“Why?”
“It was an impulse. It wasn’t planned.”
“An impulse to deceive your oldest friends,” Aunty Vinka says, and, unlike Dad, she seems to have landed on hurt rather than rage. Perhaps the hurt will come later for Dad, the way I sometimes get super furious when I stub my toe, before the pain really has time to kick in.
“An impulse to make money,” Dad says.
“An impulse tobelong,” Bec says. “I don’t have any family now Mum’s dead.”
“You werealreadypart of our family,” Aunty Vinka says. “You have Christmas with us almost every year.”
“It’s not the same.” Bec looks around, maybe to see how we’re taking it. “I’m not even included in the Secret Santa.” She says the second bit quietly.
“So this is about wanting to add to your supply of scented candles?” Dad says (and I feel betrayed because I gave him a candle last year).
“Once your dad died and you found that letter, we all knew he had a kid out there somewhere that he’d never met. One night I was thinking about how my life would be different if it was me, and then I thought,Whynot?”
“Wow,” Dad says.
“That kid is never going to be found—they could be anywhere in the world. I’m adopted, and my mum was best friends with your mum. It’s not completely impossible to imagine she adopted the child of her best friend’s husband and just…never told anyone.”
“Not impossible, but it didn’t actually happen,” Dad clarifies, and, man, he ispiiiiissed.
“I did think that was a pretty cold-blooded thing for your mum to do,” Aunty Vinka says thoughtfully. “Not really like her at all. Much more of a Virgo vibe.”
“I didn’t think it would hurt anyone. My parents are dead. I’m an only child. You wanted to believe me. Don’t pretend you weren’t happy when you found out it was me.”
“Itwasn’tyou,” Dad says.
“Not technically.”
“Not even a little bit. The DNA test you showed us, I suppose that was faked?”
“Yeah.”
“How do you fake a DNA test?” Aunty Vinka asks.
Dad and I answer her at the same time: “The internet.”
“I’msorry,okay? In a weird way I thought it would make everyone happy. It seemed like the definition of a victimless crime.” Bec looks momentarily so glum, soactuallysorry, that Aunty Vinka reaches across the table and touches her shoulder. She is way too nice, but then she wasn’t in GG’s bedroom to hear Bec and Shippy going through her stuff. She wasn’t in their bedroom when Shippy came home, and she didn’t see the way that he looked at me.
Dad isn’t buying it. “And the small matter of your inheritance was of no consequence, obviously,” he says. “I’m sure you planned to renounce your share of Dad’s estate at any moment.”
“Is this about me lying or is this about money, Andy?”
“Let’s say both. I am curious, though: When did you realize you had to bump off Gertie to get your hands on the money sooner rather than later?”Way to raise the stakes, Dad.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Bec says. She sounds shocked, but surely she knew this was coming.
“So it’s pure coincidence that the one woman who knew you were a fraud, who knew that you’d lied about being her late husband’s love child, and who stood between you and a garbage truck full of money, happened to be killed when you were staying in her house?” The sarcasm in Dad’s voice is thicker thanWar and Peace.
Teenagers are supposed to disagree with everything their parents say, and usually I do my best, but Dad has a point.
“You think I couldkillsomeone?” Bec asks, sounding incredulous. “Honestly?” She looks at Aunty Vinka. “You too?”
Aunty Vinka doesn’t say anything, but Dad makes a disgusted sound deep in his throat. Disgusted and a bit disgusting, like there’s a lump of phlegm down there he’s thinking about hacking up. Rank. “If you can lie about being my sister, you can lie about anything. I think we should call the police.”
Shippy decides to enter the chat.
