25. Heath #2
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m simply reorganizing some of my belongings. Planning a little trip.”
“With your passport on the nightstand and a one-way ticket to Switzerland in your purse?”
Her eyes flickered to the items I had spotted, confirming what I already knew. She had been planning to flee. To disappear to another country where extradition would be complicated and expensive.
“The police traced the money,” I said, stepping further into the room. “They know you paid Kendall. They know you gave her the gate codes. They know you financed the entire operation. The shell companies, the wire transfers, all of it leads back to you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Stop lying!” The words came out louder than I intended, echoing off the high ceilings. “For once in your miserable life, stop lying and tell me the truth. Did you hire those men to break into my home? Did you pay Kendall to kidnap my wife?”
My mother’s face changed. The polished mask she had worn for sixty years cracked and fell away, revealing the cold, ugly creature underneath. The one I had always known was there but had never allowed myself to see clearly.
“Did you really think I was going to let her destroy everything?” Her voice was low, vicious. “Did you really think I was going to stand by and watch while that woman dragged our family name through the mud?”
“Del hasn’t done anything to our family.”
“She’s done everything!” Montana was shouting now, her composure completely gone. “She took you away from me. She turned you against your own mother. She made you forget where you came from, what you owe to this family, what generations of Fairchilds have sacrificed to build our legacy.”
“Our legacy of what? Cruelty? Manipulation? Trying to murder people who don’t fit your definition of acceptable?”
“She was never going to fit! From the moment you brought her home, I knew she was wrong. A middle-class nobody with no breeding, no connections, no understanding of what it means to be a Fairchild.”
“I didn’t marry her for her breeding.”
“No, you married her because you were thinking with your anatomy instead of your brain! You threw away a perfectly good match with Kendall for some engineer’s daughter who didn’t even know which fork to use at dinner!”
“Kendall was never a match. Kendall was your obsession, not mine.”
“Kendall would have been perfect!” My mother’s eyes were wild now, her hands clenched into fists at her sides.
“She understood our world. She knew how to behave, how to dress, how to represent the Fairchild name. She would have given you beautiful children with proper bloodlines, not some mongrel half-breed conceived in a bathroom or a backseat or wherever it is that people like your wife conduct their affairs.”
Del made a sound beside me. A small, wounded sound that made my blood boil.
“Don’t you dare,” I said, my voice deadly quiet. “Don’t you dare talk about my child that way.”
“Your child? How do you even know it’s yours? A woman like that, from that kind of background, who knows what she was doing while you were working late? Who knows how many men...”
I moved toward her, and for a moment I think she actually thought I was going to hit her. She flinched back, her eyes going wide with fear. But I stopped a foot away, my fists clenched, my body shaking with the effort of controlling myself.
“Let me be very clear,” I said. “You’re going to prison. Not because I’m pressing charges, though I am. Not because Del is pressing charges, though she is. But because what you did was monstrous, and monsters belong in cages.”
“I was protecting this family!”
“You were destroying this family. You’ve been destroying this family for as long as I can remember. The constant criticism. The impossible standards. The way you made everyone around you feel small and worthless so you could feel big and important.”
“Everything I did was for you!”
“Everything you did was for yourself. For your pride and your reputation and your pathetic need to control everyone around you.” I took a breath, steadying myself.
“I used to wonder why Father spent so much time at the office. Why he was always traveling, always finding excuses to be anywhere but home. Now I understand. He was running from you. Just like I should have been running from you for years.”
My mother’s face contorted with rage. “Your father loved me!”
“My father tolerated you. There’s a difference.”
“How dare you-”
“He told me, Mother. Right before he died. He said marrying you was the biggest mistake of his life. He said the only good thing that came out of it was me, and he was sorry he hadn’t gotten me away from you sooner.”
I didn’t know if that was true. My father had said a lot of things in his final days, drifting in and out of consciousness, his mind muddled by pain and medication. But the look on my mother’s face when I said it was worth any uncertainty.
“You’re lying.”
“Am I? You’ll never know, will you? Because he’s gone, and I’m all you have left. And I want nothing to do with you. Not now. Not ever again.”
“You can’t abandon your own mother!”
“Watch me.”
Sirens. Getting closer. Blue and red lights flashing through the windows.
My mother heard them too. Her face went from rage to panic in an instant.
“Heath, please.” Her voice changed, suddenly wheedling, desperate. “Please, darling. I’m your mother. Whatever I did, I did because I love you. Because I wanted what was best for you.”
“What’s best for me is a wife who loves me and a child on the way and a life as far away from you as I can possibly get.”
“You can’t let them arrest me. Think of the scandal. Think of what people will say.”
“I don’t care what people say. I care about protecting my family. My real family.”
The front door burst open. Officers poured in, guns drawn, shouting commands. My mother screamed as they grabbed her arms, fought them as they wrenched her hands behind her back, cursed and spit and shrieked as they snapped the handcuffs around her wrists.
“This is your fault!” she screamed at Del, her face twisted with hatred. “You did this! You destroyed everything! I hope you rot in hell, you worthless, gold-digging whore!”
Del stepped forward. Calm. Controlled. Her face utterly expressionless.
And slapped my mother across the face.
The sound was sharp and satisfying, cracking through the chaos. Montana’s head snapped to the side. A red mark bloomed across her cheek.
“That’s for mongrel half-breed,” Del said quietly. “And for trying to have me killed. And for making my husband’s life miserable for thirty-five years.”
The officers pulled Montana toward the door.
She was still screaming, still fighting, still spewing hatred with every breath.
I watched them drag her down the front steps, watched them put her in the back of a police car, watched the neighbors emerge from their houses to stare and whisper and record everything on their phones.
Good. Let them see. Let everyone see what happened to people who tried to hurt my family.
When the car finally pulled away, I turned to Del. She was shaking, I realized. Trembling all over, her eyes bright with unshed tears.
I pulled her into my arms and held her tight. She hugged me back, her arms wrapped around my waist, her face pressed against my chest.
“It’s over,” I said. “It’s finally over.”
“Is it?”
“She’s going to prison. Kendall’s going to prison.
The three men they hired are all in custody now.
Everyone who tried to hurt you is going to face consequences.
” I pulled back just enough to look at her face.
“We’re free, Del. We can start over. We can build the life we want, without anyone trying to tear it apart. ”
“I love you,” she said.
“I know,” I said, and kissed her forehead. “Let’s go home.”
“Which home?”
I smiled. “The one we’re going to build together.”
She smiled back, tears sliding down her cheeks, and rose up on her toes to kiss me. Right there in my mother’s half-packed living room, with police tape going up around us and curious neighbors watching from across the street.
“Take me to France,” she said against my lips.
“With pleasure, Mrs. Fairchild.”