A moment was required for her to set aside the years of animosity she’d felt for this man. She was doing this for her mother. “Yes,” she finally said. “We know who he is now. We’ll get him.” Her attention settled on her mother once more. “Soon. I won’t stop until I find him.”
“When you find him,” Cyrus said, drawing her contemplation back to him, “I want you to kill him.”
There was something in his eyes. An agony that nearly matched Adeline’s. He was dead serious. “I’m ...” She swallowed with difficulty, her emotions vacillating between disgust and empathy. “I’m a cop, old man. Not an assassin.” She resisted the urge to reassure him about her objective. She had every intention of killing the bastard. In the line of duty, of course.
“Not just one shot,” Cyrus cautioned, as if she hadn’t spoken at all. “Keep shooting until there’s no question he’s dead.”
Bewildered by the strange tension vibrating between them, Adeline dragged her focus away from Cyrus and back to her mother. Shesmoothed her hand over her hair. She wasn’t giving the old bastard the satisfaction of seeing in her eyes that she would like nothing better than the opportunity to carry out his suggestion. That was wrong. It wasn’t a suggestion, it was an order. The kind he’d been giving his whole life. The same kind that people around here had been jumping through hoops to follow.
“She loved you more than anything in this world,” he said quietly.
Adeline didn’t need him to tell her that. “But she stayed here when I begged her to join me in Huntsville.” She knew damned well her mother had loved her despite the frustrating decision. Mainly Adeline just wanted to defy anything he said.
Cyrus didn’t speak again for a while, just stared at Irene as if by sheer force of will he could change this reality. Even Cooper law couldn’t resurrect the dead.
“That was my doing.”
More of the disgust she always felt in his presence settled in Adeline’s stomach. “What does that mean?”
“It’s a long story,” Cyrus said, his voice weak, distant. “And complicated. You wouldn’t understand.”
What the hell? Adeline had tolerated about as many secrets and lies as any one person could be expected to stomach. It was past time for the whole truth. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Cyrus met her glare with an uncharacteristic softness. “Your mother and father dated for two years before they married.”
“I knew that.” Adeline had no idea what he was getting at. She was tired. The pain had settled into a dull ache. She had no patience for listening to a pointless story. Particularly from this man. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Your father and I ...” The old bastard sighed. “We sort of competed for Irene’s affections. We both loved her.”
Oh yeah, right. “My mother would never love you,” she countered, allowing him to feel every ounce of disdain his claim elicited. No way was she going to listen to this kind of crap. She shouldn’t have let him inhere. The ache in her chest protested with another harsh wave of pain. She’d done this for her mother ... arguing with him was wrong under the circumstances. Just hear him out. She gave him her attention once more. “Why are you telling me any of this? It’s irrelevant.”
Incredibly, Cyrus nodded as if he agreed with her assertion. “I longed for her to choose me, but she loved your father. And I wasn’t about to try and take that from him. He’d suffered so much his entire life. I just wanted him to be happy.”
The polio. Adeline blinked, remembering. Her father had suffered with polio as a child. He’d been a fine, strong man when Adeline was growing up but his childhood and teen years had been very different. She remembered hearing her mother say that Cyrus had always looked out for his little brother, especially while they were growing up. Adeline had never known that side of her uncle. Didn’t really believe it existed even now.
“I accepted your mother’s decision, but I ...” Cyrus’s gaze rested on Irene then. “I never stopped loving her.”
Shock rolled through Adeline. Jesus Christ. She’d had no idea. Something else her mother had never told her. Adeline couldn’t imagine the old bastard really loving anyone, except his own evil spawn. But now that she thought about it, she’d never seen Cyrus look at his own wife the way he had Irene.
“My God,” Adeline muttered. How could she have missed so much? Had she been that self-centered? Maybe she just hadn’t wanted to see.
“Shortly after your father and mother married, Irene discovered she was expecting their first child.”
The news rocked Adeline back on her heels all over again. She needed body armor here; the bullets just kept coming. “I thought—”
“Irene lost that child.” Cyrus’s tone had turned dull and listless. “She was about four months along and your father was away on business. She had an appointment with the obstetrician and I offered to take her. I was driving too fast the way I always did and there was an accident. Your mother wasn’t visibly injured. She seemed fine.”
Her mother had told Adeline that Cyrus had been in an accident and that was the reason he’d ended up on crutches and then in a wheelchair. Only Irene had left out the part about being in the car with him.
“You said,” Adeline prodded, “that Mother wasn’t visibly injured. What happened to the baby?” She hadn’t heard anything about a miscarriage, either. As far as Adeline had known, she’d been the one and only child. The one and only pregnancy. Of course that had proven wrong.
Just another indication of how little she actually knew about her parents.
“You know they didn’t have the tests back then that they have now,” Cyrus explained. “At least not around here. There was damage they didn’t catch. Later that night she had to be rushed to the hospital, right here in Singing River. By then the internal hemorrhaging was so severe, it’s a miracle she survived at all. She was airlifted to Hattiesburg for emergency surgery. The only way to save her life at that point was a total hysterectomy.”
“Oh my God.” Adeline turned to where her mother lay, studied the sweet face that had hidden so much pain. Why hadn’t her mother ever told Adeline any of this?
I didn’t want you to know that you weren’t my little girl.