The horrified look on her face gave me my answer, and I turned back to Wyatt. “You knew your father slept with Roxy, and if I’ve done my math right, it would have been before the two of you got married.”
“It happened one night, just the one time,” Roxy said, hands trembling.
“Stop talking, Roxy,” Wyatt said. “We can discuss it later, after they’ve gone.”
“It’s out now. I can’t just stand here and pretend it didn’t happen. Not anymore.”
“What did happen?” I asked.
She swallowed a few times, wiping away a few more tears. “One night when Wyatt and I were dating, his father had too much to drink, and … well, I did too. We had sex, and even though it was just the one time, I got pregnant.”
I looked at Wyatt, whose eyes flickered around the room like a cornered animal searching for an exit.
“You told me you couldn’t get pregnant,” I said.
“I haven’t been able to, not since I had Holly.”
“What happened?”
Roxy bent down, placing her head between her knees, her breath heavy, while the rest of us waited.
She stood back up and said, “When I found out I was pregnant, I panicked. Wyatt’s father panicked too. I confided in Celia, and she told me she had always wanted to adopt, and she offered to raise the baby. The three of us made a pact to keep it to ourselves, and we did.”
“Celia left for Sedona, and you … what?”
“I told my family and friends that I wanted to do some traveling before I got married, just like I told you before. But the truth is, I was with Celia the entire time. I had the baby, and Wyatt’s father made arrangements with the owner of the agency for the adoption to be closed, never to be disclosed to anyone. Celia adopted Holly, and I returned to Cambria and married Wyatt.”
Roxy looked at Wyatt again, pleading in her eyes. “All these years, you knew?”
Refusing to look at her, he said, “I found out the night my father died. Seemed he didn’t want to leave this life without me knowing.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Roxy asked.
He looked at me, then at Roxy.
“You may as well admit it,” I said. “I’m guessing you put up the surveillance camera and left the note on my car. As for the note, the coroner was able to lift a print off it. He’s running it now.”
It was a lie, of course.
I sat, crossing one leg over the other, hoping he believed me.
“What is she talking about?” Roxy asked. “What note?”
Wyatt threw his hands in the air. “You don’t understand! I did what I had to do to protect us, to protect our family!”
“What are you talking about?”
My mother sat beside me, gripping the armrest, and I gave her a nod, the approval to send the text message to Foley and Whitlock. Then I rose, facing Wyatt as I palmed the gun in my handbag. “Holly was searching for her birth parents. That made her a threat to you.”
“If the truth came out about the affair and the fact we covered it up, it would have destroyed our family name.”
In the end, it still had.
“And she’d be entitled to part of your inheritance, I imagine,” I said.
Roxy’s eyes widened as if she had just put it all together. “What are you saying? What did you do, Wyatt?”
He said nothing, but his silence told her everything she needed to know.
