Chapter Eleven
Slowly, the inn starts emptying out.
The few guests who hadn’t already canceled decide to leave early.
I numbly agree to refunds and hear myself say things like “Always a gamble this time of year!” and “Of course, there’s no sense in staying and worrying!
” But it’s like some other Geneva has taken over, some autopilot system that knows how to walk and talk and say the right thing to guests while the other Geneva—the real one—sits shattered and unmoored and overwhelmed.
I’ve lived in this kind of split world ever since yesterday morning, ever since August’s question—Geneva, did you really not know Landon Fitzroy was your father?—ripped my own personal space-time continuum in half.
I didn’t know. Didn’t even suspect.
That’s what I’d told August, or tried to, after I’d gotten past the knee-jerk denial.
There’s no way, I would’ve known, Mom would’ve told me once I was an adult, my dad would’ve realized, and he never—
But I hadn’t even been able to finish the sentence because I knew it wasn’t true, what I’d been about to say. That my father never would’ve raised another man’s child as his own.
My dad was gentle, kind, easier to understand than Mom for so many reasons, and he’d loved my mom fiercely. Devotedly.
He’d loved me the same.
That’s the one steadying thought I’ve been clinging to for the past twenty-four hours, that even if Landon Fitzroy had fathered me, Dad was still my dad, and that was a different thing, and in any other world, it would be the only thing that mattered.
Except in my world, the man who fathered me had maybe been murdered, possibly by the woman currently staying at my inn, a woman who had apparently been very close with my mom but whom Mom had never mentioned.
Does Lo know?
That had been my first question to August, after the denials sputtered out, after my lips, numb with shock, could finally make sounds again.
I’m not sure, he’d replied, but his eyes had been almost feverishly bright as he’d said, But if she did … Geneva, if Lo found out that Landon had also been seeing Ellen, that he’d gotten Ellen pregnant …
He didn’t have to finish the thought.
The motive they’d assigned Lo at her trial—that she was on the verge of being dumped and refused to take it—hadn’t managed to hold much water.
But what if she had learned that her lover, the man she was depending on, had simultaneously been carrying on with one of her closest friends?
Was, in fact, having a baby with that friend?
Suddenly, murder might make a lot more sense.
I haven’t seen Lo since yesterday morning. I figure she’s giving me a wide berth after our tense moment in the lobby, and I’m grateful for it because I can’t be sure that I won’t start throwing questions—accusations—at her like they were grenades.
But at the same time, as I reminded August yesterday, it’s just a picture.
A picture isn’t proof. The likeness is eerie, though, I admit that, and when August and I looked at the dates—when my parents got married, when Landon died, when I was born—they lined up.
Landon was dead by August 5. Mom and Dad were engaged later that month, married by September, and I was born March 3.
“Which would’ve meant you were conceived in late May, early June,” August had said, stacking his hands on top of his head as he gazed into the middle distance. “If we can find out if Landon was here around that time…”
That’s when I’d bailed.
It was too much to process, and I could see that August’s journalist brain was already whirring, the book morphing as a new narrative began taking shape in his head.
The book.
Another land mine exploding under my feet.
If August was right, this revelation would be going into a book.
This sordid secret that my mother had kept for years, not even revealing to her own flesh and blood, would be something strangers would read about on planes and in waiting rooms, or listen to while walking on treadmills, and they’d judge her—they’d judge us—and think what trashy people we were.
Sure, it might mean more people came to the inn, but it would only be so that they could judge in person.
Those were the thoughts that circled my brain last night, round and round, keeping sleep far away until I’d finally gotten up, determined to look through Mom’s clippings again only to remember I’d given them to August, which had started all of … this.
He wasn’t around this morning, and by the time I’ve checked out the last guest, my skin is nearly itching with the desire to get out of the inn.
I go visit Edie first, but there’s little change.
It’ll be a few more days before they can start bringing her out of the coma, and I get to see her for only a few minutes at a time, squeezing her chilled hand, telling her the weather is fine and there’s nothing to worry about, even as a TV in the corner of the ICU waiting room scrolls a banner saying Tropical Storm Lizzie has officially been upgraded to a hurricane.
On the drive to Hope House, I pass the big Walmart and see people bringing out cases of bottled water, mountains of toilet paper, and I grip the steering wheel a little tighter.
There’s little change at Hope House, either, but that’s always how it is. Like the whole place is frozen under glass and starts up again only when someone visits.
Mom is sitting in her usual spot, her recliner turned toward the windows, and I pause before I walk into the room, looking at the back of her head.
The truth is in there, somewhere, under that fall of silvering dark hair, but her disease means that she might as well be a locked vault. The unfairness of it all washes over me every time I’m here, but this time, there’s a sharper edge to it, honed by desperation.
Just five minutes. Just give me five minutes with her so she can tell me what happened that summer. Who I am, who she was, because I’m not sure I know anymore.
I move into her room, cross over to her chair, and crouch down in front of it.
Her eyes look through me, her lips slightly parted.
“Mom,” I say softly. “Why didn’t you tell me?
About Landon Fitzroy. I understand why you couldn’t when I was younger, but after Dad was gone.
When I was an adult … I would’ve understood.
Or I want to think I would have. And I wish you had trusted me with it. I wish…”
Too many things, really, and none of them are going to come true.
“Everything okay in here?”
I look past Mom to see Opal, my favorite nurse, standing in the doorway, a plastic pitcher in hand.
“Yes,” I say, then can’t help a bitter laugh. “I mean, no, but—”
“I get you, honey,” Opal says, her eyes kind. “And don’t you worry about this storm they say might be headed our way. Our director, Ms. Diane, lived through Marie back in eighty-four, and she takes evacuation orders seriously. If it gets bad, we’ll get your mama somewhere safe.”
Guilt stabs low and deep that I hadn’t even been thinking about the storm, what they might need to do with Mom, but I nod at Opal and thank her.
Rising to my feet, my knees protesting, I sigh and lean down to kiss Mom’s temple. “I love you. I miss you,” I tell her, just like always, but this time, I lean in a little closer and murmur, “And I know whatever lies you told or secrets you kept, you had a good reason.”
I glance down at her hands, hoping they might move like they did the other day, that she can give me some kind of sign all of this is getting through.
But they just lie there, limp in her lap.
The sleeve of her cardigan is snagged on something around her wrist, and I go to straighten it, smiling a little as I do.
It’s one of the things I’ve always liked about Hope House, that when they get the patients dressed, they’ll add little bits of their own jewelry from home, something to help things feel a little more normal, a little less sad.
I’d brought up a box of Mom’s stuff when we moved her in.
Not the fancy pieces like Grandma Eileen’s ruby ring or the tennis bracelet Dad got her for their twenty-fifth anniversary, but some of the costume bits she had, things I’d seen her wear occasionally.
Her sweater has gotten caught on the little enamel flowers of a silver bangle, a bracelet Mom actually hadn’t worn all that often in my memory, but one I liked for how different it was from anything else in her collection.
The silver filigree makes it look like a tiara in miniature, and the flowers are cute and colorful, a now-faded riot of pinks and blues and yellows.
I situate it on her wrist, running my thumb over the silver disk that makes up the center of the bracelet, like a full moon rising over a garden.
For the first time, I realize there’s an engraving on the disk, faded with time and wear but still visible.
I lift Mom’s wrist up, her arm limp, and tilt the bracelet toward the window.
The light catches on the disk, a brief glare stinging my eyes, but not before I see the letter delicately etched into the surface.
L