventually, she’d find her equilibrium again. For now, she just had to force herself to pretend a courage she didn’t really possess.

Though she’d been cutting without her work gloves on—one of her habitual sins—she quietly reached over, opened her drawer and slid her right hand into the soft, protective leather.

Then she picked up the freshly bisected sheet of glass, which came to a lethal point at the tip, and walked to the back of the studio.

She adjusted her grip on the glass. Her heart was beating so hard she could feel her pulse in her fingertips. Slowly, she opened the door….

And found herself looking into the shining black-marble eyes of a raccoon, who had somehow managed to climb to the very top of her three-tiered plant stand and was trying to reach the bird feeder that hung from the soffit.

The poor thing looked mortified, just as frozen into his awkward position as she had been moments earlier. He was huge, with a fat, sprawling belly that suggested this wasn’t his first late-night raid. The long gray streamer of moss that dangled from his ear proved he had tried other approaches first.

One of the branches of the nearest oak came within six feet of the bird feeder. That must have been the thud she’d heard. The little scavenger had jumped and missed.

His stricken gaze seemed to be asking her to pretend she didn’t see him. Smiling a little, she turned her head away. She wasn’t even sure raccoons ate seeds, but if he wanted them that badly, he could have them. She could refill the feeder for the birds in the morning.

It was time to go to bed. She put her hand on the doorknob.

Someone touched her shoulder.

Electric currents of panic shot, primal and unwilled, through every vein. Her right arm came up.

“Kelly?”

“Jacob?” The sudden withdrawal of adrenaline left her limbs weak. With a loud exhale, she slumped against the door, just under the bare bulb that served as an entry light.

“God, Jacob,” she breathed.

Thankfully she’d recognized the voice before she’d had time to slash out with the glass. As it was, she had already raised it to breast level.

Jacob Griggs, Lillith’s husband, looked down at her makeshift weapon, but it didn’t seem to frighten him. He seemed beyond caring that he’d come within six inches of being impaled on a dagger of cut glass.

“I scared you,” he said heavily. He looked up at her. “I’m sorry.”

He looked horrible. His face was gray, but his eyes were small and red-rimmed inside puffy circles of grief. His hair, normally so thick and shiny Lillith had rarely been able to keep her fingers out of it, seemed to have dulled and thinned almost overnight.

“It’s okay,” Kelly said. She took his arm, and realized it was shaking. Two days ago, Jacob had been a thirty-five-year-old lawyer who jogged and played racquetball and danced and gave great parties, and generally made every woman in Cathedral Cove jealous of Lillith. In forty-eight hours, he had turned into an old man.

But what was he doing here at nearly midnight? She looked into those eyes again and wondered if he even knew where he was.

“Jacob, do you want to come in?”

He just stared at her.

She squeezed his hand. “Did you need to talk?”

To her horror, he began to cry. His face twisted with the agony of trying to hold it back. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”

“It’s okay,” she said. She put her arm around his waist, though he was a full five inches taller. She wasn’t sure he wouldn’t collapse.

He was still repeating the same broken words. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” he moaned.

“What is it? What don’t you know, Jacob?”

He shook his head, back and forth, back and forth.

“I don’t know anything,” he said. His lips were dripping with tears. Finally he groaned and bent over double, his hands on his knees, like a runner pushed beyond endurance. “I don’t know how to live without her.”

CHAPTER THREE

IMOGENE MELLON HAD LONG AGO stopped believing in justice.

Maybe, she thought as she slowly descended Coeur Volé’s wide, twining staircase in the predawn hours, that had happened on her wedding night. The longest night of her life.

The night she’d discovered her handsome, socially prominent husband wasn’t normal.

Well, maybe she should choose another phrase. In Imogene’s youth “not normal” had been a euphemism for homosexual, and lots of young women had no doubt found themselves married to men who were merely looking for camouflage. Imogene believed she could have lived with that. At least then, maybe she and Adler might have learned to be friends.

Instead she had discovered that Adler liked women just fine. He specifically liked to hurt them. Nothing too dramatic. Nothing that left marks or required care. He’d called it “spicing things up.” He’d implied that if you peeked into any bedroom in town you’d find a few of these “toys.”

It made him extremely potent. By the end of her first week of marriage, Imogene was pregnant with Sebastian. A year later, Sophie was conceived. After that, Imogene took birth-control pills secretly for several years. When Adler found out, he broke her wrist, and two months later she was pregnant again, with Samantha.

Her beautiful babies, almost all of them conceived in undignified tableaux of sadism and pain. Still, the children should have been her consolation, her reward for enduring without complaint. And they were, for a while. Then, gradually, she’d begun to understand that they weren’t normal, either.

So much for justice.

She reached the wide staircase landing now, and, as she did almost every morning, she paused to appreciate the way the rising sun lit the huge stained-glass window. She liked to watch the figures come to life. It made her feel less alone in this haunted mansion.

Jean Laurent, the French artist Adler had hired, had done a magnificent job. The twenty-by-twelve window of St. George slaying the dragon had bold colors and great drama.

The dying dragon dominated the bottom third of the window, his sinuous body curled around the feet of the knight, his scales shining like peacock feathers. Up from the dragon, St. George rose like a human tower, tall and triumphant. He lifted his sword into the air, and on the tip of the sword he had impaled the dragon’s glowing red heart.

It was not any failing of Jean Laurent’s talent that caused Imogene to identify more with the dragon than with the resplendent knight. After all, from ground level, the dragon was mostly what one saw. And, naturally, Imogene couldn’t help comparing the handsome St. George to the handsome Adler Mellon. St. George seemed to be enjoying his kill a little too much.

Imogene sometimes wondered whether Jean Laurent might have liked the dragon best, as well. The artist had spent so much time and empathetic energy on the dragon’s face. Its eyes were almost human—green, gray, silver and blue pools of inarticulate misery.

It took about twenty minutes for the sun to climb high enough to illuminate the entire window, but Imogene always waited patiently for the transformation to complete itself. The heart, naturally, was the last to burst into brilliance. The red, jewel-like heart, so real it seemed to be still throbbing.

Imogene had asked Jean Laurent if the window had a name, like any other work of art. He had smiled and turned to Adler with a bow. Coeur Volé, Jean had said. Of course.

Another reason to think perhaps Jean had sympathized with the dragon.

Coeur Volé was French for Stolen Heart.

“Mom?” Samantha was standing about ten steps above her. She still wore her nightgown. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Imogene said. What a ridiculous question. Of course she wasn’t all right. She was dying. They had told her she had maybe a month or two, no longer. “I’m fine. Go back to bed.”

“Do you want some breakfast?”

“No.”

Still Samantha hesitated, her hand on the banister. “Do you want anything?”

I want to live.

And I want justice. For my own tormented body, and for the poisoned lives of my children.

She let her gaze leave the agonized eyes of the doomed dragon. She let it slide up the shining armor, through the muscular thighs and powerful shoulders, and into the lusty, inflamed eyes of St. George.

Yes, she thought, feeling something stir in her own loins, finally. This, here at the very end, was what she wanted.

I want, for once in my life, to be the one holding the sword.

TOM HAD A BAD TASTE in his mouth, and it wasn’t from the salmon salad, which he ordered every time he came to this restaurant and which had been as delicious as ever.

The taste came instead from the conversation, especially his part of it. His words had a sticky, artificial after-taste. The hard-to-digest flavor of manipulative half-truths and sugarcoated threats.

From the minute Coach Mick O’Toole had been fished out of the ocean, red-faced and spluttering and flailing his arms wildly, splashing everyone on the boat with salt water, Bailey Ormonde had made it clear that it would be Tom’s job to make sure the man didn’t sue.

Thus, this hastily arranged lunch with O’Toole, who hadn’t even had the sense to bring his own lawyer.

Tom knew the drill. There wasn’t much O’Toole could really do to hurt Saroyan, even if he did decide to sue. People like Saroyan paid big bucks to Ormonde, White and Murray to do what they euphemistically called “asset-protection planning.” That was Murray’s specialty, and he was good at it. Saroyan could pretty much get drunk and run down a convent full of nuns with his SUV, and, though he might do time in the slammer, he’d emerge as rich as ever.

One soggy football coach claiming whiplash didn’t have a chance. But he could annoy and embarrass Saroyan, who had a very thin skin. Saroyan didn’t want a nuisance lawsuit that would keep this unfortunate anecdote alive at every party for the next year. As he’d said during their meeting yesterday, “Goddamn it, boy, just make it go away.”

Considering that Saroyan was only about ten years older than Tom, and had earned every penny of his fortune buying up slums in Atlanta and then painting over the rotten buildings and raising the rents, that “boy” comment had annoyed the hell out of Tom.

Still…this was his job. Bailey always said lawyers were actually diplomats. More like gymnasts, was how Tom saw it. He’d just spent the past hour kissing O’Toole’s dumb ass while twisting his arms back and tying his hands.

He ordered coffee to help with the foul taste in his mouth.

“You know, I’m used to tempers,” O’Toole was saying. He adjusted his neck brace, which did look damn uncomfortable. “Try coaching a bunch of college kids, and you’ll learn about tempers, that’s for sure. The real problem with Saroyan is that he doesn’t understand football. And if he thinks he’s going to call the plays on the field, he’s got another think coming.”

Tom considered giving O’Toole a little friendly advice, but then he looked at that thick neck and those beady eyes, and he decided to have another sip of coffee instead.

“Saroyan didn’t even play football when he was at MGU. He was a math major.” O’Toole said math as if it were something ridiculous, like majoring in tiddlywinks. He didn’t seem to see the connection between Saroyan’s studies and his ability to buy and sell O’Toole ten times a day.

Tom drained his coffee and tilted his watch under the table. Fifteen more minutes of this, at least, before he could check his watch openly, gasp and imply that he’d been enjoying himself so much he’d lost track of the time.

Diplomat? Gymnast? Babysitter might be more accurate. Ego babysitter. He tried to tune out the little voice that said this was nothing a grown man should be doing for a living.

Suddenly, his cell phone began to vibrate. Apparently there was a God.

Giving O’Toole a “gosh, isn’t this annoying, just when we were having such a good time?” smile, Tom unclipped his phone and answered without even bothering to look at the caller ID. Ordinarily he screened, having just enough old girlfriends to be cautious, but right now he’d welcome a call from any one of them.

“This is Tom Beckham,” he said formally, already folding his napkin and crooking a finger to let the waiter know it was time for the check. Whoever really was on the other end of this telephone, as far as O’Toole was concerned, it was urgent firm business.

At first there was just silence. And then he heard a soft female voice.

“Tom?”

For about six tenths of a second he honestly didn’t recognize the voice. And then it hit him. Hit him hard.

It was Kelly.

An image rushed toward him, leapfrogging the years. An image of the two of them in a dark corner, laughing at first, and then touching, and then she was crying, and he was up against her, and she was kissing him and whispering his name, but crying, crying the whole time.

Her red-gold hair falling loose against the green satin of her dress, the fresh-apple smell of her, the salt of her tears on his lips, the insanity inside him.

“Tom? Are you there? It’s Kelly. Kelly Ralston…I mean Kelly Carpenter.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m here. What’s wrong?”

Now that his mind was working again, he understood that something must have happened. Something bad. She hadn’t called him in ten years, though at first he had deluded himself that she might. No one from the wedding party had ever called him, except Mr. Mellon, who had actually come out to Atlanta ready to beat Tom, he’d said, until he no longer knew his own name and had to be fed with a straw.

“I—I don’t know if you heard,” she said, her voice still somber and husky. He wondered if she’d been crying again. Who made her cry these days?

“Heard what?”

“About Lillith. Lillith Griggs. I mean, she became Lillith Griggs, you knew she and Jacob got married, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I knew that.” He and Jacob had been good friends back in law school. Jacob still kept in touch, still wrote now and then, though of course he didn’t admit that to Lillith, who had, like Kelly, been one of Sophie’s bridesmaids and therefore subscribed to the official position that Tom Beckham was scum. “What about Lillith?”

“She was in a car accident. Three days ago.”

“Is she all right?”

“No.” A wretched pause. “She was killed.”

The waiter came over then and held a check for Tom to sign. He scrawled something, almost glad of the distraction. He needed time to absorb the news.

He hadn’t known Lillith well, but she’d always seemed much more…alive than most people. She was always the one laughing, playing practical jokes like wearing stiletto heels to the rehearsal so that the lineup by height suddenly seemed all wrong. She was a beauty and a brain and a class clown all in one. What kind of automobile accident had been savage enough to extinguish all that?

“I’m sorry to hear it,” he said carefully, glancing over at O’Toole, who was tonguing around in his empty drink, trying to hook a piece of ice and suck any lingering vodka from its surface. O’Toole met Tom’s gaze over the glass and frowned, pointing at the telephone.

Tom covered the mouthpiece with his palm.

“We’re done here, O’Toole,” he said, though he knew that those four words might well undo all the goodwill he’d spent the past hour building.

O’Toole put his glass down slowly, giving Tom an incredulous look. “Damn right we are,” he said. He tossed his napkin on the table, scraped his chair back loudly and walked away.

“Tom, are you still there?”

Tom took his hand off the telephone. “Yes. Sorry. How is Jacob?”

“He’s a mess,” Kelly said. “That’s why I’m calling. The funeral is tomorrow, and he asked me to let you know. He hopes you can come. I do, too. He needs a friend…and you seem to be the one he wants.”

It was subtle, but he could hear how inexplicable she found that fact to be.

“Okay,” he said.

There was another pause. “You’ll come?” She must have been expecting an argument.

“Yes,” he said. “Tell him I’ll be there. What time is the funeral?”

“One. We’re all meeting at the house and riding together. His house.” She took an audible breath. “But Tom…if I tell him you’re coming, if I get his hopes up, and then you—”

“I’ll be there.” He heard the doubt quivering in her silence. He couldn’t blame her. She couldn’t know that, since he’d left Cathedral Cove, he had never made a promise he didn’t keep. Of course, he made damn few promises.

“Kelly, I’m telling you I will be there. Have I ever lied to you?”

“No,” she said slowly. “Not to me.”

“Then trust me,” he said, and in spite of himself a wry note crept in. He could feel his tilted smile nudging at his lips. But come on. Had anyone on this earth ever spoken a more ironic sentence? “I’ll be there.”

KELLY KNEW BETTER than to trust Tom Beckham, so she couldn’t understand why she was so upset when he didn’t show up at the funeral home, or at the graveside service.

She was just mad at herself, that was all. She should never have told Jacob that Tom was coming. He had kept glancing over his shoulder at the service, and now that they were back at home, every time the door opened he looked up expectantly.

She stood in the kitchen, carefully pulling the plastic wrap off plates of deviled eggs and pans of meat loaf, and trying not to feel a little angry with Jacob, too.

But darn it. He had friends, lots of them. People who really cared about him, people who filled his house and his refrigerator, people who called and stopped by, who prayed at his side and cried at his side and loved Lily almost as much as he did.

Why weren’t they enough? Why did he need Tom Beckham, too?

Why did anyone need Tom Beckham?

The door opened, and to Kelly’s surprise a lovely blonde walked in, dressed in the most elegant little black funeral dress she’d ever seen. It was Samantha Mellon, Sophie’s little sister.

“Hi, Kelly,” Samantha said softly, brushing her long, silky hair back behind her shoulder and smiling. “They told me you were in here. I thought maybe I could help?”

Kelly stuffed the plastic into the trash can, wiped her hands on a towel, and reached out to give Samantha a hello hug. It was very sweet of her to come—and probably somewhat risky. Over the years, her mother and brother had developed an intractably hostile attitude toward every one of the young men and women who had been in Sophie’s wedding party.

As best Kelly could understand, Mrs. Mellon and Sebastian felt that the bridesmaids and groomsmen had all abandoned Sophie after she’d been jilted. True friends would have stuck by her, defended her. If they had, Sophie might never have ended up in an institution.

Was that true? Kelly’s memory of that time was clouded with misery and guilt. It was true that the friendships had ended when the wedding fell apart, but whose choice had that been? Had Sophie avoided them because they reminded her of a day so horrible she couldn’t bear to relive it? Or had they avoided her, the way you might instinctively avoid someone whose luck seemed to have turned spectacularly bad?

Some of them had tried to make contact in the weeks after Tom disappeared, Kelly was sure of that. But Sophie hadn’t been willing. Or maybe she just hadn’t been ready.

Maybe they should have tried harder.

Kelly hadn’t been able to try at all. A huge wall stood between them. She always wondered if Sophie knew about the night that Kelly and Tom had…

Just as she’d always wondered whether that night had played a part in the tragedy that came next.

But there was no one to ask. Tom was gone, and, soon after, Sophie was lost to them, too.

Kelly and Samantha hadn’t seen much of each other through the years—things would always be too awkward for that. But Kelly was still fond of her.

Suddenly she remembered what Lillith had been saying right before the accident. That Sophie had been let out again.

“Sam, Sophie didn’t come with you, did she?”

Samantha’s gray-blue eyes widened. “Of course not. Sophie is—” She hesitated. “She’s still in North Carolina.”

In North Carolina. Is that where the newest mental-health facility was? Over the past decade, if the grapevine could be trusted, Sophie had been in and out of five or six different resident institutions.

So did that mean Lillith had been wrong? Did that mean the light in the tower window hadn’t been Sophie after all?

“She hasn’t come home? I heard that she had.”

“No, she’s not up to being on her own right now. The doctor said, with the anniversary coming up so soon…” Samantha looked perplexed. “Who told you she was?”

“I think Lillith had heard it somewhere.”

Samantha shook her head sadly. “The gossips must be at it again. I think the anniversary always stirs things up, don’t you? But frankly, this terrible accident would be so hard for her. Just this once, I’m glad she’s not here.”

Kelly reached out and touched Samantha’s hand. Poor Sam. Now that Sebastian had married and moved to Raleigh, Sam was living alone at Coeur Volé with their mother, who had never been a picnic but who had become even more eccentric through the years.

Sam looked amazingly like Sophie these days. All the Mellon siblings looked similar—the lush blond hair, the deep-set eyes, the sex appeal and the elegance. Sebastian and Sophie had often been mistaken for twins. They were only a year apart and they had an intimacy that seemed almost preternatural, the kind you sometimes do see in twins.

Samantha was five years younger, and it wasn’t until she grew up that the striking Mellon looks displayed themselves. Now the only real difference was in the eyes. Sophie’s and Sebastian’s were a dramatic peacock blue, and they sparkled with an essence of danger, a flash of the untamable. Sam’s eyes were light, and her gaze was gentle, almost humble.

It made Kelly’s heart ache to look at her. This was what Sophie should have been.

“Well, anyway, I’d love some help,” Kelly said. “So many people have brought food. He’ll never eat it all, so we might as well use it up today.”

Samantha nodded and began efficiently stacking small sandwiches on a large silver plate. “He seems very weak,” she said. “It’s so terrible. It’s obviously broken his heart.”

“Yes.” Kelly blinked back moisture. This wasn’t her tragedy. This wasn’t her day to cry. But it was hard. A week ago she’d been in this kitchen drinking coffee with Lily from these same cups. “I suppose time will help. It’s still so new.”

“When I talked to him just now, he told me he was waiting for Tom Beckham.” Sam looked over at Kelly somberly. “Is that true, or is it just wishful thinking? I didn’t think we’d ever see Tom in Cathedral Cove again.”

Kelly sighed and slid the rest of the potato salad into the refrigerator. “I honestly don’t know,” she said. “He asked me to call Tom, and I did. Tom promised he’d be here, but—”

Samantha smiled ruefully. “But historically Tom’s promises haven’t really been worth much.”

“Right. You wouldn’t believe how distant he sounded on the phone when I told him about Lillith.”

She didn’t mention that it had taken her two hours to get up the nerve to dial the number, and when he’d answered she’d found that she needed to sit down, because her legs wouldn’t hold her.

“Ten years,” she said. “We hadn’t exchanged a single word in ten years. And yet, throughout the call his voice was completely bland and impersonal. He might as well have been talking to his secretary.”

Samantha lifted one graceful shoulder philosophically, as if to say what did you expect?

Good question. It made Kelly feel ridiculous to admit that she had expected more. In the private photo album of her heart, Tom Beckham had been the most-often-relived memory, in spite of the ache it always brought. She had about a dozen pictures that never seemed to fade: Tom in the gardens of Coeur Volé, with roses behind him and the river at his feet; Tom dancing with Sophie, tall and handsome in his tuxedo, with Sophie’s silver dress flashing rainbows as she twirled under the chandelier; Tom turning to Kelly in the darkness, fierce and full of hunger…

She was a fool. While she’d been wistfully fingering those images, she’d assumed that he, too, took them out now and then and remembered. But apparently he’d long since thrown them away. As she should have.

“I heard that you were behind her when it happened,” Samantha said suddenly. “I heard you were with her when she died.”

Kelly looked up. “Yes.”

“That must have been awful. I’m so sorry. But at least—at least she wasn’t alone at the end.”

“Yes.” Kelly had thought of that, but she wondered how much comfort she had really been. Lillith had seemed dazed, already moving away from the blood and the fog and the hissing car. Her cold hand had not responded to Kelly’s touch. Kelly had been just inches away, but in every way that mattered, Lillith had died alone anyhow. Perhaps everyone did.

“Was she still conscious? Did she say anything?”

Kelly closed her eyes. “I’m sorry, Sam, but if I keep talking about this, I’m going to fall apart, and Jacob doesn’t need that today.” She picked up the plate of deviled eggs and handed it to the other woman. “Let’s get the food out there, okay?”

“Of course. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.” Samantha was embarrassed, her fair skin tinged with pink.

Kelly remembered how easy it used to be for Sophie to hurt Sam’s feelings. “Scram, brat,” Sophie would say, and Sam’s blue eyes would fill with tears. She had idolized her older siblings, and Sophie and Bastian had exploited that shamelessly.