by Hester Young
I lean against the rail of her hospital bed, half-wanting to touch her, empathizing with her loneliness in spite of myself. I can smell the flowers on her bedside table, their perfume thick and cloying. “Did you love him?”
She fixes her tired gaze on me. “Oh, honey. Love or desperation, what’s the difference? He was something to look forward to.” Her face crumples a little, remembering. “He had such big plans for us. It wasn’t right, and I never thought it was. I just didn’t know how to stop.”
“I found one of his letters,” I tell her. “He was asking you to run away with him.”
She smiles a little. “He started that as soon as he found out I was pregnant. He wanted me to take Gabriel and just leave. Start a family, the three of us. I knew it was more complicated than that, and I had three other children to think of. But we’d put aside some money every month, talk about how it was going to be, how we’d run off to Mexico where Neville couldn’t find us.” Hettie presses her cheek to the pillow, sad now. “Maddie and Jack used that money later to raise Gabriel.”
“Sean’s parents knew about the affair, then?”
“Oh, yes. Poor Maddie got stuck covering for us plenty of times. We scared her to death.”
I see now why Maddie and Jack were so against their son’s mystery woman—and how helpless they must have been to do anything. On the one hand, Maddie had the luxury of raising her beloved grandchild. On the other, Neville’s temper was widely known. Maddie had to have felt the danger her son was in. But what could she do? Refuse to help the pair, and risk Neville’s wrath?
“Did you consider going to Mexico?” Running away doesn’t strike me as the perfect solution, but years of sneaking around seem worse.
Hettie considers this. “It never seemed real to me,” she admits. “It was nice to talk about. Made me feel like . . . I had a choice. But it never seemed real.”
“Did Sean threaten to tell Neville?”
“No,” she says. “Sean wasn’t like that. He wanted me to leave for love, not fear. In the end, he told me to choose, now or never. And I was a coward. I chose never.”
“And that was in June, two months before Gabriel disappeared?”
“Yes.”
There’s just one gaping hole. If she didn’t try to leave Neville, and Sean didn’t spill the beans . . .
“How did Sean end up dead?”
I’m met with silence.
Nothing but her breathing. Ugly, shallow gulps for air, followed by a long, moaning sigh. “Because he came back,” she says. “The night he was going to leave. He came back to the house and tried to take Gabriel.”
“So you killed him?”
Hettie won’t look at me. She turns her head away. “God will judge me,” she says dully. “I’ve lived for thirty years knowing that. Believe me, I don’t ever forget.”
“But I don’t understand—”
She holds up a trembling hand, warding me off. “Please. It was a horrible thing, and I’d undo it if I could. But don’t you understand? I had to protect my son. Let it be.”
You fool. Did you really think you could reclaim your lost son without also accepting responsibility for what happened to his father? But killing Sean isn’t the worst of her crimes, not in my book.
“How could you do it?” I ask. “Just—give your child away?”
“He’s safe,” she says simply. “When he was with me, I always had to worry. What if Neville found out? What if—I don’t know—there was a blood test and it came out that Gabriel wasn’t his? My husband might’ve killed him. Killed us both.”
The child’s true mother was willing to give up her baby to protect him.
Privately, I wonder how much of Hettie’s decision was fueled by self-interest versus motherly sacrifice, but I keep my thoughts to myself.
Hettie senses she hasn’t won me over. “I did the right thing,” she insists. “Look at him. He’s safe and he’s happy. You’ve seen my children. Andre and the girls, do they seem happy to you?” She answers her own question. “No. Nothing’s enough for them. But Gabriel . . . he’s different. Comfortable in his skin.”
She has a point, but I’m not sure I find it powerful enough to justify her entire betrayal, the hell she put her husband through.
Hettie’s face softens. “You love my son, don’t you?”
“I think so.” I feel myself flushing as I remember the horrible things I suspected Noah of just an hour before.
“He wouldn’t be the man you love if he had stayed.”
That one thing I do believe. Suddenly she’s gasping for air again, her face twisting up in agony. I can’t do this to her any longer.
“I’ll send the nurse in,” I tell her. “You look like you could use some painkillers.”
“Wait.” Her voice is raspy and pathetic. “Tell Gabriel to come back. Tell him to forgive me. Please. I don’t want to be alone.”
The selfishness of this request infuriates me. She has no regard for Noah’s feelings in any of this, no thought for how completely she has damaged his sense of self. I thought my own mother took the cake in the Shitty Mom department, but I’m starting to think Hettie wins. At least when my mother left, she stayed away instead of luring me back under false pretenses. The whole garden project was obviously a sham from the get-go, one Hettie concocted to draw her son back to Evangeline. And even now that she’s revealed the truth to Noah, she’s cherry-picking facts. She wants all the warm fuzzies of motherhood minus any culpability for what happened to Sean.
I’m not inclined to plead her case with Noah no matter how she begs, but one indisputable fact renders the point moot anyway.
“Sorry.” I don’t look back, don’t let her see the hurt on my face. “I can’t tell him anything when I don’t know where he is.”
32.
I want to find him. Of course I do. I stand in Evangeline’s grand foyer, trying to plan my next move. I can only imagine what Noah must be feeling. Here he’s facing what may be the most devastating news of his life—that his mother did not die but willingly gave him up, that his grandparents lied, that the person he believed himself to be is a fabrication—and he’s facing it alone. And he still doesn’t have the whole story. He doesn’t know that his father is dead. That Hettie is responsible.
If I’m to believe Hettie’s version of events, then the man Noah thought abandoned him died trying to get him back. But there are problems with that story. Detective Minot said Sean was shot at least once from behind, a bullet in the back of his skull. There’s no way she shot him inside the house—the forensics team would’ve discovered traces of blood during the search for Gabriel. Did Hettie really have time to run into the study, retrieve one of Neville’s guns from the safe, and run outside to shoot him? A gun screams premeditation, not “Oh my gosh, this guy is running off with my kid.” I try to envision the scene, her pleading with Sean to leave their son behind, Sean’s refusal. Surely Gabriel would’ve showed signs of emotional trauma if he’d witnessed someone getting shot, yet no one reported any changes in his behavior that summer. And if Hettie killed Sean to keep him from taking Gabriel, why was she suddenly willing to part with her child in August, ready to foist him off on Maddie and Jack?
This isn’t adding up.
I pace the foyer, idly glancing at the stiff artwork. How strange that Noah, so easygoing and casual, spent his first years living amidst all this stylish formality. Noah, in his jeans and cowboy boots, was once a longish-haired toddler in polo shirts and boat shoes.
Hettie’s right. He wouldn’t be the man he is if she hadn’t given him up. And I’m pretty sure I want to be with that man, if only I can track him down.
I don’t know what Noah’s been up to in the forty-eight hours since he dropped me off at Evangeline, but I no longer believe it had anything to do with his landscaping work. If I were Noah, grappling with the disturbing possibility that I m
ight not be the person I’ve always thought, what would I do? Investigate. Research. Look for holes in the story that Maddie and Jack told all these years. Locate whatever information I could on Violet Johnson. If Hettie’s telling the truth, and he came to her this morning asking for proof of his identity, then he probably hasn’t found any answers. Which means he hasn’t found anything to disprove her claims, either.
So where might he be? Hunting down Violet’s birth certificate at the Department of Vital Records? Scouring every ancestry site on the Internet? Or perhaps he’s retreated into his own mental man cave to work through it all. He could’ve gone back to Texas.
Without me.
I can only guess how the timing of Hettie’s confession impacted Noah’s dealings with me. Frankly, I don’t know how he made it through our Mardi Gras trip with something like that kicking around his brain. Denial, I suppose. The trip was probably a welcome distraction. Maybe the whole Run Away with Charlie plan was just a way to avoid a truth he wasn’t yet ready for. If that’s the case, so be it. But I have a right to hear it from him.
I remind myself that he knows where I am. Hettie must have smoothed things over with security if he came by this morning. I just need to wait. When he wants to see you, he’ll come.
And if he doesn’t?
I stop in front of the study. The door is shut, but police tape no longer blocks off the room. The crime scene unit must have finished their work yesterday. I’m glad that Noah no longer appears responsible for Jules’s overdose, but I do feel a twinge of sadness about the suicide attempt. Mostly on behalf of Andre, whose open anguish following the incident has invited widespread speculation about their relationship.
Was Jules acting out of despair or spite? I wonder. Punishing Andre for some real or imagined crime? Maybe Jules was sick of being kept at arm’s length, pretending to be what he was not. I imagine him downing a string of tequila sunrises, his bottle of Ambien dissolved into the liquor, anticipating Andre’s torment with bleak satisfaction.
“You’re still here.”
Speak of the devil. I turn and find an unshaven and disheveled Andre standing by the front door. He’s wearing a long, rumpled coat and exquisite leather gloves that were probably custom-made in Italy. I suspect he’s been with Jules all night at the hospital, keeping a bedside vigil.
“I heard you were leaving,” he says. “Glad I caught you.”
He looks awful. I wonder how long it’s been since he’s showered. “How’s Jules?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Not alive, not dead. The same.” He regards me with bloodshot eyes. “Were you really going to leave without saying good-bye?”
The short answer: yes. Andre hasn’t been a factor in my plans. “I didn’t want to bother you. I figured you had enough on your plate right now.”
He laughs, a thin, mirthless sound. “Yes, I’d say my plate’s full. Very full.” He takes a few steps closer, scrutinizing me. It occurs to me that I, too, probably look like hell. “What are you doing in the house? No one’s around but my mother.”
“I know.” I’m too distraught to lie, and he looks like he has a pretty good idea of what I’ve been up to. “I just spoke with her.”
“About what? You know she’s not supposed to be receiving visitors.” His voice is shrill and accusatory.
I’d like to cut him some slack—this can’t be an easy time for him—but I no longer trust Andre. However candid he may have appeared, he’s been holding out on me, trying to feel out how much I know and reporting back to his mother. Every interaction we’ve had has been a careful dance, me trying to draw out the truth and him deflecting, misdirecting. He once accused me of being an undercover FBI agent, and maybe that was the real Andre. Paranoid.
“I just—wanted to thank your mother for hosting me.” I can’t quite meet his eyes. Hopefully we can avoid a scene; he looks ready to detonate. “We chatted a bit.”
“What did she tell you?” From the tone of his voice, he’s having none of it.
I give up. “Everything, I guess.” I sigh. “Pretty much everything.”
Andre runs his hand through his hair and begins pacing the foyer. “I knew she would.” He shakes his head bitterly. “What does she care? She’s got nothing left to lose.”
I almost ask him what he thinks he has to lose, but at this point, all I want is to find Noah. “It’s not worth getting mad over, Andre. I’d already worked most of it out for myself.”
“Oh?” He jams his hands into his coat pockets. “How’s that?”
“I found the letter Sean wrote your mother. From the day he died.”
The blood leaves his face. He knows exactly what letter I’m talking about. “Where did—have you told anyone?”
“No,” I tell him. “And I have no desire to.”
“Where’s the letter now?” Andre presses me.
From his look of agitation, I’m onto something. “It’s back in the guest cottage,” I say slowly.
“Then we’ll go get it. I want it back.”
I wonder what horse Andre has in this race. He’s clearly alarmed by his mother’s telling me the truth, and he’s threatened by the content of Sean’s letter. But what is he so afraid of? Bad press for the family and its hotel business? I’ve always had the sense that he tended to the business out of duty, not love. Does he think some prosecutor will throw obstruction-of-justice charges at him thirty years after the fact? I’m no lawyer, but I thought the statute of limitations expired on everything except murder. Does Andre’s guilt run deeper than I’ve been led to believe?
I reevaluate. Maybe Hettie didn’t tell me everything. She accepted blame for Sean’s death—God will judge me, she said—but she never actually confessed to killing him. Maybe she didn’t. She told me plainly that she had to protect her son. Which son?
From its contents, I mistakenly assumed Sean’s letter was meant for Andre, not Hettie. Could Andre have made the same mistake? He had, by his own admission, a crush on Sean. Even if Sean gave him the book of sonnets quite innocently, the gesture could have been misconstrued as romantic. And to later find that letter . . . I imagine him reading Sean’s words, thrilled at the idea that someone reciprocated his feelings, that someone saw who he was and accepted him. If he was unaware of Hettie and Sean’s relationship, it would’ve been so easy to read those words and see what he wanted to see: Sean inviting him to escape Neville and start a new life. And Andre might’ve found this a much more attractive proposition than Hettie did.
I look at the trim, gray-haired man before me. He’s wild-eyed and wrecked, totally desperate to bury any voices from his past—he has enough to contend with in his present. It’s easy to envision him as a teenager, caught between a burning need for parental approval and the fantasy of leaving it all behind. He was young. In love. Of course he would’ve chosen Sean.
“Did you go to meet him that night?” I ask softly. It’s starting to make sense now. Why Andre’s running scared. Why Hettie blames herself. “Did you get Sean’s letter and then go to meet him?”
Andre squeezes his eyes shut and takes a few deep breaths, as if practicing some anxiety management technique. “I just want it back,” he says. “It’s not yours. You have no right to it.”
“It’s not yours either,” I say. “You know that letter was for your mother.”
He clutches his stomach like he might throw up. “Thirty years,” he whispers, “and suddenly she can’t keep her damn mouth shut.”
“I take it you didn’t know they were involved until that night.”
He shakes his head, mute.
“Was she with him? Did you find them together?”
“No.” He slumps back against the wall. “She never got the letter. He was waiting for her at the sugar mill, but I showed up instead.” He still hasn’t removed his coat and gloves. There’s something pathetic in the way he hovers around the foyer, like a strang
er lingering in someone else’s home.
“Where’d you get the gun?”
“It was my father’s. He was home that night, that’s why I brought the gun. I thought . . . if he found out, if he tried to stop me from going . . .” His blue eyes fill with tears, but he’s smiling. A painful smile. “It’s funny, isn’t it? I was willing to leave everything for him.”
“So you showed up, ready to go, and what? He told you he was in love with your mother?”
Andre glances at the staircase. “My mother’s nurse,” he says in a low voice. “Can she hear all this?”
“It’s that red-haired guy’s shift,” I tell him. “He can’t hear a damn thing with his iPod always in, I promise you.”
“Okay.” Andre swallows, resolved, I guess, to finally come out with it. “It was late. My parents had gone to bed. I waited outside the house in my car. Had my suitcases packed and everything. The gun was in my pocket, just in case.”
“In case your dad showed up.”
Even indoors, wearing a coat, Andre seems cold. He hugs himself, shivering. “Sean came out of the house carrying Gabriel and started to drive away. I was confused, but I followed him to the sugar mill in my car.”
So this part of Hettie’s story was accurate: Sean returned for his child. He didn’t want to leave Noah behind.
“When I got out of the car, he seemed . . . strange. I asked if he was taking Gabriel, and he said yes. I asked why, and he told me to go home. ‘I got your letter,’ I said. ‘I’m going with you.’”
“So he told you the truth.” I can almost understand where Andre was coming from when he killed Sean. I can almost excuse it.
“He told me the truth. That he’d been fucking my mother for years. That Gabriel was his.”
“And you shot him?”
Andre stares straight ahead, trancelike, as he walks me through it. “I stood there in front of his car. Crying. Gabriel was still asleep in the backseat. Sean told me to get out of his way, but I didn’t move. I couldn’t, I just . . . I’d pinned all my hopes to him. There was nowhere else to go. I asked if he would take me anyway.” He drags a hand across his forehead. “I didn’t mean anything by it. It was clear by that point, any feelings—they were all in my head. But I wanted to get away so badly.”
