Chapter 29
PAIGE
Paige stands in the dark kitchen with her mouth open, frozen, unable to speak.
She’s holding a glass of water she never brought to her lips because when she came down to get it, she heard Cora’s voice coming through the baby monitor Nicola left on the kitchen island when Avery was napping upstairs earlier.
At first, she couldn’t put together why she was hearing Cora’s voice in the baby monitor, and she’d thought she was dreaming, but then she stood still and listened.
The words she was hearing didn’t fit together.
The characters in the story Nicola was telling were all wrong.
Finn hit Caleb, not Nicola. Caleb was the victim, not the villain.
What was happening? Her first instinct was to run into Nicola’s room and lunge at her, pin her down and rip the flesh from her face with her fingernails and scream for Caleb until her chest burned and her eyes blurred and she was hoarse from his name in her mouth.
She can’t do that. Avery. Somewhere in between her rage and confusion, she tries to let the weight of that one detail settle in.
Avery is Caleb’s. Her head swims. Caleb needed help, and she didn’t know.
He was in trouble. He was a criminal? He wasn’t who she thought he was.
The pain of this is unbearable, suffocating.
Nicola could have stopped all these months of agony and searching and not knowing, but.
..how could she? Can Paige blame Nicola, now that she knows what was happening to her?
Yes, she decides, she can. She’s overwhelmed with anger.
She needs someone to blame. She has someone to blame.
She’s not sure, though. Could Caleb have been that unhinged addict Nicola described?
How could Paige have never known any of that?
What kind of mother would be so blind to all of it?
She needs to sit, to breathe. She needs to think, but she is still frozen in shock with a glass of water vise-gripped in her hand and her eyes wide and unblinking.
She thinks about Finn in jail and wonders how she could have gotten it so wrong.
She thinks again about Caleb and how he wasn’t faultless.
She’s drowning in thoughts that are coming too fast to process.
Her shock shifts into something else, a slow realization of the truth.
The items in the room around her don’t look real.
Her head feels light, and she feels like her knees will buckle from the sudden dizziness.
Her hands quiver violently, and before she can put down her glass of water, she loses control of it, and it falls to the ground and shatters.
Nicola appears from the bedroom immediately to see what the crash was. Paige stares at her—the woman who killed her son.
“What happened? Are you okay?” Nicola asks.
“It was you.”