I refrained this time from saying exactly what I thought it had meant to my father. But she knew that I knew.
“Well, it meant something tome. Something real. I know you’re not my child, but you are my children’s sister, my daughter’s only sister. It meant something to me to see you standing up at that altar beside Betsy. And Joey.”
She placed a finger on the screen of the laptop, tracing around Betsy, and then Joey, and then dragging her finger down the line to me. “Especially now,” she whispered.
“How long do you have?” I said quietly.
She shrugged. The movement seemed so odd on her, so…un-Caroline. “Not long.”
Stick stood up, his cup in hand. “I think I’ll go check the garage.”
“What’s wrong in the garage?” Caroline asked, but she didn’t look up at Stick—she was still looking at the photo of her kids. And me, their sister.
“Nothing, I think. But I just want to check on the cars.” He looked at me pointedly. My earlier crack about his competitors stealing Caroline’s cars must have gotten to him.
Good.
Chapter16
He leftthe house through a back door in the kitchen, and I was alone with Caroline Stratton for the first time in my life.
It should have felt weird—being in the house I’d stared at with my mother, sitting at the kitchen table sharing chitchat with the woman whose life my mother destroyed.
The woman who was dying.
“Is Joey coming back from Africa?” I asked.
Her finger on the photo moved back over to Joey’s handsome face. “No.”
“They must have ways to get ahold of him, even if cell coverage isn’t available wherever he is.”
“They have service. He calls every now and then. Mostly he just texts me pictures of the group he’s working with. He’s loving it.”
“They wouldn’t let him out of the program, out of whatever commitment he made, to come home to be with you?” That sounded barbaric. If Joseph Stratton didn’t have enough pull to make that happen, Grayson Spaulding surely did.
“It’s not that. He can leave at any time.”
Something wasn’t adding up. And the beginning of that odd equation began with Stick.
“And Betsy? Why isn’t she here with you?”
“She and Jason are in Europe. Or Asia, I think it is now. They’re taking an extended honeymoon before they move to their place in New York and start new jobs.”
I had known that. Joey had told me at the wedding. Both the big honeymoon and Joey’s trip to Africa had the added benefit—or perhaps sole purpose?—of keeping them out of the country while their father ran for governor.
But surely they’d put up with the annoyance of the campaign to be with their mother when she was sick?
Unless…
“You haven’t told them, have you?”
She didn’t answer, just continued to trace her finger back and forth between her two children. I noticed her path didn’t include me any longer, but just a glide back and forth between Betsy and Joey.
“No,” she finally said. There was a finality, a steeliness, in her voice that told me nothing I said now would make any difference.
And I don’t know what I would have said anyway. I was not part of this family, not Caroline’s family, much as she tried to include me from time to time.
For whatever reason, she had chosen not to tell her kids she was dying.
