There have only been a handful of moments when I’ve wished I could turn back time and make a different decision. I’ve never regretted coming to America and I don’t regret answering Martin’s advertisement—not even now—but in this moment, if I could reverse time, I’d back it up an hour or two, and when the doorbell rang at half past four I would not answer it. I’d leave Belinda standing there wondering if she’s got the right house. I’d peer at her from behind the lace curtain at the sitting room window and I’d watch her walk away.
I don’t care anymore that Martin is living an illusion and forcing all of us to live his lies with him. I don’t care that he marries women because he wants something from them. And God help me I don’t even care in this moment that perhaps Annabeth Bigelow Grover’s riding accident wasn’t an accident.
All I care about is that I woke up this morning the mother of a little girl who needs me and loves me. And now I am justanother pitiful soul Martin Hocking has trampled upon. Maybe he didn’t fiddle with the straps on Annabeth’s saddle, but he certainly stole Candace’s child from her. He told Kat her mother was dead. He gave Belinda a sham of a marriage. And now he’s given me a child who isn’t mine to keep. Candace is alive and living in a sanatorium in Arizona, wanting her daughter.
I feel Belinda at my side. She has risen from the chair to read the letter, too. I want to shove her out the front door, pretend I never saw her, never had any reason to pry open this desk today and unveil its secrets.
“Kat’s mother is alive?” Belinda says a moment later, in a horrified tone. “But that child thinks her mother is dead!”
Whatever I might say in this moment is frozen on my tongue.
We are both silent for several long seconds.
“How could he do that to a little girl?” Belinda finally says, and her voice cracks with what I recognize as mother-love. She is not exactly a mother, and neither am I, I suppose, but we are both on the edge of being one. She on the inside edge, and me on the outside edge.
How indeed could Martin do that to Kat? Say her mother is dead when she is not?
“I don’t understand why he would do that. Why would he do that?” Belinda implores, and she waits for me to answer.
“I... I wonder if he thought she would be dead of the consumption by now.” My own voice sounds like it’s made of air. “She’s an heiress. I’m sure that’s why he married her. And then lucky for him, she got very sick.”
“But,” Belinda says, staring down at the letter, “her father is still alive.”
“She had money of her own. From a grandmother. Martin told me this.”
“I still don’t understand why he would tell Kat her mother is dead. Why tell her that?”
I can think of only one answer. I’d wager now it is the root answer for everything Martin Hocking does, now that I know the truth about him.
“Because it suited him. Hewantedher to think Candace was dead. He wanted to live here in San Francisco as if she were.”
“Butwhy? Why did he do all these terrible things to us!”
“Because he wanted something for himself,” I say, as everything I now know merges and assures me this is true. “He doesn’t care about us. He doesn’t care about anyone.”
“Not even his own child?” Belinda says, incredulous.
“Not even his own child. I thought he was the way he was because he’d known too many sorrows. I thought he had decided to abandon love, even for his own daughter, because he didn’t want to suffer any more because of it. But that’s not it, Belinda. He’s not paralyzed by grief. He’s just a soulless, lying cheat. That’s why he did all these terrible things.”
“Stop it,” Belinda whispers, wincing as if I’ve slapped her.
I soften my voice. The revelations swirling in my head are too hard for Belinda to hear. Too hard to hear all at once. But she has to hear them. Because we have to decide what happens next. “I’m sorry to have to say it. But it’s true. He doesn’t love you. He doesn’t love anyone.”
Again, we are silent for a few minutes.
Belinda casts her gaze over all the papers on the desk, at all the evidence of what Martin has done. Of who he is.
Of who he is not.
“What are we going to do?” she says, in a childlike voice.
“I’m fairly certain it’s illegal in California to have more than one wife,” I hear myself answer. “We can go to the police first thing tomorrow morning. We can have him arrested.”
“And then?”
“And then... and then he goes to prison. I think. I don’t know.”
“What about that little girl?”
