Chapter 29
I gasped as the memory pulsed in the air around me.
“You were there!” I said, voice at a fever pitch.
“It was you he wanted me to meet!” At last, I knew the truth, and it was worse than I could have imagined.
Jet Wellington, one of the most powerful bankers in the country, hadn’t liked the fact that his wife was falling for another man, and Jet had either killed Julien or hired someone else to do the job.
I gaped at her in horror, eyes welling with tears.
Carrie reached for my hands, and I stumbled backward a step.
She looked as if she might be sick. “That night was a horrible accident. My husband had just come home from the betting tables at the Oyster Club. He’d been drinking, probably had smoked opium, too.
I don’t know, but he was a mess. He’d wanted to scare Julien off, send a message.
Lizzie, you must believe me. Jet wouldn’t hurt him intentionally.
He said our chauffeur pushed him out of the driver’s seat, that it was our driver who’d had an accident.
But I’m not…I’m not certain of anything.
I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I only remember the headlights that night, seeing Julien’s wide eyes, you and your young man bent over his crumpled body.
The way I’d run from him. From it all.” She closed her eyes, releasing a stream of tears.
I shook my head, stepped backward, my breath coming in great heavy gasps.
Lies. It was all a lie.
She was covering for her husband, and we both knew it.
He’d been the one driving that night. He’d been the one who’d had the accident, not her chauffeur, not some hired hit man.
But it could never be proven. Jet Wellington and his network of powerful allies wouldn’t allow him to pay the consequences for taking the life of a lowly jeweler who was sleeping with his wife. Men of their caliber deserved better.
“Shut up!” I screamed, covering my ears with my hands, trying to block the terrible memory. Trying to cork the pain oozing from every inch of my body. “I can’t. Please stop talking!”
“You must believe me when I say that night was a mistake,” she pleaded. “A terrible tragedy. And I will never forgive myself for not running away with Julien the first time he asked me to. I live in this big empty house with a man who sees me as something else he owns. I’m…I’m so alone.”
“You’re alone? You’re alone! I don’t care if you’re lonely. I lost the most important person in the world because of your greed. What is it with you people? You have this…this insatiable need to have it all, at any cost!”
“Please try to understand.” She reached for me.
“Jet married me to access his trust fund. He doesn’t love me.
We barely spend time in the same room together, let alone in the same bed.
” Her eyes filled, and her voice wavered as she went on.
“I know that what Julien and I had was unconventional, but I don’t believe loving someone is wrong, no matter what the circumstances are.
Things aren’t that simple. They never are. ”
“They are simple,” I said, now shaking violently. “When you love someone and you aren’t available to be with them, you let them go. This is your fault!”
A trail of tears streaked her powdered cheeks. “I’m devastated I’ve lost him.”
“No,” I said through clenched teeth. “You don’t get to be devastated. You hardly knew him. He was nothing but a glimpse of a better life to you. To me, he was my best friend, my brother, and you took him from me.”
I didn’t want to hear any more—couldn’t bear it. I stumbled into the bright light of midday, away from Carrie and her perfect Georgetown house and her perfect car, desperate to outrun the sorrow flooding my senses.
If only Henry and I had ignored our impulses, not skipped away over the grass into that moonlit field for a moment of selfish passion, we would have been on time.
We would have seen the car speeding toward him and skidding on wet pavement.
We could have pulled Julien away from the curb. We could have saved my brother’s life.
If only.
Now my beloved brother was a whisper on the wind, a shadow hovering at the edges of my vision, and yet the part of me connected to him, even still, felt so alive I could hardly contain it, contain him, be both of us separately and myself all at once.
I walked blindly toward nothing and no one until my ragged breathing ebbed and my feet chafed against my shoes and the only thought that remained was how I longed to relive that night, to be there for him when it mattered.
But I wasn’t and I couldn’t, and nothing could change the fact that he was gone.