The Lucky Ones(43)

“But why did he do it?” she asked. “Do you know? I never... I know I never did anything to hurt him.”

“Jealousy, I imagine,” Dr. Capello said. “He worshipped the ground Roland walked on and everyone knew you were his favorite.”

“I was?”

“Then and now, it seems.”

Allison glared at him. Dr. Capello raised his hand, wagged a finger.

“I see I hit a nerve,” he said. “When I was a surgeon, I hated hitting nerves. Now that I’m retired, I hit them on purpose.”

“Oliver,” Allison said, refusing to let him goad her into talking about Roland. “You really think he pushed me and called my aunt? Seriously?”

“I think that boy had motive, means and opportunity. And you better believe he was capable of it. You certainly wouldn’t have been the first child he’d hurt. He had problems even I couldn’t... I tried, though. I did try everything. That’s my one comfort about that boy is that I know I did everything I could for him. Sometimes you slay a dragon. Sometimes you cut off its head and three more grow in its place.”

“It was Oliver?”

Dr. Capello exhaled slowly and gave the tersest of nods.

Allison had to turn away from him to collect herself. The article on the wall in Dr. Capello’s office mentioned a boy he’d treated and fostered, one who had a tumor that grew back. Was that Oliver? It made so much sense.

“Doll?”

“I know this is going to sound awful,” she said, “but I feel like a hundred pound bird flew off my shoulder. I wish I’d known this years ago.” She turned back to him and gave him a trembling smile.

“I wish I could have told you,” Dr. Capello said. “And it doesn’t sound awful. It sounds human.”

Allison wanted to laugh in her happiness and relief, but contained herself for Dr. Capello’s sake. She knew. She finally knew what had happened to her. Oliver. Poor Oliver, she couldn’t even be angry at him. He’d been ill, like Dr. Capello’s grandparents. Not evil, but sick.

“Thank you for telling me,” she said.

“You’re welcome. But please, don’t say anything to the kids about this. They don’t know and it would upset them. Oliver went back to live with his family right after you left us,” Dr. Capello said. “I don’t want them blaming him for something he couldn’t help. And they were heartbroken when you left us.”

“Is that why you never told anyone about the phone call?”

Dr. Capello smiled and started walking again in the wet sand. In Roland’s bedside note he’d left her that morning, he’d joked there were “no secrets” in this house. In one day she’d discovered three—the phone call, Rachel and now Oliver attacking her.

“You don’t have children, right?” Dr. Capello asked.

“Not yet.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “You remember the day I picked you up at Whitney Allen’s group home?”

“Yeah, like yesterday,” Allison said. “Why?”

“You and another girl at the house had tussled. Or rather, she’d tussled with you and you’d gone running with your tail between your legs.”

“Yes, thank you very much for reminding me.”

He patted her face again.

“You poor little thing. You broke my heart the second I saw you. Red-cheeked and trying so hard not to cry. Miss Whitney called me to see if I could do anything for you. She said she needed a doctor to make a house call, but I knew she was hoping I’d take you home with me. Don’t be hurt by that. Whitney cared about you very much, but she had three other girls in the house—all of them older than you—and they had all finally started to get along. Then a little girl showed up who needed all of her attention and everything was chaos again. It’s not easy balancing the needs of multiple kids from different backgrounds. It’s like that old circus act—the man spinning the plates, keeping them up in the air, trying to let as few crash to the ground as possible. If I had told the kids that your fall wasn’t a fall, that there’d been a call to say there was a killer in the house...well, you can imagine what kind of chaos that would cause. I needed my kids to love each other and trust each other and trust me, too. Can you understand that?”

Allison swallowed a hard lump in her throat. She could hear the note of anguish in Dr. Capello’s voice, the note of pleading. He wanted her to understand the choice he’d made. And the thing was, she did.

“Makes sense,” she said. “If it had been Thora and not me who’d been pushed and we didn’t know who did it? I wouldn’t have slept for weeks. I would have been terrified I was next.”

“So you understand,” he said, nodding. “Oliver left right after you, and I decided to keep it quiet instead of stir up the kids. Please believe me, there hasn’t been a day that passed without me wondering if I did right by you. But I can see that you turned out better than I hoped.”

“I don’t know about that,” she said. She helped Dr. Capello take off his shoes and socks and then removed her own. “I’m not doing much with myself. Between jobs.”

“You know, a house on the ocean is a fine place to sit and think and figure out what you want to do with your life,” he said.

“You think so?”