She couldn’t move. Her feet remained rooted in that spot, her eyes zeroed in on the book in Matt’s hands as he closed the distance between them.
“It wasn’t just the stuff of legends,” he said. He held the book out to her. “My aunt Nicolette’s diary.”
Trembling fingers floated up to Tamryn’s lips. She looked at the journal, then at Matt.
“But…” she started, but she didn’t have words. She didn’t have anything.
Except for hurt. Suddenly, she had all the hurt she could handle and more.
“This…this whole time?” Tamryn choked out. “You’ve had thisthewhole time?”
A small part of her hoped that he would say that he’d just found out from a long-lost family member about the hidden safe at the Gauthier mansion, but she knew she was grasping at straws. The guilt that washed over Matt’s face was all the answer she needed.
“How could you?” she whispered.
His throat moved as he swallowed, but he remained silent.
“How. Could. You?” she asked again with enough force to shake the walls. “Is everything in there?” Tamryn asked, pointing at the diary she hadn’t summoned the courage to touch just yet. “The school? The connection to Adeline?”
He nodded. And her heart broke in two.
“My God, Matt. You knew how much this meant to my career. You knew what this meant tome.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Sorry?” She took a step back. “You think sorry is enough?”
“I couldn’t share it with you.”
“Why not?”
“Because there’s a lot more in here than just the information about your grandmother and Nicolette’s school. There’s…everything. Everything about my family and what they’ve done. Everything about how the Gauthiers lied and cheated their way into owning this town, how Micah and Nicolette’s son nearly burned half the buildings on Main Street to the ground and how they covered up the death of the man who died in the fire.”
A chill traveled down Tamryn’s spine, but she shook it off. Whatever had happened, it had happened a long time ago.
“What does any of that have to do with my research?” she asked.
“Everything,” he said. “You’ve been calling since last summer, trying to dig up these skeletons. I couldn’t let you do that. There was too much at stake.”
“Like my career?”
“Likemycareer!” he said. “Do you know what Patrick Carter will do to me if this gets out?”
“Patrick Carter can’t use what your ancestors did nearly two hundred years ago to hurt your campaign, Matt.”
“No, but he can use what my father did, and what his father did. He can use whatIdid. This diary is just the start, Tamryn. It’s the first item in a long line of evidence that shows that the Gauthier family has been nothing but a cancer to this town since the day it was founded.”
Tamryn shook her head. “It’s not an excuse,” she said. “You let me search for weeks, killing myself in that library for hours every day. You listened to me lament about how hard this research was, and question whether or not I was wasting my time looking for something that didn’t exist. And this entire time, you knew it did!”
He pinched his eyes shut and threw his head back. The pain etched across his face meant nothing to her, not when she was feeling so much of her own pain.
Matt held the diary out to her. “Take it,” he said. “I don’t care anymore. Just take it.”
Tamryn almost turned around and walked out without it, just to spite him. But her career was worth a hell of a lot more to her than the brief satisfaction she would get from hurting Matt. She took the diary from his fingers, turned, and strode out of the library, never once looking back.
When Tamryn arrived at Belle Maison, she climbed on the bed and, handling the item with supreme care, laid the diary on a pillow and gingerly opened the brittle pages. She sat with her head hunched over the diary for more than an hour, poring over stories about the perils Adeline and Nicolette faced during the early stages of the school’s development. Twice the small shed they’d used as a schoolroom was burned to the ground. Both had suffered numerous threats to their lives, but soldiered on.
Tamryn swiped at the tears that continued to stream down her cheeks. Whether they were tears of pride or tears of relief, she couldn’t be sure. She’d searched so long, and to finally have this proof of her great-great-great-grandmother’s tireless efforts to educate young children of color… It was overwhelming.
