The Moment of Truth

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  “What made you apply to Montford?”

  It was just talk. A normal conversation between fellow students who’d just rescued a dog.

  And it was excruciating as far as Dana was concerned—the explaining, answering to and thinking about her past. Shelter Valley represented a new start for her. A life where she could just be Dana Harris, a person who wasn’t second-best, who didn’t wear Cinderella clothes and live a Cinderella life. A woman who’d accepted a scholarship she hadn’t applied for, to embark on a life she hadn’t planned on, because she hadn’t been able to bear the thought of doing as her father had demanded and marry a man she didn’t love.

  But then, Daniel Harris, for whom she’d been named, the man she’d always called “Dad” and thought was her biological father, wasn’t really her father. And no matter how far away she roamed, or how hard she tried to be good enough, that fact was never going to change.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “YOUR MOM AND DAD are well and send their love.” Sitting in the chair opposite Michelle, a chair identical to hers except for the restraints, Josh looked from the still-beautiful woman to the day’s fresh flowers in the vase on the coffee table directly in front of them. He’d replaced yesterday’s bouquet. Opened the sheers that had been pulled for the night across the window opposite them, giving Michelle a skyline view of the harbor she loved.

  He’d turned on the sixty-inch flat-screen television hanging on the wall next to the window. And, when she’d frowned, turned it back off again, although he knew her frown probably had nothing to do with the TV.

  Michelle comprehended little, if any, of what went on around her. According to her doctors, frowning—and smiling, too—were simple reflexes that came and went. Sometimes her eyes filled with tears—a physiological reaction to medication, dry eyes or something in the air. Her gaze would land on something sometimes, but there was no connection between visual stimulation and a thought process that would translate the view. Permanent vegetative state was the diagnosis—and it was the same according to all four specialists Josh and her family had called in from around the world to see to her. She couldn’t move of her own volition. Or speak. Or even think.

  But somehow she breathed on her own. And as long as that was the case, Josh’s inheritance would be providing for her care. Every dime of it. From a trust account he’d established in her name.

  Her parents had more than enough wealth to care for her. Insurance covered basic expenses. But as far as Josh was concerned, his money would be dirty if he spent it on himself.

  “I’m going away, Michelle.” He said what he’d come to say. “I’m on my way out of town now.” He’d waited until nightfall so there’d be less traffic.

  It seemed fitting that he’d slink away into the night.

  Leaning forward, he grabbed a tissue from the box beside her and wiped a drop of drool from the side of her mouth, catching it before it could roll down her chin. “I don’t know when I’ll be back,” he told her. It wasn’t right, him leaving her like this. But staying wasn’t right, either. His presence in town was hurting his father’s business, creating strife for the Wellingtons and embarrassing his mother’s family, the Montfords. The Montfords had worked hard to rebuild their reputation of decorum after his distant uncle’s scandalous marriage and desertion many decades before. They’d dedicated all the decades since to reestablishing themselves as a family of conservative do-gooders, whose purpose on earth was to contribute to and better the world and whose behavior was always above reproach.

  Josh’s behavior, his selfishness and lack of awareness, had caused a scandal.

  So he’d had to choose between further hurting Michelle, who, by all accounts had no idea he was even sitting there speaking with her, and hurting all of the people who loved him, who’d supported him and given him everything he had. People whom he’d taken completely for granted. People who still had work to do and much to contribute, to better the world in which they lived.

  The choice had been a no-win. Hell. Just like the life his years of cavalier unawareness had created for him.

  “It’s taken the Montfords three generations to gain back the respect my great-great-uncle lost,” he told Michelle, something he never would have mentioned to her in the past. Truth be told, he couldn’t remember ever having a meaningful conversation with her, period.

  Even his marriage proposal had been made on the fly. They’d been skydiving that day. He’d been filled with the adrenaline of having conquered the air—coupled with his newly resolved determination that it was time for him to marry. His marriage would be good for the family name. Good for business.

  And because, in all of his travels across the United States and abroad, he’d never found that one woman who stood out above the rest, he’d chosen the most beautiful one he knew.

  One he’d dated on and off for years.

  “Let’s get married,” he’d blurted over a glass of celebratory champagne in the back of the family limo on the way home from the airfield.

  He would have driven his Mercedes convertible but hadn’t wanted to stay sober after the great event....

  The sky outside Michelle’s window was a purplish hue, aglow from the lights of the harbor. Earlier that day, when he’d left his mother’s house, that sky had been a vivid blue. As blue as it had been the day, two years before when, without hesitation, Michelle had accepted his proposal. And thrown her arms around him, confessing her undying love for him.

  He’d had no idea she’d cared so much. Then, or after.

  He was one of the blessed ones. The privileged. He was too busy to care....

  Busy upholding his reputation, keeping up appearances, studying and, later, working even harder than his ancestors had in order to ensure the continuation of the family name and financial success. And when his work was done, he’d been busy partying.

  “My great-uncle a few times removed, Sam Montford, married a black woman and brought her to live in the family mansion downtown,” he told Michelle. Back then, the scandal had nearly ruined the Montfords. It was old history now, something people knew but didn’t talk about much anymore.

  “And if that wasn’t bad enough,” he continued softly, “he fathered a child with her who was to be raised among the privileged society kids, equal to them.”

  Michelle’s expressionless face gave proof to the seriousness of her condition. If she’d had any mental cognition at all, she’d have shuddered at that one. Not because of the child’s mixed race, but because of the societal scandal such an act would have caused back in his great-great-uncle’s day.

  People of his family’s social class absolutely did not cause scandal. At any cost. To the Montfords and Wellingtons, Redmonds and people like them, appearances and reputations were every bit as valuable as their financial net worth. Sometimes more so.

  In today’s world, his distant uncle’s actions might have produced a raised eyebrow in their conservative society, but generations ago, mixed marriages, particularly among the elite, were unheard of. Blasphemous.

  Michelle offered him a steady stream of drool.

  “Hard to believe, isn’t it?” he asked, wiping her chin and slowly running one finger down Michelle’s linen-clad knee.

  Her therapist had already been there that day, and would be in again before bedtime, to massage every muscle in her body and move her limbs, to keep her as toned as they could for as long as they could.

  Because he’d deemed it so. He wanted her to be as comfortable as she could be.

  And the irony was not lost on him. If he’d paid even a hundredth of the attention to Michelle then that he did now, none of this would have happened. It was an inarguable fact—and the reason Josh took full blame for the probable attempted suicide that had left Michelle in her current state.

  What kind of fool left his deliriously drunk fiancée alone to sle
ep it off while he went back to party some more? True, he hadn’t known that Michelle had consumed enough liquor to make alcohol poisoning a risk. He hadn’t even paid enough attention to know she had a low tolerance for alcohol. He knew she drank with the rest of them; he hadn’t bothered to notice how much. Or, in her case, how little. As her future husband, he should have noticed. And if he’d stayed with her that night, tended to her, paid even a little bit of attention to the symptoms of alcohol poisoning that she’d already been exhibiting, he could probably have saved her.

  “Remember that New Year’s party we went to at the Montford mansion the year I turned twenty-one?”

  He’d been there with a blonde whose name he couldn’t remember—someone he’d brought home from Harvard to show his father he was his own man. Another woman he’d treated kindly but had callously used for his own end. Michelle had had a date, too—a pompous ass a few years older than them who’d looked down his nose at all the alumni from their elite high school. Forty-eight of the fifty kids he’d graduated with had been there. And many from Michelle’s class, two years behind his, had attended, as well.

  “A bunch of us got drunk and my date threw up on the porch steps,” Josh continued, sparing himself nothing—telling her something she already knew. “Thank goodness it was the back porch steps and Bart liked us enough to get it cleaned up before anyone found out.”

  Bart—his maternal grandfather’s live-in help. A man who’d run the Montford city estate since before Josh had been born.

  Josh had escaped besmirching the Montford name that time. But he hadn’t learned his lesson.

  Michelle’s head tipped forward, and with his fingers around her chin as he’d been shown, Josh righted her. And rubbed her cheek.

  On some level, he told himself, she had to know that he was there. That she was surrounded by tenderness. By anything and everything money could provide.

  She had to know that the only thing she’d wanted—his attention—was hers.

  “One day when Sam Montford was away from the mansion on business, his wife and baby went out and found a lynch mob waiting for them on the front steps outside their home,” he said, looking out in the distance, to the harbor seventeen stories down and about a mile over from them. Unlike his shame of ten years ago, that long-ago event had taken place on the front porch—not the back.

  “The mob killed them both,” he said evenly, hardly feeling anything at all. Just like Michelle. They were alike in that way. Dead to any kind of real living. “Hard to picture Boston’s elite in any kind of a mob, isn’t it?” he said. “But things were more primitive then. People took matters into their own hands. And didn’t stand calmly by when others tried to change the rules by which they lived.”

  Michelle’s gaze was turned on him and his breath caught in his throat. Until he remembered that he’d repositioned her head.

  “But to kill a woman and an innocent baby...”

  If only Michelle would recover, even a little bit, if he could talk to her, find out what she’d been thinking the night she’d nearly drunk herself to death, to know for sure that he’d been the reason she’d consumed such a dangerous level of alcohol the night of their prewedding party.

  He hadn’t loved her. Her heart was breaking.

  And he’d been too self-absorbed to notice that anything was wrong.

  Alcohol poisoning, loss of oxygen and a careless fiancé had all contributed to Michelle’s predicament. He’d been the only one who could have saved her.

  “When his wife and baby were killed, Sam Montford left town,” he blurted. “He took up residence with an Indian tribe out west. And later, after marrying the daughter of a missionary he met on the reservation, he founded a little town in the middle of the Arizona desert.”

  It had just been in the past couple of years that his mother had developed an interest in genealogy, helped along by the readily available resources on the internet. That research infused her with the need to get to know her distant relatives—relatives she’d heard about but never met. Being able to look them up, learn details of their lives, made them seem real to her, although she hadn’t contacted any of them yet. The two branches of the family had not been in touch since old Sam Montford left Boston. After his sojourn with the Indians, he’d founded Shelter Valley. But he’d never reconnected with the Boston part of his family.

  While researching her family tree, Josh’s mom had discovered the names of cousins several times removed, as well as birth dates, marriages and deaths. The need to meet them intensified.

  And because Josh had agreed to make his home there, she’d finally given her blessing to his plan to move away—at least for a while—rather than travel for an extended period until the news of Michelle’s tragedy and his subsequent broken engagement died down a bit. “It’s a town that welcomes losers,” he added.

  Not quite what his mother had said. She had framed it as a town that would welcome him.

  Because she thought he was going to arrive in town a Montford. Or even a Redmond. She thought he’d been in touch with the newfound—and long-estranged—branch of her family. He’d never told her so. It was just what she’d have done—and expected him to do.

  He wasn’t moving to Shelter Valley as a Montford.

  He was going as Josh. To accept the junior-level position his Harvard business degree had qualified him to have in the university’s business operations office.

  “That’s where I’m going, sweetie,” he said. “Out to Shelter Valley, Arizona.”

  He wiped away more saliva. And could hardly remember what it had felt like to kiss her lips. Wished they stood out from all of the other lips he’d kissed.

  Or even that he could remember the last time he’d kissed her.

  “We didn’t get to the altar, to exchange our vows.” He bowed his head. “But I’m promising something to you now. I will change my ways, become more aware of those around me and do what I can to make this world a better place.”

  He wasn’t actually sure if Michelle was into the whole bettering the world thing as much as the Montfords were. They’d never really gotten around to talking about it. Still, she’d been involved in charity work. He wasn’t sure how much. But during their two-year engagement, he’d accompanied her to several black-tie affairs for different causes.

  He’d written generous checks.

  And spent most of the evenings making business contacts. Or doing other things like planning the mountain-climbing expedition he and several of his friends had taken over Christmas the previous year.

  “I’ve got a few thousand dollars with me to get started,” he told her. “I sold the Mercedes. And the 4x4. I bought a used SUV with a hitch and loaded a trailer with stuff, and that’s all I’m taking. The rest of the stuff I sold with the condo, and that money went into your trust, too. My monthly stipend will also go into the trust. It’s there for as long as you need it.

  “My mother’s agreed, for the time being, not to get involved,” he said, thinking of the days ahead. “I told her I’d handle the first contact with the Arizona Montfords on my own—or I wouldn’t go. If she interferes with my life while I’m there, I’ll just move on. The point is for me to get away from here. It doesn’t matter where. She’s the one who wants me in Shelter Valley, and this is the only way I’ll do it.” There wasn’t going to be any big family reunion in the near future.

  What his mother didn’t know was that his “visit” with the Montfords was going to be short and sweet. He wasn’t one of them.

  He was starting a new life. Not going on vacation. He was going to live like a regular guy. One who had to work and sweat and save. One who was humbled enough to pay attention to the people around him. He couldn’t do that if his old life followed him. Making things easy for him.

  “Sweetie? Michelle? Is there anything I can do, or say, anything that...”


  His voice broke. Looking down, Josh breathed and waited for the emotion to pass. It always did. One of the many things he’d learned over the past couple of months.

  He hadn’t meant anyone any harm. Hadn’t meant to ignore the needs of those around him. He just hadn’t noticed.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Redmond, I didn’t realize you were here. I’ll come back later....”

  Sara, one of the three full-time caregivers he employed to see that Michelle had everything she could possibly need, stepped back through the archway leading to Michelle’s bedroom.

  “No, it’s okay, Sara,” he said, standing. “You can come in. I was just leaving.”

  “I hear you’re leaving town, that you won’t be coming by here anymore,” the middle-aged widow said. He knew Sara best. She lived in the suite with Michelle.

  “That’s right.” She could castigate him for his callousness. All Michelle had left was his visits. Her parents couldn’t bear to come. Couldn’t bear to see her this way.

  And her sisters, all their friends...they considered Michelle dead and buried.

  But Michelle didn’t need him there as much as the rest of them, her family included, needed him gone.

  “It’s about time,” Sara said, smiling at him with a warmth he wasn’t used to seeing. People in his world banked their emotions, their expressions, showing the world a blankness that preserved their ability to walk in and out of rooms, do the business they’d come to do, without drama.

  Or shame.

  Without anyone getting one up on them—or being able to manipulate them.

  Their walls protected their reputations.

  And they protected the money.

  The gray-haired woman moved quietly to Michelle’s side, running her fingers tenderly through the young woman’s hair. “We’ll be just fine without you,” she said. “Missy here has no idea you’re killing yourself over something you didn’t do. She ordered those drinks and she drank them. You wasn’t even in the same room as her. And she gets no benefit from these visits. But you...you’ve got a whole life to live. Things to do and people to help. It’s time for you to let go.”