She made it exactly one step before Ruth and Ida closed in from either side, each taking an arm with the calm efficiency of women who had been waiting for precisely this moment.
"Admit it, Margo," Nans said. "Tell us what happened. You owe June that much, don't you?"
June's voice came out barely above a whisper. "Margo? What is she talking about?"
Margo’s eyes filled. When she spoke, her voice was steady, but only just.
“Daniel Shaw came to me,” she said. “The night before he left. He had a letter he’d written her, and he had his ring. He asked me to give them to her.” She stopped. “He said he was going to Nashville. He said he wanted her to come with him. Drop out of school, pack a bag, follow him.” A small, precise shake of her head. “He had forty dollars in his pocket and a borrowed guitar and a plan that wasn’t a plan. He was going to take June away from everything she had and he wasn’t going to look back.”
“So you read the note,” Nans said.
“I read the note.” No apology in it. “And I knew. I knew if June saw that letter she’d go. She’d have been on a bus by morning. June was seventeen and she loved him completely and she had absolutely no sense where he was concerned.” A pause. “She had a full scholarship. She had a life here, a real one — a family, everything she’s built since.” Margo looked up the driveway to where Helen was still standing with a box of kitchen things, and then back at June. “He would have burned through all of it in two years and left her somewhere with nothing.”
“So you hid the note,” Lexy said. “And the ring.”
“I put them in the cat,” Margo said. “Up in the attic. I thought I’d deal with it later, decide later. And then later kept being later, and eventually it was thirty years ago and June had a whole life and Daniel Shaw hadn’t amounted to anything anyway — which I’d always known he wouldn’t.” She straightened her jacket. “And that was that.”
“Until today,” Ruth said.
“Until today,” Margo agreed, quietly. “When I saw Everett with that cat in the Cup and Cake, I knew it was only a matter of time before he found the compartment in the base and read the letter.” She looked at Nans. “June would have read it. After thirty years, she’d have read that letter and known that he tried. That he wanted her to come. That she missed it.” A pause. “That I took it from her.”
“You could have just taken the cat,” Lexy said. “You didn’t have to?—”
“He wouldn’t give it up.” Margo’s voice cracked on the last word. “I tried. I didn’t mean to kill him. I only meant to knock him out long enough to get the cat and go.”
“Then why leave the ring?” Nans asked.
“I didn’t mean to. It must have fallen out — the compartment opened during the struggle and I didn’t have time to find it. The letter was still inside, and I thought that was the important part.” She pressed her lips together. “So I ran.”
June had gone quiet in the way that means something is breaking rather than bending. She was looking at Margo the way you look at something when you’re realizing you never really saw it before. Confusion first, then understanding, then something worse.
“June,” Margo said.
June didn’t answer.
A car pulled to the curb. Jack got out and read the scene in two seconds flat — the way he always did — his eyes moving once around the group before settling on Margo with quiet certainty.
Margo looked at June. “It was always you I was thinking of,” she said. “I need you to know that. Every single time. It was always you.”
June looked at her for a long moment. Then she turned away, out toward the street, at nothing in particular.
Margo went with Jack without any resistance.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Four days had passed since Margo Haskell had walked out of the Mercer yard sale and into the back of Jack’s car, and Brooke Ridge Falls had done what small towns do — absorbed the shock, processed it thoroughly through every coffee counter and front porch in a three-mile radius, and begun the slow business of moving on.
At The Cup and Cake, the display case was full again, the yard sale weekend was a memory, and the waterfall across the street caught the late afternoon light in that particular way that made the town look like a postcard.
Nans, Ruth, Helen, and Ida were at the table by the window. Lexy had pulled a chair over from the next table and was sitting on the end of it with her coffee when Jack came through the door with the expression of a man who had done a great deal of paperwork in a very short amount of time.
He pulled up another chair and sat next to Lexy. Lexy slid her coffee over to him.
“Margo’s cooperating,” he said.
Nans nodded slowly. “And the DA?”
“Going light on her. Given her age, her record, the circumstances.” He wrapped both hands around the mug. “She didn’t plan it. That counts for something.”