Her mother nodded. “After they shut down the facility, Paul was killed as a warning. We knew our work was jeopardized, and you were at risk. We thought it best if everyone believed we were dead.
“We staged our ‘death’ with a little help from an old friend,” her father tipped his head toward Joe, “and Maman.” He reached out and hugged his mother, Holly’s Mémère.
Holly backed away from the four of them, her gaze landing on her grandmother, who’d been complicit in the lie. “And you knew all this time?”
The Voodoo queen met her gaze and held it. “The less you knew and the more you believed they were dead, the more likely everyone else would believe it, too.”
Her mother reached out to capture her hands. “We knew you would find a way to support yourself and guessed you might leave the state to keep yourself safe.”
“Did you ever think that I might miss you?” Holly pressed a hand to her chest, a sob rising up her throat. “That your deaths would break my heart?” Tears spilled down her cheeks.
Simon moved closer, his hand resting at the small of her back. He didn’t try to pull her into his arms, but he was there for her.
Unlike her parents.
And her grandmother had been in on it all this time.
Holly’s eyes narrowed. “When I came to you about the possibility that I was cursed, you were the one who suggested I move away from Bayou Mambaloa. The apartment in Atlanta was your idea. A friend of yours, my fanny!”
Her grandmother nodded. “It worked, didn’t it?”
“And changing my name from Gautier to Hazard?”
Her Mémère shook her head. “That was all on you, but another stroke of genius.”
“It didn’t keep them from finding you,” her father said, “but it gave us time to continue our work and kept them from moving forward.”
Her mother exchanged a glance with her father. “We have to tell her everything.”
“Damn right, you do.” Holly crossed her arms over her chest, anger overshadowing the joy of seeing her parents alive. She’d get to the joy again, but the level of betrayal hurt.
“Come, take a seat,” her mother said. “We just made a pot of coffee, and we have fresh-baked cookies Joe made.”
Holly didn’t want to sit. Didn’t want to have coffee and cookies like any other day.
Her parents were alive!
And they’d lied to her for the last six months.
And her grandmother had lied.
“You really don’t think much of me,” Holly said as she sank into a chair. “I’m true to family. I could’ve kept your secret. You could’ve trusted me. Instead, you let me grieve this whole time.”
“Oh, sweetie,” her mother reached for her hand. “We never wanted to hurt you. It nearly broke our hearts to cut ourselves off from you.”
“But it was for your safety,” her father said. “There’s a lot involved here. We had to play dead to keep them from taking all of our work.”
Holly raised her hands to her face, suddenly so tired she ached. “Them? Who is ‘them’? And how is it that you led me to believe you worked for Bayou Resilience when you were working for BioEnergen all along? You’ve been lying to me for years.”
Her mother drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “We did start out working for Bayou Resilience. You know how much we love everything about the bayou. We also know big corporations can decimate the ecosystem by dumping toxic chemicals into the water, and that the continued reliance on fossil fuels will bring drilling for oil closer and closer.”
Her father leaned his elbows on the table. “We wanted to do more to help the bayou and the world.
“Coming up with an eco-friendly, renewable source of energy would save the world from the overuse of coal and oil, the dangers of spills and the destruction of habitat offshore drilling can create.
“People have tried to find alternatives to fossil fuels. No one has been able to create something sustainable.”
“We have,” her mother said softly. She smiled and reached over to take her husband’s hand. “We were so close six months ago, but discovered our research was being leaked to the Russians. They wanted to weaponize the formula we were trying to create to replace fossil fuels.”
