Chapter Twenty-Eight #2
Her stomach rumbled, so Emma hurried to the kitchen. An assortment of appetizers and sweet treats presented a tempting display.
She filled up her plate with vegetables and relented enough to grab one of the small croissants.
Pam might have brought them but she obviously hadn’t made them herself. She likely had purchased them from the bakery in town.
That somehow made it okay for Emma to eat one, though she had to wonder if she was rationalizing.
Emma nibbled on a cucumber slice as she walked across the room to chat with Candace Early, the town librarian. She had always
been kind.
“Emma! I’d heard you were back in town and running your mom’s bookstore. I’m sorry I haven’t had a chance to come in yet.
It’s so great to see you. You look fantastic.”
Did she? Emma felt exhausted most of the time and was fairly sure her appearance reflected that.
“I love that tattoo.” A younger woman whose name tag read Lindsay pointed to the moon and heart on Emma’s forearm with the
cursive “To the moon and back.”
Emma smiled. “Thanks. It helped me get through some tough times.”
“I have a tattoo,” the librarian said.
Emma gazed at the quiet woman, surprised. “Do you? What is it?”
To her delight, Candace pushed up her sleeve to reveal a tattoo on her upper arm of an open book with planets rising out of
it.
“Oh, that’s perfect!” Emma exclaimed. “I love it.”
“Mel was quite astonished when I came home with it after I went on a girls’ trip with my sisters to Seattle. Now he likes
it, though.”
Before Emma could respond, their host tapped a spoon against a glass to catch the group’s attention.
“Everyone, please take your seats. I know we love to chat but we’re going to be here all night if we don’t get started.”
Somehow, miraculously, there were enough seats for them all. When everyone seemed to settle, Barbara cleared her throat and
spoke.
“It is my great honor to welcome our special guest, who is also our town’s newest resident. We’re so pleased to have the amazing
Andrew Morgan with us. If you have not read his books, you are definitely missing out. They’re full of adventure, intrigue,
great characters and fabulous writing. Andrew has kindly agreed to give us a short reading from his latest book that will
be coming out next month and then he is happy to answer some questions. I thought we could maybe have a short Q and A for
ten or fifteen minutes to ask him about his process.”
Andrew, Emma saw, didn’t look particularly happy to be the center of attention but he gave a polite smile.
Emma glanced at her mom and saw Rosie offer a bright, encouraging smile.
As if some secret message passed between the two of them, the corner of Andrew’s mouth lifted and he straightened slightly as he moved to the front of the room.
As Emma listened to him introduce himself and his book, she was struck again by what a handsome man he was. He would be perfect
for her mother.
If Rosie could maneuver behind the scenes to throw Emma and Bryce together by sending them both to the same remote beach,
Emma should be able to do something similar for her mom and Andrew Morgan.
She listened with fascination to his reading, a continuation of his Starbound Chronicles. She couldn’t wait to read it and
wondered if she could finagle an advanced reader’s copy out of him for the bookstore.
She had already ordered one hundred copies for the store and would love to persuade him to come and sign some of them for
her.
Even better would be a book launch event where he would sign them for the public. She would have to work on that while she
tried to come up with some creative way to push him together with her mother.
After he finished his reading, he answered a few questions about how he started writing and why he chose to write the kind
of books he did. Barbara cut off questions after twenty minutes and everyone continued socializing.
Emma was glad she had made the effort to find a babysitter for Olive and carve time out of her schedule to come. Besides the
chance to listen to a fascinating author she admired, she had been able to chat with several people she knew, and she had
made a few new friends.
Through it all, she had been able to avoid Pam—until the end of the evening, anyway.
After three glasses of sparkling water, Emma found herself in need of a bathroom break. Barbara pointed her down a hallway and around a corner to a guest bathroom. As she headed that way, the door opened and someone came out.
Pam.
The two of them were alone in the hallway, and Emma had nowhere to go. She braced herself to be as polite as humanly possible.
Pam gave her a bright smile. “Emma, darling. I feel like you’ve been avoiding me all night. I’m sure I’m imagining things,
but it felt like every time I tried to approach you, you moved to the other side of the room.”
Oh, she’d noticed that, had she? Apparently, Emma had not been as subtle as she had hoped.
“Is everything okay?” Pam pressed.
No. Everything was not okay.
“Sure,” she mumbled. She would have moved past the woman and locked the door of the bathroom, but Pam held out an arm.
“I get the impression you’re mad at me for something. What did I do? I would love to clear the air.”
Emma thought about lying to her, making nice and being polite. But the scene Andrew had read that featured his main characters
digging deeply for courage to face their foes against overwhelming odds seemed to resonate in her head.
She did not need a confrontation with Pam tonight, but she was also not in the mood to lie simply to be polite to this woman.
“I saw you that day.”
Pam stared at her, eyes wide and confused. “You saw what? What day?”
“The day my dad died. I saw the two of you together.”
Pam’s face seemed to lose color and her jaw sagged. “You . . . what?”
Emma nodded. “I was supposed to meet Dad at four so he could take me driving after school. We had some kind of school assembly that day so I decided to leave early and surprise him.”
She had been the one surprised, though.
The memory of all she had seen and heard burned in her mind, hot and shameful.
Pam seemed to turn another shade paler.
“Imagine my surprise when there was nobody at the front desk to meet me. I could hear sounds coming from his office. I didn’t
want to disturb my dad but I wanted to let him know I was there. The door was slightly ajar and I saw the two of you there
on his sofa. You certainly weren’t going over the payroll. You were all over him.”
Now a hot tide of color seemed to wash over Pam’s features, leaving her skin splotchy. “I’m sure you misunderstood what you
saw. You were only a girl and it was a long time ago.”
“I didn’t misunderstand anything. I know what I saw. You were making out. How long had you been going after my dad?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Pam said, her voice icy.
“I know what I saw. I have no idea how you have managed to hide the truth from my mom for all these years. If she had any
idea you were screwing her husband, I know she would never have let you stay working at Lucas Construction.”
A host of emotions seemed to cross Pam’s features. Embarrassment, unease and the beginnings of anger. “We never slept together.”
“That’s what my dad said, too. I didn’t believe him any more than I believe you.”
Pam now looked like she wanted to rush past her back to the party but Emma remained in her way. Now that the words had spilled
out, she couldn’t seem to hold back her scorn.
“What kind of person sleeps with the husband of someone who was supposed to be her friend? A friend who has continued to employ you and pay you very well for the past ten years.”
“I don’t need to listen to this.” Pam again tried to push past her but Emma stood firm, ten years of pain and anger spewing
out as if she had ruptured a pipeline.
“What did you hope to achieve? Did you really think my dad was going to leave my mom? He loved her.”
Pam drew in a sharp breath, her gaze hardening. “Your mother was never the woman Gary needed,” she hissed, her voice low and
intense. “He needed a partner. An equal. Rosie didn’t care about Lucas Construction. She didn’t care about anything but her
stupid little bookstore and about buying Stormhaven. She wasn’t there for him. I was. I was the one staying late with him to work on bids, advising him on personnel issues, spending my weekends dealing with
bank paperwork.”
Her mom had been a little distracted around that time, Emma remembered. And her parents had been bickering more than usual. Had Pam swooped
in to take advantage of the opportunity when her parents were going through a rocky time?
“Your dad had feelings for me,” Pam went on, her voice still low. “He was going to leave your mom, and we were going to run the company. Together, we would have been unstoppable. We were talking
about having a future together. We would have had a great one, too.”
She narrowed her gaze, skewering Emma with a look of deep antipathy. “Until you had to go and ruin everything by killing him.”
Emma nearly reeled in the face of the other woman’s vitriol. She felt dizzy, lightheaded, as all her own guilt and pain coalesced.
She curled her hands into fists, wanting to smack Pam right in her furious face. She wanted to hit out, to run from the house, to go get wasted or high or any of the old things she once used to escape.
“It was all your fault,” Emma hit back. “We were fighting about you right before I hit the slick patch and drove off the cliff.”
“That doesn’t make it my fault. You were behind the wheel.”
“I told him I had seen you together. Do you want to know what he said?”
Pam looked as if she wanted to cover her ears with her hands. Her gaze flitted down the hallway but Emma didn’t turn around,
too busy finally, finally spilling out all the ugliness of that day.
“He said it was only a harmless flirtation. Meaningless. You were lonely and he was flattered by your attention. He said he
felt sorry for you, that he lost his head, but that it meant nothing and would never happen again.”
“Of course that’s what he said. He wasn’t going to tell the truth about what we felt for each other to his fifteen-year-old
daughter.”
Wondering about that had haunted Emma for all these years. Had her dad been lying? Could his and Pam’s relationship have been
deeper and more important to Gary than he claimed?
She would never know. She only knew that her father died that day but she had also lost her idealized image of him as a loving
father and husband.
She felt shaky and sick and wished she had never started this, that she had turned back around and rushed away as soon as
she saw Pam come out of the bathroom. The same way she had rushed away that day in the office when she had found them together,
only to come back inside, this time making noise and calling out to alert them to her presence.
Pam made a move to rush past her but Emma had one more thing to say. She drew in a breath and faced this woman who had caused irreversible harm.
“Even if you were having an affair with him that had been going on for years under my mother’s nose, my dad loved us. He never
in a million years would have left my mother for someone like you.”
“You keep telling yourself that, honey.”
“Wh-what?”
At the new voice from the end of the hallway, Emma turned and felt any blood remaining leave her face.
Rosie stood staring at both of them, her features pinched, haunted.
How much had her mother overheard? Her stomach roiled as every bite she had eaten that evening threatened to rise up again.
“Mom.”
“What are you saying?” Her mom was looking at Pam. “You and Gary had an affair?”
Pam said nothing, looking as if she would rather be anywhere else on earth.
“This isn’t the place or time for this, Mom. Let’s talk about it when we get home.”
“No. I want to talk about it now.”
Her mom was shaking, she saw. Emma stepped forward and would have taken Rosie’s arm but her mother held her hand out as if
pushing away a tidal wave of pain.
“Gary wouldn’t have betrayed me. We . . . we loved each other since we were in high school.”
“People change,” Pam said tightly. “Their needs change and sometimes they no longer want the same things they did when they
were teenagers. I used to love fruit-flavored bubble gum but then I grew out of it.”
Okay. Emma was going to punch the bitch.
Rosie looked devastated, as if this entire beach house she had built for Barbara West had collapsed around her.
Emma narrowed her eyes at Pam. “And sometimes they realize what they want and need has been right in front of them the whole
time and that everything else is a pathetic attempt to fill a void that didn’t need to be there in the first place.”
Pam gave her one last look of loathing and then pushed past both of them to return to the party. A moment later, she heard
a door shut and assumed Pam had left.
Meanwhile, Rosie was staring at her out of eyes that looked bruised, betrayed.
“You knew about . . . about your dad and . . . her?”
Emma swallowed, closing her eyes. She had never wanted this day to come. She had hidden the truth for a decade, unable to
truly grieve her father’s death properly because she was so full of anger toward him.
She could never accept her mother’s attempt to comfort her after Gary died because Emma was so afraid of Rosie finding out
the truth.
“All this time, you knew and you didn’t say anything to me?” Rosie pressed.
Emma released a shaky breath. “There wasn’t anything to say, Mom. Not really. I had no idea what was truly going on between
them. I only know what I saw.”
“Which was what?”
She couldn’t lie. Not now, after all this time. “They were on the couch in his office. The one where I used to sit and do
homework while he would make phone calls. They were both dressed but . . . they were making out. I’m sorry, Mom.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Emma closed her eyes, unable to look at her mother as she spoke the truth that had haunted her all this time. The truth she had tried to escape with booze and drugs, the truth she had been trying to run from when she left Wood Briar.
She and her mother had fought about every single thing back then except this. The one inexorable fact beneath everything else.
“Because an hour later he was dead and it was my fault. We were fighting about Pam and I wasn’t paying as much attention to the road conditions as I should have been and neither was he. And as a result, I
killed him.”