25. Callum
25
CALLUM
“ E xcuse me… murder? Why the hell would you think that? Did Lucas say that?” Ada tries to play innocent when I see nothing but guilt.
“Are you saying he’d have a reason to tell me that?” I toss back.
Her eyes narrow, and she crosses her arms, steadily examining him from head to toe. “You don’t know shit.” She sighs. “Sit down, and I’ll tell you everything.”
I don’t sit, and she rolls her eyes. “Fine, have it your way,” she says, taking a seat at the foot of Eloise’s bed. “How about we start with why you believe I had anything to do with Virginia’s death? I need to know what you think you know so I can tell you the truth.”
That’s a manipulation, one I’m familiar with after growing up with a narcissist for a father. He constantly asked me what I thought so he could try to reshape my perception to fit his narrative. “No,” I say firmly.
“No?” she questions confoundedly.
“What we know or believe doesn’t change your truth.”
She purses her lips before saying, “I suppose the two of you have no reason but to see me as the villain right now. I’ve kept secrets. I’ve made choices I’m not proud of, but”—she turns to Eloise—“sometimes we let our emotions decide for us, ruling over our better sense.”
I know what she’s doing. She’s playing on her daughter’s emotions, but I leave it alone because I know Eloise sees it, too. She spent years protecting her mother’s secrets, but I know today she’d choose Adler and me over protecting her.
“Let’s hear it, Mom, and don’t even think about leaving anything out. I know more than you think I do,” she challenges, and Ada quirks a brow.
Ada clasps her hands together. “Well, there are so many lovely places to start, but I think I’ll start with murder since apparently I’m being accused of it.” She gives me a sidelong glance. “I didn’t murder your mother. She was my best friend. The two of you exist because of our friendship. We tried to get pregnant at the same time so we could raise our children to be lifelong besties. The plan evolved after we found out we were having a boy and a girl, but it was a dream nonetheless. We never planned on forcing the two of you together. We just hoped…” her voice trails off. “When I found out about Adler, I wanted to call her on the phone and share the news and excitement with her, and it wrecked me that I couldn’t. You guys carried out our shared dream without our interference, after all. It felt like fate, and then it felt like her moving the pieces from beyond the grave.”
Everything she’s saying aligns with the relationship my mother spoke of in her journals and the sentiments Elias echoed before Ada arrived. “Why didn’t you ever bring it up? Over the years, you’ve had many chances to tell your daughter that her son’s other grandmother was your best friend. Why hide that unless you were trying to cover something up?”
“Your mother’s death was suspicious. She died in a hospital from a condition that labor and delivery nurses are trained to spot. Your father never took action against the hospital, and then when I saw he was seeking solace in one of her nurses, a million red flags went up, and I started doing my own investigation.”
Well, we have that in common. I, too, believed it was out of character for my father not to file a malpractice suit against the hospital. It’s why I started thinking the worst of him.
“That’s why your relationship with Keely was short-lived. You were using her to get answers,” Eloise states hastily as pieces start falling into place.
Ada nods in confirmation. “That’s why Lucas set me up. I was getting close to finding out the truth. He and Keely lured us to their house under the guise of a party and spiked our drinks. Elias’s more than mine.” She closes her eyes, and her forehead wrinkles with stress. “We, or rather your father, engaged in after-party activities that Lucas took videos and pictures of as insurance to ensure I’d stay silent.”
Her story sounds plausible. I don’t believe it’s a lie, but I also don’t think Ada Beck was ever scared of my father. She owns the media. Even back then, she could have easily silenced whatever gossip my father sought to propagate.
“If you and my mother shared the bond I believe you did, then we both know a dirty pic and sex video wouldn’t be enough to silence you. So tell me, Ada, what secrets had you writing my father checks?”
Her blue eyes turn gray the same way her daughter’s do when she’s upset. She rolls her lips and focuses her gaze out the window.
“Your secrets almost ended your daughter’s life tonight. Are you really that hell-bent on keeping them?”
“A baby…” she says in a whisper so soft I’m unsure the words were said.
Eloise leans forward, her eyes glassy as she grabs her mother’s hand. “Dash…” she speaks softly. “Dash Westin is dad’s, isn’t he?”
What in the actual fuck? My eyes widen, and I’m at a loss for words. Of all the conspiracies Eloise and I have been working through, Dash Westin being her brother was never one of them. I feel blindsided, and I’m about to ask all the questions until I see the formidable woman who eats billionaires for lunch… break. She doesn’t say the words. She can’t. It hurts too much. Drug-induced infidelity at a party is something she and Elias could get past. Their marriage was strong, and their love was infallible, but something tells me this was one thing she couldn’t get past. She got too close to my father’s secrets, and he set her up. Ada didn’t play a role in my mother’s death. The money was to keep my father silent.
“Elias doesn’t know Dash is his son, does he?”
“No,” she confirms, pulling in a stuttered breath.
“That’s why you paid him a large sum of money the year after I was born,” Eloise concludes. “It was Dash’s birth year, but who’s his mother?”
“Keely Balfour.”
I thought the bomb Eloise dropped about Dash was big, but Keely being his mother is next level. I pinch the bridge of my nose and try to wrap their words around the reality I lived. Is it possible? Yes, but fuck if it doesn’t reshape everything I thought I knew.
“Keely was suspect number one. Her sister, Blair’s mother, snaked her way into marrying rich and I was highly suspicious she coached Keely into doing the same thing. They might be Wyndhams, but they’re cousins without a penny that comes along with the name. It seemed too coincidental that Keely was not only one of Virginia’s nurses but Lucas’s next wife. Sure, they played up the role of finding a bond through shared grief, but anyone who knew Lucas would have known that was bullshit.”
My father was not a frivolous man. Everything was well thought out and planned. Even his plans had backup plans. I never believed he married Keely out of grief. For that to happen, he’d have to have a heart.
“Tell me something about my father I don’t know,” I say. The man I’ve always known is cold, callous, and manipulative. From the few entries my mother wrote in her journal, I don’t get the impression she embodied any of the same traits. “Why did she marry him?”
“He was different to her and to be fair, while your father was an opportunist who I’m sure sought her out because of her net worth, I believe he fell in love with her. Lucas was good to her.”
“Then why do you suspect he played a role in her death?”
“Probably for the same reasons you think he’s capable of a crime so evil. He’s a narcissist. When Virginia and I concocted our baby plan, your fathers were on board. As you know, making babies is the fun part.” She clears her throat and flattens the lapels on her suit jacket. “But the further along Virginia got in her pregnancy, the more it became real. Her belly was growing, and so was his home. She spent almost every day planning for your arrival in some fashion, and everyone knows a narcissist doesn’t like to share the spotlight.”
I pace the side of Eloise’s bed. Sitting still isn’t an option. I never had any relationship with Keely, but looking back, I’m not sure my father did either. For years, I thought they were happily married, but it was because I didn’t know what a happy marriage looked like. As I got older, my view of their dynamic evolved. I saw exactly what Ada believed she saw: a gold digger and a man happy to add a pretty woman ten years younger than him to his belt. However, that was before I knew Keely had a baby. Moments I thought were her acting the role of an entitled, kept woman could have been her hitting him where it hurt—his wallet. My father was cheap. Now I know it’s because he never had my mother’s money.
“Where does Blair Wyndham fit into all of this?” Eloise asks, her eyelids getting heavy.
“Eloise, I didn’t raise you to be anything but direct. If you have a question to ask, then ask it.”
“The car Cal was driving tonight was meant to take Blair home.”
“I’m aware.”
That confession alone has my eyebrows rising to my hairline. We didn’t give her that information. We only just revealed it to Elias.
“Why would she help Lucas?” Eloise asks.
“Did she tell you she was helping Lucas?”
I rub my chin as I go over all the conversations we’ve had. Half of the reason Eloise was so quick to believe Blair’s words at the Bronson Estate was because she didn’t use any names and assumed she meant me.
“If you had asked me two months ago if Blair would play the role of Lucas’s pawn, I would have said yes, but I can’t say that’s true now.”
“Blair hated me for years. That woman is the reason I left Cal. She gave him a drink that was laced with the same stuff Lucas used to lure you and Dad into that scandal. I saw her on Cal’s lap and assumed he wanted her there, and that’s why I didn’t tell him about Adler.”
Ada nods, but not like she knows something. More like she’s piecing something together herself. I thought Keely was a gold digger all these years, but I now believe she was trapped, the same as me. If my father was callous enough to allow his own wife to get pregnant with another man’s baby in the name of blackmail, I wouldn’t put it past him to have used that same woman to assist or cover up his tracks at the hospital.
“Keely wasn’t his wife. She was his prisoner,” I say the thought aloud.
“I think so. Keely believed we were friends, and I didn’t hate her, but our friendship wasn’t easy for me. She couldn’t step into the shoes that belonged to your mother, and since she lived in your mother’s house and married her husband, that’s all I could ever see. When I didn’t fight Lucas harder and instead went along with his demands, I made an enemy in her. If anyone could have fought him and won, it would have been me, and I let her down.”
“She didn’t want to get rid of Dash. She wanted to keep her baby. She was willing to divorce Lucas, wasn’t she?” Eloise states as though she knows it’s a fact.
“Yes,” Ada confirms.
“And you didn’t want Dad to find out.”
“No.” She drops her head. “When I found out she was pregnant, I was mad, but more than that, I was scared. I was scared I’d lose my husband.”
“But you left him anyway,” Eloise states. “It doesn’t matter that it was years after the fact. You still left. It doesn’t make any sense.”
She stands and looks at me. “That’s because I let my fear win. I was scared I’d lose him, and so I did. Every year that passed, I told myself this would be the year I told Elias what happened that night. Hell, it was me who worked behind the scenes to bring Dash’s adoptive family to Copper Falls so he’d be close, but every year I didn’t say something, the truth ate me alive, and I told myself there was no excuse for keeping my husband away from his son. It didn’t matter that Elias had no feelings for Keely. In my head, she was now my competition. My reasons for keeping him in the dark are petty, insecure, and, in the scheme of everything, selfish, but no one knows how wrong they are more than me. I lost the only man I ever loved because I couldn’t stand to look at him, knowing the secret I held inside. So I left.”
“Why not just tell him?” I ask. I’d bare my soul and risk it all before I ever walked away.
“Because breaking his heart I could bear, his hate I couldn’t, and that’s exactly what I’d see every time he looked at me if I gave him the truth.”
“Dad could never hate you. If you told him today, I guarantee the first words out of his mouth would be I wish you had told me, followed by I love you.”
“Maybe,” she says with a long sigh, fidgeting with her gold cufflinks.
“What’s wrong with Dash?” Iverson asks, appearing in the doorway, wide-eyed, and we all turn to stare at him and his unexpected intrusion. “I tried to say hi, and he shouldered past me.”
“Damn.” Ada looks at the ceiling. “He heard everything.”
“Wait, he knows about Dad?” Iverson questions, his eyes darting around the room, trying to catch up.
“If you saw him coming from this direction, then yes, he heard everything. Your sister knows, too. I’m going to see if I can’t find him.”
“Mom, he deserves to know,” Eloise says. “He’s a good guy, and if you spent any amount of time with him, you’d love him too.”
“I know, Eloise. I’m very abreast of all things Dash Westin. I just hoped I’d be the one delivering the news. I have only myself to blame for this mess now.” She nods toward the door. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to see if I can’t make things right.”
As Ada exits, Iverson raises his eyebrows and clasps his hands together. “What did I miss?”
“Nothing, you arrived at just the right time to help me plot my father’s demise.” I point to the chair opposite Eloise’s bed. “Have a seat. It’s going to be a long night.”