For the first time since she’d come out to the garage, Josie really felt the cold. It was like a living thing creeping all over her body. She thought of what Amber had said in the car. When you are raised to lie, you don’t know any other way. Josie put a palm to her forehead, again trying to shift all the puzzle pieces in her mind.
Devon kept the gun pointed downward, at the top of Amber’s head. “My father was dead. I had had five miscarriages. My husband had left me. One day, this pitiful little girl shows up on my doorstep with a little tiny baby. She told me that she worked at the coffee shop my dad stopped at every day and that she had gotten to know him well. She said he was always so upset that I kept losing baby after baby, and he said he didn’t know how much more I could take. Then she told me her sister had been raped. She said they’d hidden the pregnancy from their parents by running away. They were so stupid, she told me. They hadn’t thought anything through, but they couldn’t go back home with a baby and they didn’t want to go to the police. She said she remembered my father talking about me and wondered if I still wanted a baby. She was very convincing.”
Josie said, “You took a baby from a seventeen-year-old stranger?”
Devon’s head snapped toward Josie. She glared. “Lilly would have gone into foster care. Who knows where she would have ended up? I gave her a stable and loving home. She was my miracle. She even got me my husband back for a short time. Lucky for me, we’d slept together a few times nine or ten months before Lilly arrived. Then he went away to the Middle East to do some kind of independent contracting work for almost a year. It wasn’t easy to contact him while he was there, so I had that going for me. By the time he returned, Lilly was already two months old. He was furious that I never even told him I was pregnant, but he got over it pretty fast the first time he held her. We had five great years as a family before things fell apart again. And she arrived in my life on my father’s birthday.” Devon nudged Amber with a sneakered foot. “Did you know that? Did you do that on purpose?”
Amber shook her head, wiping at her face with the back of her sleeve. “All I knew was that you wanted a baby, that your father was a great man, and I thought you must be great, too because he raised you. I thought she would be safe with you.”
“She was!” Devon shouted. “She was, until your sister opened her big, stupid mouth.”
Amber pointed to her own chest. “I was supposed to be the only person who knew where Lilly went! I never even told Eden. That was our deal. No one could know, not even her.”
“Then how did she know?” asked Devon, nudging Amber with the barrel of the gun again. Josie tried to calculate whether or not she could successfully tackle Devon without the pistol going off, but her finger was on the trigger and they were in extremely close quarters. Too dangerous.
“I didn’t tell her,” Amber said. “I swear. After I brought Lilly to you, I told Eden that I had found her a very good home. She never questioned it. Not until after she came clean with Thatcher. After she told him the truth, she called asking me all kinds of questions about the baby, like how I knew she was safe. All I told her was that I knew her daughter was safe because the person I gave her to had wanted a baby for a long, long time, and I knew she would be a good parent. That’s all I said.”
“Then how did she figure it out?” Devon shouted.
Amber stared up at Devon with wide, teary eyes. More blood trickled from her nostrils. “I don’t know! Maybe because when we were teenagers there was a limited number of people we knew who might just accept a baby with no questions asked? She knew how much guilt I carried over what we did to your father. I’ve never gotten over it. I knew about your miscarriages. That was true. Your dad did tell me all those things, just not in a coffee shop. He told me when I came in for sessions. He was usually on the phone with you when I got there. He was so distraught over everything you went through. Back then, I always cried to Eden about how horrible it was that you had lost all those babies and your father. I think Eden just figured it out and told Thatcher her theory. But I promise I did not tell her. She shouldn’t have told anyone either.”
Devon pressed the gun into her forehead. “Thatcher Toland came here looking for a little girl. He said he knew all about what the Watts family had done to my father. He said he believed that one of them had brought me a baby and then he said that baby was his. I lied and said it wasn’t true, of course. Do you think I’d let him get his hands on my Lilly? Do you think I’d let any of you get your lying, filthy hands on my angel?”
“Why not kill him?” Josie asked. “After Eden, he had the biggest claim to Lilly.”
Devon kept the gun trained on Amber’s head but glanced at Josie. “I would have, eventually, but killing someone as famous as Thatcher Toland? That was going to take some research.”
Josie thought about the book Devon had given her. “You weren’t really a member of his church, were you?”
“Of course not,” Devon spat. “I only read his book to find out more about him. I went to the church to see what kind of security he had around him.”
Josie looked down at Amber. She was shivering. “You found that empty patient file on your father’s desk after his death marked ‘Ella Purdue.’ You had no idea that Amber was Ella Purdue all this time?”
Devon shook her head. “No, of course not. I just thought she was some scared, stupid teenage girl. When she started working as the press liaison here, I recognized her but I never dared approach her. We made a deal.”
Josie tried to put herself in Devon’s shoes. A young married woman desperate for a child. Miscarriage after miscarriage. A failed marriage. Her father’s mysterious and sudden death. It must have seemed like a miracle when a young girl showed up on her doorstep with a baby on her father’s birthday. Josie could see how in Devon’s warped mind, it must have seemed like her father had somehow given his blessing to the arrangement. And it had gone off perfectly for ten years until one day Thatcher Toland showed up at her doorstep and told her everything. He put names to the faces behind Jeremy Rafferty’s demise. Josie tried to imagine Devon’s shock when she realized one of those faces was the very girl who had given her a child.
Even though Thatcher hadn’t seen Lilly that day, it would only have been a matter of time before he figured it out for certain. A simple DNA test would have blown all of their lives apart. Devon’s plot to annihilate the entire Watts family served both her need for revenge and her need to protect her daughter. Vivian Toland and Gabriel had likely been on the same path, but their goal had been to eliminate the Wattses in order to protect Thatcher.