Chapter 16
I’d decided long ago that I didn’t like my great-grandparents.
Still, that didn’t mean I had to be rude.
Not feeling up to a confrontation in the driveway, I’d allowed my two uninvited guests to come inside.
I felt like a traitor for being hospitable after all the unforgivable things they’d done to Tilly.
However, as I was discovering, it was a hell of a lot easier to despise someone from afar as opposed to when they’re standing right in front of you.
I still didn’t know what they wanted from me. They sat ramrod straight on the living room sofa, the cups of tea I’d fetched for them steaming on the coffee table, untouched. They’d turned their noses up at the cookies I’d also set out, probably deeming crumbs uncivilized.
“I was under the impression you’d passed away,” I said, which wasn’t entirely true. Though I’d had no official confirmation, they’d been dead to me—and my mother and grandmother, for that matter—for years.
The woman’s smile was brittle. “We thought you might be.”
Do you even care? I wanted to ask. From what I’d been told by Tilly, what concerned these snobs most was their reputation.
The narrative was complicated, but I knew it well.
When Tilly was in high school, she’d gotten pregnant by a boy from the wrong side of the tracks.
In response, the delightful pieces of work sitting before me had given her only two choices: go away to a “girls retreat” and give the illegitimate child, my mother, up for adoption, or be disowned by the family forever. Tilly chose the latter.
As the oldest story in the world goes, the father skipped town once he caught wind of the pregnancy.
Tilly, a teenaged debutant with no real-life experience, was suddenly and completely on her own.
She dropped out of high school and left my great-grandparents’ mansion in New York in the dead of winter with little more than a suitcase of personal belongings and a small amount of savings.
She headed to Florida, the warmest place she could think of.
A few days shy of her eighteenth birthday, she gave birth to my mother in a women’s free clinic in Pelville, the town where I was subsequently raised.
She did it under Tilly Taylor, an alias she made up on the spot.
Ashamed of having been jilted by both her family and the baby’s father, she continued using her assumed identity after leaving the hospital, later having her name changed legally.
She told everyone she met that she’d been orphaned as a young girl, and that her husband had been killed while serving in the military.
She told the lies so often and so convincingly that she eventually started to believe them herself.
She worked as a cleaner, learning how to scrub floors, change bedding, and polish furniture—chores she hadn’t done once in her whole life as the daughter of millionaires.
Despite doing backbreaking labor for minimum wage, she was thrilled to be liberated from her cold parents’ suffocating oppression.
That’s what she’d said, anyway, on the rare occasions she opened up to me about her past.
Feeling defensive on behalf of Tilly, I said, “Are you aware your daughter has passed away?” To twist the knife, I added, “Your granddaughter, too.”
“We know,” the man said, showing all the emotion of a snail.
Now, I was good and pissed off. I hadn’t expected sobbing from these robots, but even a modicum of remorse would have been appreciated.
“Where were you all these years?” I demanded, rage simmering up from my gut and straining my voice.
“Do you have any idea how hard life was for your daughter? For your granddaughter? For me? You left Tilly high and dry—tossed your own daughter out of the house into the freezing cold when she was pregnant! And why? Because you couldn’t stand to lose face with your friends! ”
“That’s part of the reason why we’ve come here,” the man said. “We’d like to explain.”
“You can explain all you want, but there’s no way you’ll ever be able to justify doing that to your own flesh and blood! At least not to me.” I clamped my hands down on the arms of my chair to regain composure.
My great-grandparents didn’t flinch at my outburst. They didn’t even blink. It seemed they’d come expecting my reaction. Good thing they remained silent, because I was far from done.
“You two clearly have lots of money. But us—do you know how tough it was financially? How much we scraped and scrounged to get by? Did you know that my mother—your granddaughter—was killed by a drunk driver when I was just a kid?” I neglected to mention that the drunk driver was my father, who’d driven them home from a bar after they’d consumed over a dozen beers each.
“It was your daughter who stepped up and raised me. Despite your upbringing, Tilly was the most decent and honorable person I’ve ever known.
So, if you think you can just show up here and buy my forgiveness with your blood money, you have another thing coming.
I’ll give you the million dollars back, if that’s the case. ”
I really hoped I wouldn’t have to reimburse them, but damn if I didn’t mean it. Screw them and the luxury car they rode in on.
The man, whose name I still didn’t know, took a sip of his tea. I was so furious that I wanted to snatch it from his pruned hand. Stop drinking my chamomile, asshole!
“You’re well within your rights to be angry, Olivia,” said the woman. “We certainly could have handled the situation with Greta better. Perhaps you’ll consider forgiving us once you hear the entire story.”
I was confused. “Greta?”
“Your grandmother—our daughter.”
“Oh, right.” I’d only ever known her as Tilly. “And what are your names?”
“Greta didn’t tell you?” the man asked.
“I never bothered asking,” I sniped.
“Fair enough.” The woman’s tiny, bejeweled hand fluttered up to her breast. “I am Maxine.”
The man smiled. Sort of. “And I am Richard.”
“And what are your last names? I’m assuming not Taylor?”
Maxine said, “My maiden name is Bowden. I became Nolan after Richard and I married.”
“Richard and Maxine Nolan,” I muttered. I could have been Olivia Nolan. What a trip.
“Can we come to an agreement?” Maxine asked. “Let us stay long enough to explain ourselves. If you still want us to go after we’ve finished, we promise we’ll leave. The money is yours to keep regardless.”
“It’s not about the money,” I said, and it wasn’t. It was about the way they’d treated three generations of women. Like we were insignificant, unworthy of their love—though it was debatable that Mr. and Mrs. Nolan even knew what love was.
Nevertheless, I knew very little about my roots beyond what Tilly had told me. I hadn’t cared so much when I was a teenager, but now that I was a little older I felt that knowing something about my ancestry was important.
I sat back in my chair. “Fine, I’ll hear you out.” But it had better be good.
“Splendid,” Richard and Maxine said in harmony, their jaws jutting out slightly. They reminded me a great deal of Leopold. He was a posh snob, too.
Maxine nodded at her husband, and he began, “I wasn’t born wealthy, Olivia. My family was terribly poor. My father was a humble shop owner in New York City, and I was one of five children.”
Ironic, then, that you’d go out of your way to ensure your daughter lived in poverty, I thought.
“I was almost a teenager when Prohibition ended. It was now legal to sell alcohol, though that didn’t stop bootleggers. A lot of individuals, many of them gangsters, had built lucrative businesses during the alcohol ban. Several speakeasies were still operating out of the city.”
What did any of this have to do with the price of tea in China? I was starting to regret my decision to hear them out. I hoped they weren’t intending to stay for hours, which they would, if he didn’t speed things along.
“Around that time my father had fallen ill, and his business was suffering. My parents were having a difficult time putting food on the table. As the eldest child, it was my job to step in. A friend from the neighborhood was running rum for a small crime syndicate, and he got me a night job delivering barrels to a few of the more exclusive speakeasies. My father wasn’t pleased with what I was doing, but I was bringing in money that we desperately needed, so he turned a blind eye. ”
Well, well, my great-grandfather was a criminal.
“I’d been a delivery boy for about two months when I ran into trouble,” Richard continued.
“Running rum was dangerous, not only because it was illegal but also because rival gangs would attack during deliveries. When I was ambushed, I assumed that was what had happened. I was with just one other boy that night, Sampson, my friend from the neighborhood. I was lucky to be working with someone who cared about my life, or else I probably would have been killed.”
“Sampson fought back?” I deduced.
“He did, indeed. But it wasn’t a gang who’d attacked.”
“The attacker bit into his neck,” Maxine piped in with a knowing look. She’d obviously heard this story before.
“He was a cannibal?” I asked innocently.
“Please don’t insult our intelligence. We know that you know,” Richard said.
“About?”
He gave me a look that bordered on disgust. “Vampires.”
My long-lost great-grandparents could have shown up and said many things after being absent my whole life, but this was the last thing I would have expected.
I was getting a bad feeling about the timing of their arrival, with it happening so close to Robert’s disappearance.
With the amount of money the Nolans had, they could have hired a legion of private investigators and found me years ago. Why now?