Emma released a shaky breath. “There wasn’t anything to say, Mom. Not really. I had no idea what was truly going on between them. I only know what I saw.”
“Which was what?”
She couldn’t lie. Not now, after all this time. “They were on the couch in his office. The one where I used to sit and do homework while he would make phone calls. They were both dressed but... they were making out. I’m sorry, Mom.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Emma closed her eyes, unable to look at her mother as shespoke the truth that had haunted her all this time. The truth she had tried to escape with booze and drugs, the truth she had been trying to run from when she left Wood Briar.
She and her mother had fought about every single thing back then except this. The one inexorable fact beneath everything else.
“Because an hour later he was dead and it was my fault. We were fighting aboutPamand I wasn’t paying as much attention to the road conditions as I should have been and neither was he. And as a result, I killed him.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Rosie
Rosie heard her daughter’s harsh words from a long distance away but it took her several seconds to register them through her shock.
An hour later he was dead and it was my fault... I killed him.
“It was an accident,” Rosie said, her voice as firm as she could manage around the horror that was only now beginning to feel real. “Completely an accident. It was only bad luck that you hit that patch of wet road and spun out right where the railing was weak.”
This couldn’t be happening. Rosie felt as if the very foundations of her world had crumbled.
This had to be a mistake. Gary wouldn’t have cheated on her with anyone, especially not Pam.
Would he?
Rosie felt like she was going to throw up. She was going to be sick all over Barbara’s lovely tile flooring they had spent two weeks installing.
“Come on, Mom. Let’s go home. We can talk about this there.”
That made the most sense. They were in the middle of a party. A party with thirty-odd people who did not need to be part of this airing of dirty laundry.
Pam.
Could Gary have been sleeping with Pam? The woman who had been a rock for Rosie since his death, who had stepped up to help run things with Victor Blackwood whenRosie had been too numb with grief and shock to think about Lucas Construction?
She felt betrayed on every single level.
How was she going to go back in there to the rest of the book club and pretend that nothing was wrong, when she felt as if she had shattered into a million pieces?
For ten years she had grieved Gary. Had she been grieving a mirage?
He had been the love of her life, the yang to her yin, the other missing piece of her. From the time she was seventeen years old, she had loved him. When she found out she was pregnant with Emma, it had been an easy decision to marry him. They had adored each other.
Yet apparently he had betrayed her on that final, monumental day.
She didn’t know how to absorb the blow but she could see from the pale, stiff set of Emma’s features that it must be true.
What was she going to do? She wanted to flee but she was supposed to give Andrew a ride home. She wasn’t sure she could even talk to the man right now, when her emotions were in such turmoil.
As if sensing her thoughts, Emma stepped forward. “Let me gather Grandma, and I’ll meet you at the house. I can get Olive to bed if she’s not already asleep and I will tell you the truth about what happened that day, at least what I know.”
She nodded numbly, drew in a sharp bracing breath and returned to the book club meeting.
Somehow Rosie made it through the next few moments, feeling as if all the broken pieces of herself were being held together by sheer grit.