A crow cawed in the distance. “Go to hell.”
“No, thanks. I’ve been there these past couple of days, and I don’t care to go back. I spoke with Avery Bryan yesterday, and she’ll be attending Haywood’s funeral tomorrow.”
She gasped. “She doesn’t know . . .”
“Not yet,” I said. “But she needs to know, same as Dylan.”
“No, she doesn’t.”
“Dylan’s her brother,” I said. “The only family she has left.”
She sniffed. “Half brother.”
“As if that makes a difference,” I said, rolling my eyes. “She’s moving up here in December.”
Patricia went so pale I was afraid she was going to faint. “She can’t.”
“She is.”
“This is a nightmare,” she murmured, her hand shaking as she continued to pet Louella. “It started when I found out about Harris’s affair and I’ve yet to wake up thirty years later.”
“How exactly did you end up with Dylan?” I asked casually, hoping she’d tell me the whole story.
She eyed me for a moment, but finally said, “When I found out about Harris’s indiscretion, I gave him an ultimatum. Me or her. He chose me, and broke things off with Twilabeth. I forgave him.”
“I’m surprised you stayed.” In fact, I was shocked she hadn’t killed him dead on the spot.
“I loved him.” She lifted her shoulders in a gentle shrug. “Turns out you can compromise a lot in the name of love.”
So true.
“Shortly after their breakup, Twilabeth learned she was pregnant,” Patricia said. “That was the first time she tried to kill herself.”
I watched her carefully. She didn’t speak with any kind of hateful inflection. It was simply as though she was stating the facts.
“She was in a psychiatric hospital when Dylan was born and not yet ready to be released. The staff contacted Harris—she’d listed him as her spouse on her paperwork. She said she couldn’t raise the baby, that she couldn’t even care for herself properly. She told Harris he should take the baby and put him up for adoption. Harris couldn’t bring himself to do it, so he brought him home. To me. I’m not able to have children of my own, and as much as I resented the fact that Harris was bringing his bastard child into my house, I took one look at Dylan’s face and fell in love.”
I knew the feeling.
“I told friends we’d adopted privately. No one knew of the affair. Twilabeth was in and out of hospitals after that, and eventually found the right combination of medications. She never questioned Harris about what happened to Dylan, but I’d see her sometimes watching him from afar. She eventually married Haywood and seemed to be moving on with her life.”
“That’s when you turned on Haywood, isn’t it? When he married her?”
“I was afraid she’d told him the truth about Dylan, that he knew my darkest secret and was pitying me behind my back. Or worse, waiting to use the information against me.”
It almost made me feel sorry for her. “Do you know why she and Haywood broke up?”
“I only heard rumors of her mania starting up again and it causing issues between them. I had a private investigator keeping tabs on her when she moved, so I knew when she was with child again. This time when the baby was born, she didn’t let anyone know, and I assumed it was because she didn’t want Haywood to take the girl away from her in light of her mental instability. After Avery’s birth, however, I never learned of any other manic episodes, so Twilabeth must have found a good doctor down in Auburn.”
As I watched her talk, I realized this was the longest conversation I’d ever had with her in all the years I’d known her. The wind ruffled my hair, and I tucked strands behind my ears. “You must have panicked when Avery walked into that ball.”
“She may as well have been wearing a sandwich board proclaiming her relationship to Dylan. They look quite similar.”
They had the same jawline, the same smile, the same eyes. But it wasn’t quite as noticeable to a stranger as it might have been to someone who knew Dylan as well as I did.
A plea was in Patricia’s eyes as she looked at me. “You can’t tell him. I promise I won’t ever give the two of you a moment’s trouble ever again if you do this for me. Please.”
With a sigh, I clasped my hands and set them on the table. “What do you think would have happened if Gabriel Kirby had simply admitted he accidentally ran over Virgil Keane the day he did it?”
She tipped her head as though wondering where I was going with this but said, “I’m not certain. He probably would have been arrested for vehicular manslaughter, but with the cancer playing such a factor, I’m not sure he’d have ever been formally charged. If he had been, he’d probably have gotten off light.”
“Would you have thought any less of him if you’d known what happened that night?” I asked.
“Of course not. His eyes . . . It had been dark. It was an accident. They do happen.”