“Don’t go making too much of this. I look at that guy and I don’t think he cares one way or another about those girls. He came into their lives when they were both almost teenagers. Eleven and thirteen. Their half brother hated his son, and the girls adored Witt. Hunter was obsessed with Emma, which I’m sure made him blame her for being a temptation to a healthyyoung man with hormones—you know how that argument goes. But, believe me—when Cass said Emma was pregnant and wouldn’t say who the father was, I thought about it. I thought about Jonathan Martin and I thought about his son. That would be reason to leave, to be afraid of what would happen if she stayed and one of them was the father.”
“Except she’d been in France during the time she got pregnant, right? Cass said she had the baby in March. That puts conception in June, July at the latest. Emma didn’t come home until mid-August.”
“Right. So I made sure they weren’t in Paris, that’s all. Just closing the loop.”
“So what now?”
Leo shrugged. “We go at Judy Martin in an hour. It’s perfect—he denied it, so now we have cause to question her. Give him a narrow window to tell her himself.”
“Agreed.”
They walked farther up the driveway to Abby’s car. She pulled out her keys.
“I read your paper, you know,” Leo said.
Abby turned from the car to look at him. “When?”
“Last year. And again last night. I was lying in bed. Susan was dead asleep. She keeps a picture of the kids when they were little on her nightstand. I must look at that picture ten times a day because it’s right there, you know? And I was thinking about a mother cutting her child’s hair like that. Viciously. Vindictively. And to punish the other one.”
Leo paused. He was shaking his head and staring at his boots.
“The sibling stuff you wrote about. How the narcissist parent chooses one sibling as the favorite, and then does everything and anything to keep that child in line. Reinforcing the alter ego…”
“Emma,” Abby said. “That’s what she did to Emma.”
“And Cass, the other child, who looks to the favored one as a parent. A child raising a child when the parents are right there. It makes me sick.”
“Yes,” Abby agreed. She had no idea where this was headed, but having Leo understand, having him see the things she saw in this family—it meant everything in that moment.
“It makes me sick for them. And it makes me sick for you.”
Abby didn’t know how to respond. Cass’s words were there now—how she had described the conflict—the need to love and be loved but then knowing that “everyone you could ever trust could betray you.” Most people lived in blissful ignorance. But Abby’s mother had taken that from her. Judy Martin had taken that from Cass. And you can never get it back, this ignorance. Was that something to be sorry about? Or did it keep them safe?
A thought rushed in then. Abby grabbed Leo by both arms.
“What is it, kiddo?”
“Everyone can betray you,” she said.
Leo was confused. “What does that mean?”
“That’s what Cass wants her mother to know. That’s why she led us back to Lisa Jennings—to find out about the affair, to make her mother think, or know, that her husband betrayed her!”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know—”
“And why didn’t she just tell us? Why did she make us think it had something to do with Emma?”
“Because she has to be the one her mother can trust… and don’t ask me why, because I don’t know that yet either. I just know that she needs her mother to start trusting her, to believe her, and to stop believing in Jonathan Martin.”
“Abby, I don’t know what any of this has to do with finding Emma—”
Leo’s thought was interrupted by his cell phone buzzing in his jacket. He pulled it out to answer.
“Yeah…” he said; then he listened. His eyes grew wider.
Abby waited, watching his face change expression—surprise to excitement. He hung up and smiled, his words freezing time, impossible to believe.
