The Winter Sister(93)

“This family is all that we are! You have never understood that, and that’s why you continue to waste your time working for an embarrassing salary at that hospital. You—”

“Tell him,” I said.

Ben and Will looked at me, and it was clear from their expressions that they had both forgotten I was there.

“Tell him why you didn’t want them to be together.” My voice was stiff as it scraped against the cold. “The real reason.”

Tommy laughed, a quick, satisfied jab of sound. “Guess you finally talked to your mother,” he said.

Will swept his eyes over my face, an incredulous look warping his features. Something inside me relished his surprise, the ways he was coming apart. His silver hair, previously slicked back, now fell across his forehead, and I stared at the bruise already coloring his jaw.

“You know?” he asked quietly. Then, with a surge of anger, he thundered, “She told you?”

“No,” I said. “Don’t worry. My mother kept your little secret, just like you made her believe she had to. I discovered it on my own. Last night.”

I turned to Ben, whose eyes were wide with an effort to understand. “I wanted to tell you,” I said to him. “Tonight. That’s why I came.”

Looking back at Will, I saw a tinge of fear tucked into the sneer in his lip.

“Tell him or I will,” I insisted—but still, he said nothing.

I took a deep breath. “Tell him what Persephone was to you,” I said. “Tell him how you had the right to take her life. Because that’s what you think, isn’t it? Your children are yours to do with as you wish. What’s a knife across a cheek, what are hands around a neck, if they’re not listening to you, not doing what you command?”

“I don’t—” Will sputtered. “I don’t know what your mother told you, but—”

“My mother told me nothing. You got what you wanted. Persephone never knew. Ben never knew. This town never knew. But that’s over now. Tell him why you did it. Tell him who Persephone was.”

I looked at Ben. His eyes were focused on the ground, shifting back and forth as if reading something off the pavement, but I could see in his face that he was piecing it together.

“No,” Ben said after a moment. “No, that . . .” He chuckled a little, but then grew instantly serious. “No.” He raised his eyes to stare at his father. “That can’t be true. Because if it were, you wouldn’t have kept that a secret—how could you have—when you saw we were—No. No way.”

But I could see in his eyes—which were everything and nothing like his father’s—that he knew it was true. It was on Will’s face, even as he seemed perched to deny it, and there was a part of Ben, I knew, that had always understood his father was capable of anything.

I walked away then, back up the driveway, and no one made a move to stop me. I could hear Will rushing to explain, to redefine—“As usual, you don’t understand, because you’ve never made a single sacrifice for this family. I couldn’t possibly tell you, because if I told you, then you’d tell her, and then everyone would . . .”—but his words quickly dissolved into static. I could feel myself beginning to buckle, and I knew I only had a couple more minutes before I completely broke apart.

It wasn’t until I reached for the door handle on the driver’s side of my car that I realized I was still holding the box Tommy had dropped on the driveway. I blinked at it, the loops of Mom’s handwriting as recognizable to me as Persephone’s or my own, then I took out the afghan and let the box tumble to the ground.

Wrapping the blanket around me, my face numb to what would have been the scratch of wool against my face, I opened my car door and slid inside. I could feel a sob building up inside me, ready to break the dam and let all my loss and grief and love and relief come flooding out, but I quickly swallowed it down. I had one more thing to do.

Pulling my phone from my pocket, I held Persephone’s afghan tightly in place with one hand, and I used the other to look up the number I needed. When I found it, I pressed the button that would connect the call.

Someone answered on the second ring.

“Spring Hill Police,” the dispatcher said.

“Hi.” My voice, I heard, was on the edge of caving in. “I need to speak to Detective Parker. I have important information about the death of Persephone O’Leary.”





29




Mom didn’t watch the news—didn’t subscribe to the paper, either—so she didn’t see the front-page story, the breaking news on every local channel: “Spring Hill mayor arrested, charged with murder.”

Will and Tommy had been taken away for questioning the night before, and I’d let Detective Parker drive me to the police station to make my statement. When we got out of the car, he ushered me to the same interview room I’d been in twice before. We sat down, he set up a recording device, held a pen over a notepad, and in a voice that sounded scuffed and skinned, I spoke.

Now, as I sat up in bed, groggy from a marathon stretch of what felt like blackout sleep, blinking at the diluted sunlight filtering through the blinds, I could barely remember what I’d said to him.

What I did remember was Parker’s somber expression when he came back into the room after having excused himself for several minutes. He sat down, leaned forward a little across the table, and clasped his hands together.