Wish You Were Gone(86)
Emma put her forehead on the steering wheel as more memories rushed back at her. Lizzie asking about the will. Wondering if there would be names named—whether the beneficiaries in the will would have to attend the reading. It had been a bit much, actually, now that she thought about it. Had Lizzie imagined that James might leave something to Willow?
Her throat closed over and she felt like she was choking. A horn honked and Emma looked up. Green light. She gasped in a breath and floored it. James screwing a child. Her mother, her friend, knowing about it. She didn’t know whether to be angry at Lizzie or ashamed. Why hadn’t she told Emma? Why hadn’t she stopped it?
She didn’t know what to think, what to do, what to say. She only knew she had to get to Lizzie. She had to find out whether Lizzie had known. But what if she didn’t know? What if it was all conjecture? Emma could be driving like a bat out of hell over to Lizzie’s house to tell her that her husband had taken advantage of Lizzie’s daughter.
This brought her foot slightly off the gas, but she kept driving anyway and soon she was there, pulling into the driveway, getting out of the car.
Emma staggered toward the house, eyes bleary, hair whipped sideways by the wind, still with no conceivable plan in mind. Lizzie swept out the front door with her bag, ready for a lovely spa weekend, her wild hair loose around her shoulders, her floral print suitcase bumping down the steps behind her. She took one look at Emma’s face and dropped everything.
“Emma? What’s wrong?”
“Did you know?” Emma blurted. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes.
Lizzie paled slightly. “Know what?”
“About Willow. And…” She swallowed hard, hand on her stomach. “James?”
Lizzie blinked about a thousand times. She put the suitcase down and raised her hands. “Emma, listen, I—”
“Oh, God. It’s true. They were sleeping together. Oh my God.” Emma wavered on her feet, but couldn’t go forward toward Lizzie or back toward her car. If she took a step, she’d go down. So she simply stood there and rocked back and forth like a boat on a wind-tossed sea.
Lizzie looked stricken. “Wait. What? No. No! Emma, no. Willow and James were not sleeping together!”
“I have emails, Lizzie! Willow was begging him to see her again. On the day he died! Begging. And you knew about it, didn’t you? All this time, you knew!”
“Emma, calm down. Just… take a breath and listen to me.” Lizzie was there. Right there. In front of her. Gathering up her hands.
“Willow was not sleeping with James. She was James’s daughter.”
KELSEY
Her mother had already left for Lizzie’s to pick her up and go to the spa, kissing Kelsey on the cheek, promising again to be back before her four o’clock audition so that she could take her. The woman just blindly trusted that neither of her kids would ever throw a party. Of course she thought that. A month and a half ago, neither of them would have ever considered it. Just imagine James Walsh stumbling home to find his kids doing whippets on the lawn with a bunch of half-in-the-bag minors. She could only imagine what that shit storm would have looked like. Would he have freaked out and told everyone to go home, or would he have grabbed a bottle out of Rico Thomas’s hands and pounded it? Hard to tell.
Still, she kind of couldn’t believe Hunter had said yes. Maybe he was trying to make it up to Willow after almost punching her in the face. In fact, maybe Willow had goaded him into almost punching her in the face so that Hunter would agree to the party out of guilt. It was a manipulation Kelsey could easily imagine Willow pulling off.
Whenever Kelsey thought about that day, taking Hunter to the nurse, helping him explain, she felt oddly gratified. Or was it vindicated? Because seeing him there, with his fist in the locker next to Willow’s huge eyes, she knew for the first time how Hunter felt. Whatever the DNA test said, he didn’t think of Willow as his sister. Because he never would have done that to Kelsey. Never in a million years. It made her feel powerful, knowing this. Like Willow couldn’t control her. Not anymore.
The other important takeaway from that day was that Willow hadn’t reported Hunter. She hadn’t told her mother or their mother. She’d kept his secret. Which meant that Willow, who Kelsey had previously believed to be strong and defiant and untouchable, actually had a weakness, and that weakness was Hunter. It was as if her entire worldview had changed in that one moment. If Willow wasn’t going to tell on them, then maybe Kelsey could stop being so damn nice.
Downstairs, people were beginning to arrive. Kelsey smoothed her hair and applied a bit of lip gloss, checking herself out in the mirror over her dresser. From this angle, she could see her bed and wondered if she should lock the door. The last thing she wanted was anyone fooling around in here, or going through her things. She dug the key out of her desk drawer and shoved it deep into her pocket, then clicked the lock and walked out. Hunter was just emerging from his own room. Downstairs, bass pounded through the surround-sound speakers and pool balls clacked. Willow greeted a newcomer with a shriek.
Kelsey’s pulse was all wrong. She could feel it in parts of herself where she’d never felt it before. In her face, between her toes. She and Hunter regarded each other for a long moment, then he started walking toward her and was about to slip past her down the stairs without a word.