Chapter 29 #2
“She only came back because she had to.” Her voice softened as the pain touched her words. “And they all treated us like the trash you left behind.”
He took a breath. “She never was going to tell me. But she didn’t have to. Everyone knew the second she showed back up with you.” He turned his sad face to her. “I didn’t want that for you. I tried…”
When he didn’t finish, she prompted him. “Tried what? Paying her to take me somewhere else? To hide?”
“You would’ve had a good life! I would’ve made sure everything was taken care of, and you wouldn’t have had to deal with the whispers.”
She’d overheard the conversation, lying on the floor coloring while they’d argued on the front porch. She remembered how mad her mama was that he never looked at his own child, never tried to be her father.
“She didn’t want your money.”
“No, she didn’t. She wanted what I couldn’t give her.” Regret softened his tone. “What I wasn’t willing to give her at the time.”
Jocelyn wrapped her arms around herself as he rubbed a hand down his face, looking less and less like the golden boy of Cedar Hollow. He was a pillar of regret, of bad decisions and miserable circumstances.
“I was just trying to do the right thing. But every decision I made was wrong. Everyone has suffered for it. And I don’t know what would’ve been better for any of us. Because you and your sister… If I hadn’t married Lydia, where would they be?”
She wanted to hold onto the fury, the righteous indignation, but she couldn’t when he put it like that.
Natasha deserved to have a family, too. And Jocelyn realized she could never fully understand his motivations or the circumstances that led him down the path he’d walked.
She knew nothing of who he was, nothing of where he came from.
Her short conversation with Errol had been the most she’d ever talked to the man, or anyone on this side of her family.
What history formed the man before her today? He’d been young when all of this happened. Stuck between two women, and only one who’d told him he’d fathered her child.
“You did the best you could.” It cost her to say it, the words bruising and scraping at her throat as they went.
He glanced up at the acknowledgment.
“But she still died that day. And you were there.”
Moisture shimmered in his eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
She slashed at the air as if to knock his useless apology away. “I need to know if you remember anything that could help me find out why.”
Something shifted in his expression, like it was the first time he’d considered it might not have been an accident. Her accusation earlier had probably seemed like a wounded child throwing out barbs to cut her absentee father down a peg.
“You don’t think it was just an accident.” It wasn’t a question, and she could see him flipping through the event in his mind with a new lens.
That sense of intensity skated through her as it always did when someone gave her a platform. “The reason I came back was to find out what happened and why. It’s been suspicious from the get-go, but no one is willing to look into it.”
His face hardened. “You talked to Eric?”
“Eric Ward?” She snorted. “Fat lot of good that did me. He promised to give me more information then blew me off.”
He sighed. “He’s going through a divorce.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Not really anything new.” He shrugged and continued as if this was important to the conversation. “They’ve separated many times.”
She squinted at him.
He waved the unspoken question away. “Sorry. He’s Lydia’s brother.”
“Lydia’s brother,” she repeated. Something about that felt significant, though she couldn’t pinpoint why at first. But her own thought about firefighters being the perfect arsonists because of their understanding of fire rolled back through her mind.
Could the reason Eric Ward had dragged his feet be that he wanted the culprit to stay buried?
“Lydia—your wife?”
Daniel went unnervingly still, as if that was an accusation in itself.
There was no denying that Lydia hated Jocelyn’s mama.
She had a fair enough reason, even if the person she should’ve hated was the man across the room from Jocelyn.
Was it possible Lydia had hated her mama enough to hurt her—accidentally or intentionally—and then she’d had to find a way to cover up what she’d done?
Natasha had mentioned driving by their house more than once.
But who didn’t? It wasn’t in the back woods.
But she’d said many times, like it was an unusual amount.
Jocelyn turned away from Daniel’s intense gaze, brushing her fingers over her lips as she replayed that conversation.
One day it was there; the next day, it was gone.
Jocelyn had taken it as a turn of phrase, a child’s observation of things without true knowledge of the frequency or the time that had passed.
But if driving by was a regular occurrence, maybe they’d driven by that day.
Could it have been when Daniel was there, trying to convince her mama to keep their affair going?
Had Lydia gone back later?
Jocelyn pulled the newspaper clipping from her purse, staring at it again. The person had highlighted the phrase “sad accident,” but just above that, a sentence cut in half she’d missed before was visible if she really studied it: “consistent with a blow to the head.”
Jocelyn swallowed, her mind spinning and spinning. “I-I have to go.”
Daniel’s hand stretched toward her. “Wait. Please, Jocelyn.”
She’d taken two steps back, but that tone, the plea in it stilled her movements.
“Will you forgive me? For-for everything I did and… didn’t do?” His voice broke a little. “I wish to God things had been different.”
There was that little twinge inside her, the knowledge that, damn it, she didn’t really know what had led him to make the choices he had. But her mama had suffered for it, and it wasn’t something she took lightly.
“I don’t know,” she answered truthfully. “Maybe someday.”
His lips flattened as he nodded acceptance of that answer, but his shoulders slumped.
She turned to go, ignoring the pull of sympathy.