Trouble in Mudbug (Ghost-in-Law, #1)(87)

“It’s apparently not too late.”

Helena grinned. “Why start now when the only people it would benefit are you and Luc?”

“Why indeed?” Maryse sighed. “Please just go away, Helena. I’ve got enough to think about without you mucking things up more.”

“Not until I have my say.”

“You’ve had your say for years, and it’s been nothing but aggravation and trouble. You’ve got five more minutes of my life, Helena, then I will pitch myself out that window.”

“Fair enough.” Helena took a deep breath. “The reason I implied that some of your life has been a waste wasn’t because the cure turned out to be a fake, and it certainly wasn’t because you married my useless son—that one is totally on Hank.”

“Then why…”

Helena gave her a sad smile. “It’s because in looking for the cure, you shut yourself away from the very society you purported to want to save. How do you even know people are worth saving anymore if you don’t get out of that swamp and meet any?”

Maryse started to fling back a retort but clamped her mouth shut, remembering that Sabine had said the same thing. “I meet people,” she said finally.

Helena snorted. “Yeah, that Dr. Do-Kiddies being one of them. You’ve locked yourself away from the world, Maryse, and I know you think you had a good reason to do so, but I’ll be the first to tell you that if you don’t change, you’ll regret it. I do.”

Maryse stared at her. “You regret your life? But you had everything…well, maybe not in the husband and kid department, but the money, the respect of the town.”

Helena waved one hand in dismissal. “Respect? Oh, please, I was tolerated by this town, and that was all my own fault. For all intents and purposes, I was the biggest bitch on the face of the Earth. Oh, I might have done a couple of good things with my money, but I never really lived myself. I even chose to marry Harold because I knew I’d never really love him so I wasn’t in danger of being hurt.”

“I don’t understand. Why would marriage have to hurt?”

Helena sighed. “That’s my own hang-up. My childhood was miserable. My father was a tyrant who barely tolerated girls and remained angry with my mother until the day he passed for producing a daughter rather than a son, then having the nerve to die while giving birth.”

Maryse stared at Helena in disbelief, unable to comprehend that degree of spite. Unable to imagine a childhood spent with a man who blamed his only child for the gender she’d been born with.

“He died when I was eight,” Helena continued, “and all I can remember is being relieved. Then guilty because I was relieved, you know?”

Maryse nodded. “I can see that.”

“I stayed fairly locked away from the world with a guardian, a tutor, and a live-in nanny. But when I turned twenty-one and gained control of my inheritance, that’s when the circus started. People who’d never spoken a word to me in my life practically lined up at the gate of my house with their hand out. I couldn’t even walk into town without someone hitting me up for money—business loans, medical bills, scholarships, it never seemed to end.”

Suddenly, Maryse understood. “So you became the biggest bitch in Mudbug because all anyone wanted from you was your money. And you funded the orphanage because you could relate to children that didn’t have anyone looking out for them.”

Helena nodded. “That was what I told myself—convinced myself was a good reason. But I was wrong, Maryse. Dead wrong.”

“How so?”

“There are good people in this town, people who wouldn’t have wanted a thing from me. People like your mother, and you, and Mildred.” She smiled. “And even your nutty best friend. By shutting myself off, I denied myself the pleasure of friendship, of knowing what it felt like to have someone care for you that wasn’t being paid to do it.”

She gave Maryse a hard stare. “My life could have been so much more, and it took dying to realize that. Don’t make the same mistakes I did, Maryse. This world would be a much better place with you in it.”

Maryse looked at Helena, decked out in blue jeans, the “dead people” T-shirt, and neon blue Nikes. A far cry from the unrelieved black she’d always worn. But it was too late to share her newfound style with anyone. Too late to leave a different mark on this Earth. Because for everyone but Maryse and Luc, Helena was already gone, and Maryse had stopped living so long ago that she’d been dead longer than Helena.

Maryse didn’t even try to hold in the tears as they rolled out of her eyes. She cried for Helena, the little lost girl and the older lost woman. She cried for herself—the life she’d never bothered to live and had almost lost—and the realization that she still had an opportunity to change it all before it was too late.

She looked up as Helena rose from the bed. “Where are you going?”

“My five minutes are up,” Helena said. “And I’ve probably given you enough to think about.” She walked to the door, then looked back. “There is one last thing.”

Maryse looked up at her. “What’s that?”

“When Johnny broke into your room, I ran out of the hotel desperate to find a way to help. Luc was sitting in a car across the street from the hotel, and if I had to guess, he’d been there for a while and wasn’t planning on moving.”