The Watcher Girl(65)

“She told me you hid it from her, and after you promised to get rid of it, you kept it anyway.”

“That’s true.” His mouth flattens. “But it wasn’t like that. I’ve always been . . . sentimental.”

“I know you are.”

“I’ve got boxes of stuff from elementary school, junior high . . .” He lifts his beer, gesturing behind him. “I hold on to everything. Everything that makes me me.”

“I remember.” Still, I can’t imagine it’d be easy for a wife to come across something like that.

“She didn’t believe me when I said I was over you,” he says. “And I guess, why would she? That box of old stuff was pretty damning. Caused quite the rift, especially the second time she found it. She actually made me burn it.”

“I know. And she said you wept.”

His brows meet. “I can be a sappy son of a bitch sometimes, but believe me when I say I didn’t shed a tear. Maybe she saw what she wanted to see—or what she needed to see. She never brought you up again after that.”

“She had me believing a lot of things.” I pause, anchored by the weight of that revelation. “And that’s not easy to do.”

“I can imagine. She was good at that—she could make anyone believe anything.”

“What was with the bruises I saw on her?” I ask.

He sniffs. “She’s got this condition that makes her prone to blood clots . . . takes a prescription blood thinner . . . can’t bump into anything without it leaving a mark. We used to joke about how it looked. Guess it was funny to us since I’d never laid a hand on her. Not so funny now.”

“She told me she was my half sister,” I say. “And I almost believed her. I think that was only because I wanted to . . .”

“Are you serious?” He shakes his head.

“She told me she met you when she was looking for me. That the two of you bonded during your search.”

Sutton leans forward in his chair, elbows on his knees, peering over the bridge of his nose. “We met on a blind date. She’s the cousin of a guy I used to work with. And Grace, I never searched for you. I knew you too well. Once you were gone, you were gone.”

“Wow . . .”

“What else did she claim?” he asks. “Just out of curiosity.”

“Aside from you being controlling and physically abusive? Let’s see . . .” I take a deep breath. How much time until Gigi wakes? “She told me you two moved here for your work. Is that true?”

“We moved here because she claimed she found her dream job managing a pediatric ER downtown.” He speaks from the side of his mouth, takes another swig. “I found a job here only because of her. A month after we got settled, she got pregnant. Wanted to quit her supposed dream job right away so she could stay home.”

“Why’d you name your daughter Grace?”

“Campbell named her Grace,” he corrects me. “She told me she made some promise to her grandmother years ago before she died, said she’d name her firstborn daughter after her. I never met her grandma, but she insisted. I thought it was strange, personally. Especially given her fixation with you earlier in our relationship, but I went with it as long as she agreed to let me call her Gigi. It would’ve been too weird to call her Grace.”

I sit with these facts for a moment, burying my head in my hands, breathing through my fingers. “Why do you think she did those things? Was she trying to punish you? Test you?”

Sutton shakes his head. “I imagine something like that. She had demons, I guess. When we first met, I thought it was nothing more than an insecure streak. Once we got married, had Gigi, I realized how deep those demons lived in her. How much they ran her life. For a while, things were getting better. We were settling here, she seemed happy, I thought there was hope for us. That we could salvage this . . . then you showed up, and it set her off.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“I know.” He takes a sip of beer, then another, then places the empty bottle on the coaster. “You couldn’t have known. I just wish you’d have stayed away when I told you you were making things worse.”

“You have to understand . . . she had me convinced you were hurting her. I thought when you told me to stay away, you were threatening to make things worse for her.”

“Yeah. I can see how you’d think that now.” He chuffs. “She almost had me convinced for a while that you were obsessed with her, that you were stalking her. I told her to stay away from you because, to be quite honest, I didn’t know why you were back. I was just trying to keep the status quo around here, trying to hold on to what we’d spent years building.”

“I came home to apologize for leaving you the way I did.”

He tilts his head, expression softening. “Grace . . . we were twenty-two. We were kids. Yeah, it hurt, but life goes on.”

The man saying these things clearly hasn’t met the man at the cabin, telling me he wished I were dead.

“All that stuff you said . . .”

“I had to say those things. She was listening in the next room. I needed her to think I was going to go through with her plan.”

Lying in that bed Sunday afternoon, hearing the crunch of tires on gravel, seeing the shock on Campbell’s face as if she wasn’t expecting someone, and then listening to the murmur of discord in the next room—it makes sense now.