CHAPTER 54 The Truth
A pungent smell rushed through my nose, making my eyes fly open.
“She’s awake,” William told someone behind him, tossing a small cotton ball on my nightstand. My dad was leaning against my bathroom doorframe and looking straight at me, his features etched with concern and his nose swollen and red from the blow. “How are you feeling?”
Like the world imploded and nothing will ever make sense again.
“Fine,” I said, not wanting to make eye contact with my dad. “Better.” Slowly, I pushed myself to a seated position and leaned back against the headboard. My shoes were tossed on the floor next to my bed, and I was still wearing the gown, which felt heavier on my body.
“Glad to hear that. You scared me over there,” William whispered, cupping my cheek. “Do you need anything? Water? A coke?” He stood. “You know what? I’ll bring both. I’ll be right back.” He left through the invisible door before I could stop him from leaving my side, and my dad’s gaze widened with shock. He pointed at the wall and sucked in a breath as if about to say something, but he disregarded his question with a wave of his hand.
“Did you do it?” I couldn’t let a second pass before asking that question, even if I’d heard him deny it earlier when Agent Mark threw the accusation at him. I wouldn’t let him take a step forward before he looked me in the eye and told me the truth. “Did you—” Kill her. I couldn’t make myself say the words. “Have anything to do with her death?” I said instead. “Is this what all the secrecy has been about?” My voice got louder with every word I said as I failed to redirect the anger by fisting the comforter. “Have you been lying to me?” I was full-on yelling, and my temples throbbed from the effort.
William pushed himself back into my room, holding two glasses—one with water and one with Coke. He swallowed, surveying the situation. His agitated breathing told me he had rushed back, probably when he heard the screams. “I’ll leave these and get out of your way.” He rounded the bed to set the two glasses on my nightstand.
“No,” I begged, making William’s jaw pop. “Stay.”
He nodded once in understanding. I needed a witness, someone who would shield me from any potential gaslighting or manipulative methods my father could potentially use on me.
“Kiddo, I think this is a private conversation we—”
“He stays.”
He held out his hands, trying to appease the growing tension between us. “Okay. But would you let me explain?” His tone was wary, but he waited the five seconds it took me to nod before taking a few steps closer.
William stayed next to my bed, leaning back against the wall with his arms crossed at his chest. His bowtie hung untied around his neck, and his hair was disheveled. He kept his gaze down, becoming a silent, almost invisible bystander.
“I loved your mother,” my dad chose as an ironic opening statement when every cell in my body screamed that he was a liar. A hypocrite. “So much that you’ve seen what losing her did to me. But I can’t deny that I fell short of being the husband she deserved somewhere along the way.” His voice cracked. “I made mistakes. We both did.” He paused to take a deep breath. “But I admit I am to be held responsible even for the ones she made.”
“You were cheating on her,” I said, the words souring my mouth. “With Annette?” It was one thing for him to neglect his wife because of the demanding nature of his job as an ambassador. He’d neglected me, too. As I grew older, I tried to overlook the wound by justifying his abysmal role as a father with any excuse I could come up with. But it was a whole other thing to know he was cheating on my mom with his personal assistant and that my mother found out at some point, bringing her a great deal of pain. A pain I could see and sense, even at a young age, despite how I failed to recognize where it stemmed from.
“Yes. I had an affair with Annette. And even if I never admitted it in the same way she never admitted her proven affair with Mark, I knew she knew.” His face was overcome with shame, guilt, and regret. I’d never witnessed such a raw and uncalculated display of emotions from him. “We had our issues, and I had my own. The combination of them made me do things I’m not proud of. And if I could go back and change things, I would. But I can’t. And when she died …” he trailed off, his voice cracking with emotion as he visibly struggled to maintain his composure. “There was no use in you knowing any of this, of spoiling your image of me because the things that happened between your mother and me have nothing to do with the profound love and devotion that she felt for you and that I feel as well.” He took a slow, careful step forward. “I wanted so badly to be the father you deserved when she died. And I did what I had to do to protect you from the pain and disappointment attached to the truth.”
The lies were never-ending. When I thought there was nothing else to dig up, more things managed to come up to the surface on their own. I’d completely lost the ability to trust him.
“You haven’t answered my question,” I enunciated every word with meticulous care. “Did you or did you not have anything to do with her death?”
The prolonged moment of silence that followed my statement almost sent me into a fit of hysterics.
“I did,” he began to admit, “if sending Agent Mark away after I heard the rumors of their affair and leaving her under the care of a less experienced agent counts as such.” He shook his head, his mouth twitching, as if years of lies, cover-ups, and suppressed feelings seemed to have won the final battle.
“I wanted so desperately to repair our marriage, to make up for my mistakes when the pieces were so scattered, and I was so blind that I couldn’t see there was no recovering from any of it. And the only way to make that happen was to send him away. But what if I hadn’t?” His brows lifted in a quivering arch. “The thought of Mark being in charge of her security in Mexico City and possibly changing the outcome of her death doesn’t give me rest to this day. So, even if I didn’t have anything to do with it, it will always feel like I did, like every action, choice, and decision I had made up to that point led to her death. And I don’t blame you for thinking the worst of me, kiddo.”
His face scrunched up, and so did mine. The tears rushed down our miserable faces. There was so much pain, so much guilt, so many lies and despair vibrating in the room that it devastated us both in different but powerful ways.
“Your mother was done,” he continued, his eyes swollen and red-rimmed. “With me. With the marriage. And I didn’t blame her. Although a foolish part of me hoped that we could return to being the family we once were and thought we could still be. But her light grew dimmer, and she became more distant and colder as the days passed. And I wanted nothing more than to be the one to take that pain away. The pain I had inflicted on her myself.”
I grabbed William’s hand and pulled him toward me, silently asking him to sit on the bed and hold me. He did.
“No matter how much I begged, your mother told me a few days before her death that it would soon become impossible to stay. She wanted to return to New York with you and start a new life without me in it—here, actually.” He looked around the apartment and smiled, as if he could imagine her alive and well, living a different life. “The way she gave me her ultimatum felt so cryptic, and my obsession with retaining her didn’t allow me to see the signs.”
“That she was pregnant and would soon start to show,” I said, unable to fathom how different my life would’ve been if we had left and my mom had been able to give birth to that baby. She’d still be alive, and I would have an eight-year-old sibling. I wouldn’t have met Thomas or Caleb because I would’ve never gone to Paris, but William … I was always destined to cross paths with him, no matter what.
“I didn’t know she was pregnant!” He cried out, his voice raw with emotion as he crumbled back onto my sofa, collapsing against the cushions with a heavy thud. “I’m so sorry,” he sobbed, his voice choked with tears, as he buried his face in his hands. “I didn’t know. I didn’t find out until the autopsy.”
“When you came to see me in May,” I reminded him, angrily brushing away the tears from my face. “You said: no more secrets. And still, you deliberately withheld this very important piece of information from me.”
“These secrets were never meant for you to discover.”
“But the truth always finds its way out, doesn’t it?” My crying had stopped, and a feeling of numbness took over. It was becoming too much to process, so dissociating seemed like the convenient way out of this emotional mess.
“I never meant to hurt you, kiddo,” he muttered, his words barely audible amidst his sobs. “I know you don’t trust me anymore, but I’ll do whatever it takes—anything you need, even if it means staying away—so long as you can find it in you to stop looking at me like that one day.”
I considered his pleading words with equal parts loathing and compassion, witnessing the agony pouring out of his body after years of being kept locked up inside him.
Deep in my heart, I knew this was the complete truth I’d been seeking all this time. It devastated me that I had to stumble against every crumb along the way instead of having it offered up freely during the countless opportunities my dad had possessed whenever I brought up the subject.
“The problem is you never trusted me to begin with,” I retorted. “You never trusted me to know how to make my own choices, to think for myself and figure out what was best for me on my own, or to make mistakes and learn from them, including learning the real story between you and Mom,” I asserted firmly. “But I navigated through it all regardless.”
“Please forgive me,” he pleaded, rising slowly from the sofa as if the weight of his body had become an unbearable burden. “For everything.”
“I don’t know how to recover from this,” I admitted. “I can only hope that I will someday, as I have with everything else that’s happened in the past.”
Nodding, he squeezed his eyes shut and rested a hand on his hips. “I love you, kiddo. Even if it seems like I’ve gone out of my way to convince you otherwise.” Resigned and depleted of anything else to say, he walked out of my bedroom, and I held on to William as I listened to my dad’s footsteps grow softer and more distant until the front door clicked shut behind him.