Chapter 11 #2
She left Phylicia and Mya outside and went up to her room, dillydallying around for another two hours before, finally, she couldn’t take it anymore. She headed for the Gauthier mansion, hoping she’d given Matt enough time to get home.
Her shoulders drooped in relief when she drove around the back of the house and spotted his car parked in its usual spot under the portico just off the entrance to the kitchen. Tamryn gave two sharp taps on the door, and seconds later, Matt opened it.
“Hi,” she answered with a smile she couldn’t contain.
“Hello,” he said.
His subdued expression caught her off guard. He walked over to the kitchen island, where a highball glass filled halfway with amber liquid sat next to a parcel of mail.
Tamryn’s steps slowed as she rounded the kitchen island. “Are you okay?”
He nodded. “You?”
“I’m more than okay. I’m perfect.” That smile was back again, bigger than ever. She’d smiled so much this afternoon her cheeks hurt. “I found it,” she said. “I found proof that Adeline West and Nicolette Gauthier opened a school for free Blacks and slave children.”
Tamryn wasn’t sure what she expected, but it was definitely not the apathetic nod he gave her.
“Matt, did you hear what I said? I found my proof.”
He took a sip of his whiskey, then put the glass down and reached for her hands. “I’m happy for you,” he said. “I know how much this means for your career, and for you personally.”
Disquiet slithered down Tamryn’s spine. She cleared her throat before she spoke. “Call me crazy, but it doesn’t sound as if you’re all that happy for me. I’m not really sure what’s going on, but—”
“Come with me,” Matt said, but then he stopped, holding up a finger. “Wait one minute.” He picked up the glass and drained the rest of the whiskey. “There. That’s better.”
The uneasy feeling traveling through her intensified. She had never seen him this way before.
“Matt, is something wrong?” she asked.
“Yes.” He huffed out a humorless laugh, shaking his head. “Something has been wrong for a very long time.”
He wrapped his fingers around her wrist and gently urged her to follow him.
They walked to the family library on the left side of the house.
Tamryn had only been in the room once, during her first visit to the mansion.
She stood just beyond the threshold of the door while Matt walked over to a portrait of Micah Gauthier.
He grasped the gilded frame and unhooked the portrait from the wall, revealing a safe.
As he turned the knob on the combination lock, Tamryn noticed that his fingers were shaking.
“What are you doing?”
His chin dropped to his chest as he braced his left hand on the wall. “Coming clean,” he said.
He opened the safe and rifled around inside for a moment. She couldn’t tell what he retrieved, but her blood pulsed with a mixture of excitement and dread in anticipation of it. When he turned, Tamryn’s stomach dropped at the sight of the worn, leather-bound book.
She couldn’t move. Her feet remained rooted in that spot, her eyes zeroed in on the book in Matt’s hands as he closed the distance between them.
“It wasn’t just the stuff of legends,” he said. He held the book out to her. “My aunt Nicolette’s diary.”
Trembling fingers floated up to Tamryn’s lips. She looked at the journal, then at Matt.
“But…” she started, but she didn’t have words. She didn’t have anything.
Except for hurt. Suddenly, she had all the hurt she could handle and more.
“This…this whole time?” Tamryn choked out. “You’ve had this the whole time?”
A small part of her hoped that he would say that he’d just found out from a long-lost family member about the hidden safe at the Gauthier mansion, but she knew she was grasping at straws. The guilt that washed over Matt’s face was all the answer she needed.
“How could you?” she whispered.
His throat moved as he swallowed, but he remained silent.
“How. Could. You?” she asked again with enough force to shake the walls. “Is everything in there?” Tamryn asked, pointing at the diary she hadn’t summoned the courage to touch just yet. “The school? The connection to Adeline?”
He nodded. And her heart broke in two.
“My God, Matt. You knew how much this meant to my career. You knew what this meant to me.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Sorry?” She took a step back. “You think sorry is enough?”
“I couldn’t share it with you.”
“Why not?”
“Because there’s a lot more in here than just the information about your grandmother and Nicolette’s school.
There’s…everything. Everything about my family and what they’ve done.
Everything about how the Gauthiers lied and cheated their way into owning this town, how Micah and Nicolette’s son nearly burned half the buildings on Main Street to the ground and how they covered up the death of the man who died in the fire. ”
A chill traveled down Tamryn’s spine, but she shook it off. Whatever had happened, it had happened a long time ago.
“What does any of that have to do with my research?” she asked.
“Everything,” he said. “You’ve been calling since last summer, trying to dig up these skeletons. I couldn’t let you do that. There was too much at stake.”
“Like my career?”
“Like my career!” he said. “Do you know what Patrick Carter will do to me if this gets out?”
“Patrick Carter can’t use what your ancestors did nearly two hundred years ago to hurt your campaign, Matt.”
“No, but he can use what my father did, and what his father did. He can use what I did. This diary is just the start, Tamryn. It’s the first item in a long line of evidence that shows that the Gauthier family has been nothing but a cancer to this town since the day it was founded.”
Tamryn shook her head. “It’s not an excuse,” she said.
“You let me search for weeks, killing myself in that library for hours every day. You listened to me lament about how hard this research was, and question whether or not I was wasting my time looking for something that didn’t exist. And this entire time, you knew it did! ”
He pinched his eyes shut and threw his head back. The pain etched across his face meant nothing to her, not when she was feeling so much of her own pain.
Matt held the diary out to her. “Take it,” he said. “I don’t care anymore. Just take it.”
Tamryn almost turned around and walked out without it, just to spite him. But her career was worth a hell of a lot more to her than the brief satisfaction she would get from hurting Matt. She took the diary from his fingers, turned, and strode out of the library, never once looking back.
When Tamryn arrived at Belle Maison, she climbed on the bed and, handling the item with supreme care, laid the diary on a pillow and gingerly opened the brittle pages.
She sat with her head hunched over the diary for more than an hour, poring over stories about the perils Adeline and Nicolette faced during the early stages of the school’s development.
Twice the small shed they’d used as a schoolroom was burned to the ground.
Both had suffered numerous threats to their lives, but soldiered on.
Tamryn swiped at the tears that continued to stream down her cheeks.
Whether they were tears of pride or tears of relief, she couldn’t be sure.
She’d searched so long, and to finally have this proof of her great-great-great-grandmother’s tireless efforts to educate young children of color… It was overwhelming.
That’s what she was. She was overwhelmed with pride.
Her phone rang, and Tamryn was surprised that she was able to tear herself away from the pages of the diary long enough to check it.
A small part of her thought—hoped—that it was Matt calling to apologize.
It would take a lot to rectify the pain he’d caused her, but now that she’d had some time to come to grips with her emotions, she would be more receptive to an apology than she had been just a few hours ago.
But it wasn’t Matt on the other end of the line, it was Victoria. Tamryn felt the blood drain from her face as she listened to her colleague. When she ended the call, she quickly pulled up a travel website and booked the first flight back to Boston.