Divide and conquer, Caroline thought. Her mother’s favorite technique, her way of asserting dominance, maintaining control. And why not? It had always worked for her.
Caroline walked into the kitchen to find her brother sitting on the counter beside the sink, looking slightly disheveled in a pair of torn jeans and a lime green short-sleeved shirt. His hair, too long and jutting out over the top of his collar, made him look as if he’d just been roused from bed, which perhaps he had. “Already poured you some,” Steve said, holding a china cup toward her. “A bit of milk, no sugar. Correct?”
“She brought you along for reinforcement?”
“I left the straitjacket in the car. What can I say? Have some biscotti. They’re delicious.” He pointed to the plate of biscotti on the kitchen table.
“I see she made herself at home.”
“That’s our girl. So, is it true?”
“Is what true?”
“That you’re in the middle of some sort of breakdown?”
Caroline took a long sip of her tea. “I’m not having a breakdown.”
“But you have been talking to some crackpot who claims she’s Samantha?”
“What if she’s not a crackpot?”
“Still doesn’t make her Samantha.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Think about it, Caroline. What are the odds?”
“What difference does it make what the odds are?”
“I’m the gambler in the family,” he reminded her. “You don’t bet against the house, the house in this case being common sense.”
“Since when have you had any of that?”
Steve slid down off the counter. “Let’s not make this personal. I’m not the enemy here.”
“No,” Caroline conceded. “The enemy’s in there.” She looked toward the living room.
“You don’t think you’re being just a little hard on her? She was there for you, you know. After Samantha disappeared. You were down in Mexico. She moved in, looked after Michelle. And after you got back and were such a basket case. She was pretty much all the mother that kid had.”
“And look how well that turned out.”
“It hasn’t been easy these past fifteen years. For any of us.”
“Did you know?” Caroline asked.
“Know what?”
“That Hunter and Rain were having an affair.”
Her brother looked toward his scuffed brown shoes.
“You did know.”
He hesitated. “I suspected.”
“How? Why?”
“I don’t know why. Just a gut feeling, I guess. I saw the way she looked at him, the way he looked at her, when they thought no one was watching. Plus the way he was always putting her down when she wasn’t around. Like he was trying to hide how he really felt. It just made me wonder. And then the night Samantha disappeared…”
Caroline felt her breath catch in her lungs. “The night Samantha disappeared…What?”
Another moment of hesitation. “I saw them.”
“What do you mean, you saw them? You saw them together? When?”
“Hold on. Hold on,” Steve cautioned. “I didn’t say I saw them together.”
“What are you saying?”
“It was after I’d gone back to my room to try to talk some sense into Becky, you know, try to talk her into coming back to the table, but of course she wouldn’t listen, and I was about to leave the room, I’d opened the door, and that’s when I thought I saw Hunter walking down the hall. And I remember wondering what he was doing over in our wing. And then, when I ran into Rain in the lobby, I just put two and two together…”
“And kept the answer to yourself.”
“What was I going to say, Caroline? Happy Anniversary. I think your husband’s having an affair! I didn’t know that for a fact. It might not have been Hunter I saw. He and Rain might not have been together. Even if they had, it might have been perfectly innocent.”
“Well, they were together and it damn sure wasn’t innocent. Instead of checking on the kids, my darling husband was, in fact, screwing a woman who was supposed to be my friend, and if you’d told the police what you saw…”
“I told them what I knew, which unfortunately was nothing. Even if the man I saw was Hunter, even if he and Rain had been together, I had no reason to believe he hadn’t checked on the kids when he said he did.”
He was right. Still Caroline wasn’t ready to let her brother off the hook so easily. “You should have told me.”
His answer was as direct, as forceful, as an arrow to the heart. “You shouldn’t have left your kids alone.”
The simple statement took her breath away. She doubled over, gasping, the teacup slipping from her hands and dropping to the tile floor, shattering into a hundred tiny pieces.
She heard the shuffle of feet moving toward her. “What’s going on in here?” Michelle asked over the ringing in her ears.
“My God, what have you done?” her mother said, scrambling to pick up the broken slivers of china.
“I’m sorry, Caroline,” her brother was saying. “I shouldn’t have said that. You know I didn’t mean it.”