58. Theo
Theo
Ididn’t blame Liv for wanting to have it out with her parents. In her shoes, I’d have done the same. But standing here as misery and fury radiated from her, all I wanted was to grab her hand, drag her out of here, and tell the Carters to go fuck themselves.
How dare they look at her like she was a nuisance, a goddamn inconvenience, rather than the smart, strong badass she actually was?
I had to bite my tongue not to demand they treat her with the respect she deserved.
The only thing stopping me was the knowledge that she was a full-grown, adult woman who could advocate for herself.
I set my hand at the small of her back just the same, letting her know I was here if she needed me.
Say the word, and I would eviscerate these bastards—metaphorically, of course, but still.
Russ Carter tore his gaze away from his daughter and dropped it to the paper that had just landed on Charles’s journal. “What is this?” he said, picking it up with two fingers, like maybe Liv had coated it in poison.
Beneath my palm, Liv tensed. And then, both of us had the immense satisfaction of watching all the color drain from his face.
“Russ? Honey, what is it?” Kate hurried around the desk, her voice high with worry.
Liv’s dad pushed his chair back and tugged at the collar of his shirt, as if he needed air. “Where did you get this, Olivia?”
“I hired a PI. And a genetic genealogist.” I stepped forward, angling myself between him and Liv in case he got any ideas. Liv had never mentioned that her father had laid a hand on her, but after the way I’d grown up, I wasn’t taking any chances. “If you want to blame anyone, blame me.”
“Blame you for what?” Kate plucked the printout from her husband’s fingers and scanned it, biting her lower lip in a gesture that reminded me of Liv. “You found Ella,” she said softly. “But she’s dead.”
“She died eighteen years ago,” Liv said, vibrating like a tuning fork beneath my hand. “But you knew that already, Dad. Didn’t you?”
Kate glanced from her daughter to her husband to me, then back at the paper. Then at her husband again. “What is she talking about?” she said. “Russ?”
Liv’s father tossed back his drink, then poured himself another. He didn’t say a word.
“You almost got away with it.” Liv’s tone was conversational, like she was discussing a grocery list. “If it hadn’t been for that paperwork we found about the farm, you would have.
I thought you and Uncle Jamison were getting into wind energy, or something.
Diversifying your business interests. Stupid me. So trusting, even now.”
Her mother looked down at the paper again. “A farm in Kansas?” she said, her voice rising in puzzlement. “That’s where Ella ended up? But…what does that have to do with us?”
I turned to Kate, since Liv and her dad were engaged in an epic staredown.
“When we were in New York, trying to figure things out, we looked through the Gramercy Park apartment. We thought we’d found a whole lot of nothing.
Part of that nothing, though, was documentation on a farm in Kansas.
Not a deed, just a mortgage payoff. The payment was made from Carter Industries and signed by Russ and his brother.
We assumed it was a business deal. But now—”
“Now,” Liv said, completing my sentence, “it looks an awful lot like Dad and Uncle Jamison found Ella a long time ago, paid her to keep quiet, and then acted like they had no idea. They treated me like a traitor”—she spat the words, her face turning an alarming shade of red—“for insinuating that Grandma might really be Lily. Dad did everything he could to stop me from looking. And the whole time, he knew I…was…right.” Her final words came out like venom-tipped bullets, each one punctuated by a stab of her finger into the cover of Charles’s journal.
“I did it to protect us!” Russ slammed the tumbler down on the desk. Amber liquid sloshed over the sides, and Liv grabbed the journal for safekeeping, clutching it to her chest.
Silence fell, and in it, my mind churned, dredging up that nightmare I’d had in New York: May Dressler, sitting at the piano in the asylum, hissing a malediction.
He knew. He knew. I’d assumed this was my subconscious, leveraging an accusation at Charles.
Or, if I chose to suspend my disbelief, May reaching out from the grave to point a finger at him one last time.
But I’d been wrong. Charles hadn’t known, not for sure. Consumed by guilt, he’d taken his own life based on a supposition.
All along, the one who’d known the truth and hidden it was Russ.