Max stiffened, bile caustic in her throat. She hated uncles, hated her own more than anything else in the world. Except perhaps as much as she despised herself for sitting and listening to Izzie Monroe lacerate her life with Cameron.
Izzie shrugged. “Well, he was only her uncle by marriage. Aunt Evelyn’s husband.”
Max let her head fall forward onto the table, rested with her eyes closed, and assimilated the data.
“No one’s heard from them since?” Witt asked.
Air currents flowed. She was sure Izzie nodded her head.
No one had heard from Cordelia or Evelyn’s husband, BJ, in almost thirty years.
Chapter Fourteen
“I hate you I hate you I hate you,” Max chanted without a breath between.
“You sound like a child,” Cameron whispered in her head.
She wanted to throw things like a child.
Witt was in the next room. He moved about, a door closing with more than necessary force, a noisy cough, as if he wanted her to know he could hear her as easily as she heard him.
It didn’t make her lower her voice. “You goddamn bastard.”
“Why does this hurt so much?”
How could Cameron not know? How could he not understand that it was like he’d been with another woman?
“They were letters, she was an old friend, I thought she’d be able to tell me if she ever heard from Cordelia. They were friends.”
“How do you know what you thought? You’re not supposed to remember a damn thing.”
“I remember it all now Izzie’s out in the open with you.”
“That’s so much bullshit. And so damn convenient.”
“I don’t know how this memory thing works any more than you do.”
“You say that so you can change the rules to suit yourself.”
Unable to stand still, she paced the small room. Witt’s TV went on, blaring. She didn’t care if that, too, was another message. “Why didn’t you tell me about her?” She couldn’t bare to say the woman’s name. “Why did you need to keep her a secret?”
“Why did you keep secrets from me?”
“I kept those things from myself, too. You weren’t special in that, Cameron.” Childhood things, bad things, like the nights her uncle came to her room, like the murder she’d committed when she was thirteen. She’d hidden them away in the deepest part of her mind. She hadn’t let herself remember while Cameron was alive. It had taken his death, taken the visions, the murders of her soul sisters Wendy, Tiffany, and Bethany, and her friendship with Angela to drag her head out of the sand.
She wished now she could have stayed there like an ostrich.
Pacing wasn’t enough. She grabbed the album she’d thrown on the orange bedspread, yanked a drawer open, intending to hide it. The drawer was full of clothes and nonsense. She slammed it shut. The volume of Witt’s TV went up another notch.
God, it was so like Cameron to turn the tables on her, so like her to let him do it. She sucked in a breath, held it. “Why didn’t I ever see a letter from Izzie?” She almost spat the name at him.
He was quiet a long moment. She died a little inside, like the night she’d watched him lying amongst the Cheetos, the night she thought he’d left her for good. “I gave her the office address.”
She turned from the glowing red of his eyes in the corner of the darkened room, turned her back on him, threw the album on the bed, next to the damn yearbook she’d left there earlier, and stalked to the bathroom. She didn’t ask him why, but the question crackled like electricity in the air around her.
“We’d been writing since long before I met you. She had the work address, I saw no reason to change it.”
She flipped on the overhead light in the bathroom, squinted. “You’re making excuses,” she whispered.
“It was never because I didn’t love you.”
She stared at her pale face in the mirror, her light makeup long since worn off. It was because he couldn’t share everything with her, because in a way he’d had to share about her. “Did you tell her stuff about us, about our relationship?”
Again, that painful ominous silence. She grabbed a washcloth, ran the water until it scalded her hands, then put the cloth to her face. God, the warmth felt good, leaching the strength from her even as it soothed.
“Sometimes I wrote about you. I told her how wonderful and smart you were, that I admired you as well as loved you.”
Her heart contracted. She lowered the washcloth, stared at her now reddened face. “What did you tell her about the other times?”
“I didn’t complain about you, if that’s what you mean. I ...”
Unwrapping a piece of soap, she wet it, then rubbed it into foam against the rough material. “You what?”
He didn’t answer right away. She scrubbed her face, kept on scrubbing, waiting, scrubbing until she’d scraped her skin raw.
Then he spoke. “Sometimes I asked her what she thought. She was a woman.”
Max rinsed the cloth, laid it on the bathroom counter. Her hands shook. There was more. She didn’t want to hear. She covered her ears as she walked into the bedroom, stopped by the bed for the album, looking for a place to put it so she didn’t have to see it ...