Cam gets up so fast that I rock back in surprise, almost knocked over by his long legs as he strides away from me, one hand on his hip, the other rubbing his mouth.
He stands there in the middle of the room, and something starts to go cold inside me, sinking into my veins, my heart.
“It wasn’t a shock. Finding her,” he says as I sit there on the plush carpet of Ruby’s bedroom and wait for him to say what my sick stomach and dazed mind somehow already know.
“I knew she was dead when I opened the door,” he goes on, and he turns, our gazes meeting, and I want to tell him to stop there, not to say the next part, the part that he won’t be able to take back, the part I won’t be able to unhear.
“I knew. Because I killed her.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Camden
“I killed her.”
The words hang in the air, words I’ve never said out loud before. You’d imagine it would feel good, getting something like that off your chest, even if you know it’s about to ruin your fucking life.
But it doesn’t feel like anything. It’s just a fact, one I’ve tried to run from, though I’ve now learned you can’t run from these kinds of things.
They always catch you in the end.
Jules is still sitting on the floor, her legs twisted to one side, her eyes wide in a pale face. Her legs and feet are bare, her toenails turquoise. I flash back to her painting them in the bathroom of our little house in Golden, singing softly to herself as I lay in our bed and watched her, warmth in my chest, contentment in my bones.
How fucking stupid I was, thinking I could have that forever.
“I, uh. I’d come back from college. I was going to UNC then, but I’d already started the paperwork to transfer. Do you know why I picked CSU San Bernardino?”
She shakes her head, and I rub the back of my neck, a humorless laugh harsh in my throat. “Neither did I. I just searched ‘colleges in California,’ and told myself I’d choose one at random. It didn’t matter where, just so long as it put the whole country between me and this place. Because I knew by then. I knew what Ashby House did to people. How it twisted them. It’s not just the money. I mean, the money is part of it, but it’s more than that. It’s what happens when you live in a place that never expects you to … well, leave, I guess. To go out in the world and actually do something with your life. Ruby, her family? They might as well be gods here. It’s why they all stay. They’re so used to everyone knowing who they are, to their last name opening doors and greasing wheels, and…”
I blow out a shaky breath. These secrets have been stuck inside me for so long, and now they’re all tumbling out. “When nothing has ever been hard for you. When you’ve never had to do the normal shit everyone else does to get through their day, you start thinking maybe you aren’t a normal person. Maybe you are better. Which means you can do what you want. Anything you want.”
Jules hasn’t moved, but I can see her chest moving up and down, her lips parted, and I wish there were some way to make her understand, to pour all these experiences into her head, all the years of living in this house. To make her see how confusing it was to be simultaneously the coddled Golden Boy and the outsider, the orphan.
“Ruby used to say that to me,” I continue. “‘You’re a McTavish now, Camden. That makes you special.’ But I saw what being ‘special’ looked like to this family.”
It looked like Ben wrecking a boat on Beaver Lake, slamming into some poor kid on a Jet Ski who never walked again. No matter that Ben was drunk, no matter that he should have been arrested. The kid lost his legs, but thanks to the McTavish fortune, he had a full bank account for life.
It looked like Howell’s wife, sunglasses hiding black eyes, but new diamonds always appearing in her ears, around her neck, before the bruises even faded. Howell was a mean drunk but a regular at Tiffany’s.
It looked like Nelle, placidly watching the police haul away one of the cleaning crew on robbery charges. Then, later that same evening, appearing at dinner wearing the very same bracelet she’d claimed had been stolen. “I found it in my jewelry box,” she’d said with an elegant shrug, and nothing more. There was no phone call down to the station, and certainly no guilt at having jumped to conclusions.
It looked like Libby sitting on the edge of my bed, expecting me to be enthralled, assuming I’d be seduced.
And yeah, you know what? It looked like Ruby, picking some poor kid out of the foster system and hanging a golden anchor around his neck just to piss off her family.
“She hated it,” I tell Jules, sinking down on the bench in front of Ruby’s dressing table. “The idea of me leaving. I think it was the only time she ever raised her voice to me.”
You’re a little old for teenage rebellion, Camden, and frankly, I’m tired of this discussion. Transfer to Duke, transfer to Wake Forest, but you have responsibilities to this family, and I will be damned if you abandon them!
“I stopped taking her calls. She stopped paying my bills. I got a job working at a restaurant in Chapel Hill only to have the manager call me into his office after my first shift and say that he needed to let me go.”
I laugh bitterly, shaking my head. “It took two more jobs that shitcanned me after only a day to realize what Ruby was doing. As long as I was in North Carolina, I was within her reach. In trying to make it hard for me to leave, she only proved why I couldn’t stay.”
“Is that…”
Jules’s voice is whisper-thin, and she stops, takes a deep breath. “Is that why? So that you could be free?”
It’s not an absolution, but it’s not a condemnation, either. She hasn’t gotten up, hasn’t run out screaming, and fuck knows I shouldn’t be dumb enough to hope for anything more, but that’s what the little spark in my chest feels like right now.
“I don’t know,” I tell her truthfully. “Maybe? I didn’t … it wasn’t something I planned. I didn’t come here that night to … to do that.”
But I’d just lost another job, my credit cards were frozen, my bank account was locked. I’d told myself I didn’t need her money, I could make it on my own. I didn’t care if I slept in my car and ate cheap hot dogs and canned chili for the rest of my life, though of course, I didn’t realize how na?ve that was. For one thing, the car wasn’t mine, and a phone call from Ruby would’ve had it on the back of a tow truck within the hour. And if I couldn’t keep a job for more than two days, I couldn’t make enough money to buy hot dogs, much less a new car, and the more jobs I lost, the harder it would be to get new ones. Everywhere I turned, there was some new, Ruby-shaped roadblock in front of me. Every path of escape had slowly been cut off.
“I didn’t realize how hard it would be,” I tell Jules now, and when she blanches, I lift a hand, shaking my head.
“No. No, I don’t mean that … part. I mean, just leaving. I didn’t understand how every part of my life was tied to Ruby. To what she’d given me. To what she could take away. When I came up here that night, all I wanted to do was talk to her, to see if we could find some kind of compromise. I thought there had to be a way, you know? I thought…”
I thought I could find the right words to make her see reason, to let me go. What I didn’t get was that there was nothing reasonable about any of this to Ruby.
That Ruby would never let me go.
I breathe in through my nose, knowing I have to finish this.
“It was raining that night. Ben was off at college and Libby was in town.” I laugh, but there’s no actual mirth in it. “So, yeah, she was lying at dinner, but she was also telling the truth in a fucked-up way. Howell was doing some guys’ fishing weekend down in Georgia. Nelle was upstairs watching TV—she got really obsessed with Downton Abbey. A rich family in England, that big house, World War One? Classic Nelle.”
I’m stalling, I know I am, but I make myself say the most important part.