I wanted to grab her and shake her. For having a kid—kids—who loved her and throwing them away. For being so damn selfish. For having children in the first place if she wasn’t going to take care of them.
But I had a job I needed to do, so I pushed my anger down.
“Okay,” I said with a smile. “Love you, Mom.”
She gave me a halfhearted smile in return and closed the door.
This was going to be even harder than I thought.
? ? ?
I was headed back for the dining room when Nicholas caught me on the stairs. He’d been locked in his room ever since we got home from school, poring over the documents and notes I’d collected. He grabbed my arm and hauled me into his bedroom.
“What the hell?” I said.
He had a stack of papers clutched in one hand. “Are these for real?”
“What are they?”
“You didn’t alter them or something?”
“I don’t even know what those are,” I said, “but I didn’t touch anything. What’s going on?”
He swore under his breath and sank down onto the floor. I took the stack of papers from his hand and laid them out on the rug. Mia’s medical records, a police fact sheet on Daniel, some kind of report from the hospital from the time Nicholas broke his wrist, and a medical intake form from one of Lex’s trips to rehab. I looked up at Nicholas, who was staring at the ceiling, his hand over his mouth.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Look at the blood types,” he said.
I frowned and searched the documents for the information. Mia and Lex were both B positive, and Nicholas and Danny were O negative.
“So?” I said. Unlike Nicholas, I wasn’t an honors student taking all AP classes. Even if I had finished high school, I doubt I would have gotten what he was driving at.
“It’s biologically impossible,” he said. “I’m O negative because both of my parents are. O negative parents always have O negative children.”
I looked down at the papers again, and what he was saying slowly dawned on me. “But Mia . . .”
“She’s B positive, which means one of her parents was,” he said. “Mia’s not my father’s child.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Are you sure?”
He nodded. “I think she’s Ben McConnell’s.”
? ? ?
It all made sense once Nicholas explained it to me. For Mia to be B positive, one of her parents had to be. Ben McConnell, as evidenced by Lex’s blood type, was. And as Nicholas had already told me, Jessica and Ben had stayed close even after their divorce, which made his death all the more devastating for her.
“They were having an affair,” Nicholas said. “They must have been. That’s why he was around the house all the time. He wasn’t just helping my mom out by babysitting. He wanted to be close to her and to Mia.”
“Do you think your dad knew?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I think I should stop assuming I know anything about my family.” He scrubbed his fingers through his hair. “I wonder if this has anything to do with Danny.”
“I don’t see how,” I said.
“Yeah, you’re probably right. The only thing is . . .”
“What?”
Nicholas sighed. “Well, Danny was a snoop. One of his favorite games was to find out something about you didn’t want anyone to know and then hold it over your head. Our lives were kind of chaotic the last few years before he disappeared, and I think he liked feeling like he was in control of something, you know?”
As a matter of fact, I did.
“Or maybe I’m just making excuses for him because he was only a little kid, and he’s . . . gone now,” he continued. “The truth was, as much as I loved him, Danny was sort of a jerk. When I was ten, he guessed the password to my computer and found this journal I kept on it.” Nicholas adjusted the way his glasses sat on his nose, a nervous habit of his. “I wrote a lot about thinking I was gay and what that would mean for me, really private stuff like that. I know it was obvious to everyone else from pretty much the moment I was born that I was gay, but I wasn’t ready to tell anyone or to talk about it, so I just wrote it all down in that journal. Danny printed the whole thing out.”
“Shit,” I said.
Nicholas nodded. “He used it to blackmail me for months, right up until he disappeared. It was just kids’ stuff, like making me do his math homework or give him my Halloween candy, but it was this constant shadow hanging over my head. And it made me hate him.” His hands were clenched into fists, but there was no anger in his expression, only grief. “After he was gone, I hated myself for hating him. Like I had made him disappear somehow.”
Watching the Tate home movies had put a little tarnish on the image of Danny the Innocent that had been created in the wake of his disappearance, but this was a little too real. It was probably no worse than what many siblings did to each other as children, but Danny had never gotten the opportunity to grow up and out of it. He probably would have matured into a good person, but he’d died as a brat. It made me think of how I’d be remembered—if I was at all—if I died tomorrow. Made me wonder if there was any chance I could change it.
“So if Danny had somehow found out about Mia, or about your mother’s affair . . . ,” I said.
“I know it sounds insane, but maybe he tried to do the same thing to Mom that he did to me,” Nicholas said. “Maybe she’d been drinking and lost her temper. Or maybe he told Dad, and Dad . . .” He suddenly slammed his fist in the floor. “I hate this! I hate having to suspect everyone in my family of something so fucking horrible. I wish I didn’t know any of this.”
“What do you want to do?” I asked.
“Move to the other side of the world and never come back.”
“Okay.” That was an impulse I could empathize with. “But what do you want to do today?”
He sighed. “Same thing as before. Get close to my mother. Find out what she knows.”
“What about your dad?” I asked.
“I’m working on that,” he said. “I also want to try to find the file my dad kept on Patrick. I remember him getting into trouble a lot when I was young, but I never knew the details. It might mean something, and I’m sure all the information is in that file.”
“You bet,” I said.
Whatever he wanted, as long as it kept him from busting me.
? ? ?
But getting close to Jessica wasn’t going to be easy. I needed help.
I went to Lex’s room later that night. When she found me standing at her door, she smiled, and I could have sworn it was real.
“Hey, Danny,” she said. “What’s up?”
“Can I talk to you?”
“Of course.” She opened her door wider. “Come in.”
I sat on the low, silk covered sofa at the foot of her bed, and she sat beside me.
“I’m glad you’re here, actually,” she said, crushing the hem of her shirt between her fingers. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about the other night.”
“You don’t have to,” I said.
“Yeah, I do,” she replied. “I’m so sorry for putting you and Nicky through that. You never should have had to see me that way or deal with a situation like that. I hope you can forgive me.”