“No more light and no more secrets.”
“Okay. So it went like this. Kellen and I had a half brother. His name was Vincent. We had no idea he existed. None. My mother never, ever mentioned him. She never breathed a word about another marriage other than the one to my father. As far as we knew, Dad had been her only husband, for reasons we found out much later. I was in college, studying veterinary medicine, and Kellen was bumming his way through life, delivering pizzas while he figured out what he wanted to do with himself. Mom was in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s.” She choked on the word—still so hard to say out loud, even now. Her mother’s deterioration had been one of the longest, hardest, most draining periods in her move to adult-hood. Draining and sometimes unbearable.
“And your father was already gone.”
“Right.”
“And?”
Delaney scoffed with a snorting huff. “This Vincent shows up, and he has proof he’s our half brother. Real proof, Clyde. He had a bunch of pictures of my mom and him. All sorts of pictures. But it wasn’t just that—he had other proof, too. Birth certificates and a marriage license—stuff we followed up on and found county records, divorce papers for.” Even now, she still couldn’t believe how Vincent’s father had managed to cover it all up.
“And what was his explanation for why he lived with his father all those years and not your mother and you?”
Vincent had had an answer for everything. “His claim was that all of his life his father, Richard, had told him his mother—my mother—was dead. Vincent said Richard could barely talk about it without becoming enraged, but when his father died, he’d left a will with a confession about my mother in it. He’d told Vincent from a very young age that my mother left them before her eventual death. Richard knew all about my mother and us—he’d kept tabs on us over the years. In this letter, he made it look like she’d gone off and gotten herself some new family and that telling Vincent she was dead was easier on a little boy than telling him his mother ditched his ass, but just before his death, he had some private detective find us so he’d be able to leave Vincent the information.”
“A coward even in death,” Clyde said with distaste.
“Anyway, once we got past the shock and disbelief, the endless questions about why Mom had never breathed a word about Vincent and a former marriage—questions he knew damned well we couldn’t ask her because of her debilitation—both Kellen and I decided he was family. Where we come from—how we were raised—you don’t turn away family. Anyway, we were young. I was almost twenty at the time, Kellen was eighteen, and Vincent was pushing thirty-five when we met him. Thirty-five and rich. He had buttloads of money, and between college and Mom’s care, well, we were drained. The life insurance policy after my father’s death was slowly running out—which meant I’d have to leave college to keep her where she was.”
“But Vincent had an answer, and I’m betting cash and a savior complex were involved.” Clyde’s words were snide, angry.
Delaney pinched her eyes with her thumb and forefinger to keep tears from flowing. “He said she was his mother, too. He was some rich defense attorney by then, and Kellen and I were stupid and hopeful—so hopeful we were willing to do whatever we had to, to give every comfort to our mother until she passed.”
“And Vincent helped.”
“Hoo boy—did he ever. But there were things about Vincent we could never quite pinpoint that made both of us really uncomfortable.”
“Like?”