“Don’t think badly of me. I couldn’t bear that.” He let her lead him to the armchair the detective had occupied earlier. “Iloved two women, each with all my heart—I still do. You can, you know—love two people equally. The same way you can love each of your children with all your heart. A heart expands. And you were the sweetest little girls. I would read you stories.” He closed his eyes, and a tear slipped down his papery cheek. “Vivien loved anything with zoo animals, and you would curl into me, enraptured, even before you understood the words, cuddling your toy rabbit. You used to suck on its ears. I bought that for you too.”
“Rabby?” She still had him, sitting on a shelf betweenThe Secret GardenandAnne of Green Gables. Her mother had sewn up the ears so often they were all thread and no fur. Lana sat in the second armchair, at an angle. “So you were involved in our lives?” He didn’t just father them, hewastheir father, for a time. She’d known this man, in her earliest moments. Had she missed this man? Had she cried for him, like she’d cried for Brenda?
“Of course. What did you think—that I would have two children with a woman and not be involved?”
“I haven’t had a lot of time to process it. You were married. You paid our parents—our adoptive parents—to take us away.”
He rubbed the loose skin at the bridge of his nose. “I know how it looks. I was much older than Brenda, but she was an old soul, so we met in the middle. When she fell pregnant, I begged her to keep the baby, I promised I’d support her. I rented an apartment for her, and I’d go around there and play with Vivien—even changed her diaper on occasion! And then you came along, and my heart could not have been fuller. But the guilt…” He looked and sounded like he was desperate for air. “Oh, Grace… She’s older than me by sixteen years—I suppose you know this—and we faced so much prejudice, she’s always been insecure about it. She desperately wanted children—we both did—but she had multiple miscarriages, and a stillbirth. We tried to adopt, and both times it fell through, and she couldn’t faceit again. After Brenda died, I thought about adopting you girls, pretending I wasn’t your real father, but that felt too dangerous. If Grace knew that not only had I been carrying on with a woman less than half her age, but I’d also hadchildrenwith her…”
He grabbed Lana’s hand in both of his, like it was a lifeline. “It’s the hardest thing I ever did, letting you go. I didn’t want to lose my little girls, but when Brenda died, it was a mess, I was a mess. A mess of my own making, I know that, but I was grieving, and of course Grace couldn’t know.” He leaned forward and pressed his forehead to the back of Lana’s hand. “Dear girl, I’ve thought of you constantly, every day. Not just consciously—you exist in my subconscious. You are part of my thoughts, part of me.” He released her and pulled out a wrinkled handkerchief to blow his nose. “I knew I would miss out on being your father but you would be happy and loved and protected, and I told myself that was the important thing.”
Lana was welling up herself. She had imagined confronting him, demanding to know about Vivien’s visit, about what he was hiding. She hadn’t imagined this. She could see Vivien in him—the shape of his mouth, perhaps a tendency to the mercurial. Was there anything of herself? Did he exist in her subconscious, too? She swallowed. This would all need to be processed later. There’d be a lot of reading up. For now, she had to keep her head straight.
“Can you run me through what happened with Vivien? You thought she was blackmailing you?”
“If you think it’ll help… It must stay between us, though.”
“I understand.”
“A few months ago, I got a note in the mail, anonymous. From these bastards who blackmail everyone. They said they knew, they had proof, and they’d be in touch. Putting the fear of God into me—it’s what they do, apparently.” Walter pulled at his hair, and Lana understood why it was such a mess. “ThenVivien showed up here, saying she’d done some DNA test and she knew. To be frank with you, she wasn’t making much sense, and—I must confess—I was in a panic. I gave her some cash and I thought maybe I’d gotten off lightly after all, and that would be that. But then the blackmailers came for more—only this time, they had a recording of my conversation with Vivien. So finally, I called the police—I knew it was a risk, but I was desperate. A policewoman contacted me and said there was little they could do about the blackmail, but they could try to keep Vivien away, so I agreed to a restraining order.”
“Youput the restraining order on her? Of course! Was the cop Keisha Graham, a detective?”
“You know her?”
Lana nodded. She seemed to be a one-woman police department. “My understanding is that this extortion racket offered Vivien money to get proof, but she refused and reported it to the same detective, offering to help catch them. It’s possible she found out who they were, but vanished before she could tell anyone.”
“But she recorded our conversation and gave it to them. How could she not have been in league with them? Hold on—you asked about Grace’s birthday…” He pulled at his hair. “Vivien called me the day before. We were about to transport Grace home in the ambulance, so I couldn’t talk. She said she wanted to see me—she begged me. But I said there was no way, given that she’d taped our previous conversation. She denied it, of course—she really did seem shocked—and then I had to hang up. She sent me a text message afterward, but I didn’t reply. Something about having deleted everything. It slipped my mind, with everything else going on.”
Lana frowned. So the phone call Vivien made as she left the set—that was with Walter?
Walter’s phone buzzed, and he checked the screen and stood. “I must get back to Grace. My dear, I hope you’re right that Vivien isn’t involved, and I hope you find her. I wish I could help, but…” To himself, he muttered. “Such a mess.”
As he left, a nurse came in, pushing a cart. “Would you mind giving Mr. Lascelles some privacy?” he said. “I need to do some checks.”
Lana walked along the hall in a daze. For all that she’d found out, Vivien kept getting further away. Part of her wanted to believe her sisterhadtaken the money from the extortion gang and fled, but it didn’t ring true. Belonging was more important to her than money. Lana went to grab her phone to call Griffin, but remembered it was in Darnell’s room. And Griffin… Griffin probably wanted nothing to do with her. Her eyes watered. She thought they had this authentic connection, but he trusted her as much as he trusted the next superfan.I don’t know you.
And he was right. He didn’t. Because if he saw her for who she really was, he’d never accuse her of such a thing, even with no other likely explanation. Whywouldhe trust her, given his history? They were two broken people who couldn’t co-exist in the real world. They’d had a fling that had come to a brutal but inevitable conclusion. Beginning, middle and end of story.
She blinked hard. As her eyes cleared, she found herself staring into a camera lens. A pap—insidethe hospital. He wore an orange cap—one of the paps who surrounded the car yesterday. She swiveled. The nurse from the palliative care ward strode toward her, glaring. “Call security and get that man out of here,” she ordered someone, as he snapped away. “Come with me.” The nurse grabbed her hand and took her through a door to a stairwell. “I’ll take you somewhere quiet, where you can collect yourself. This must all be overwhelming.”
Which of the many overwhelming situations did she mean? They went down a few floors, and the nurse stopped outside aroom marked “chapel.” She looked through the window inset in the door. “Sorry, someone’s in there.” She opened the next door along the corridor and ushered Lana into a small office, modern and neat. “Take a seat in here—Dr. Kincaid won’t mind. I’ll check that the hospital is clear of those bastards. Stay put until I come back.”
“Thank you,” Lana checked her nametag, “Ophelia.”
Lana’s watery gaze latched onto a box of tissues behind the desk.First things first, get yourself together. As she was wiping her eyes, she noticed a photo next to the monitor. A wedding photo. The doctor with…
She snatched it up. Was thatthe detective? The bride was ultra-slim and her face was in profile, gazing up at the groom. Was Lana seeing things? That woman showed up everywhere, had a hand in everything, while getting nowhere: dealing with Walter, interviewing Vivien and slapping the restraining order on her, searching her room, asking Julian if he knew what she was researching, volunteering to speak to Lana, investigating Darnell’s accident. But even if she was married to the doctor, how did that change anything? A strange coincidence?
A phone sat on the doctor’s desk. There was one way Lana could check if it really was the detective in the wedding photo. She went through her pant pockets. The detective’s business card was still there—it had been through the wash, but the number was legible. She punched in the number.
The detective’s distinctive voice answered. “Hey, you. No, no baby yet. Please say you’re calling to tell me our little trap worked… Babe? You there?”
Lana hung up. She pressed both her hands to her mouth.Our little trap? Darnell? The doctor had said they’d rerouted the ambulance here. Did they have something to do with his injury—if he evenwasinjured?
She looked around the office. A printout of the patient list lay on the desk—similar to the one Darnell had found, but updated to include his name. She located Grace Marbury. Her date of birth checked out—it was indeed her birthday the day Vivien visited. Lana tried the computer on the desk, but it was locked. A small shredder sat on a shelf in a corner. Next to it lay a red binder with an elastic strap. Lana crossed the room and opened it. Empty. The shredder was also empty, but a torn piece of paper was stuck in the mechanism. She eased it out. It was part of a photo, printed on paper. Two people in a car—one was the detective, holding the red binder like she was handing it over. The other person’s head and chest were just visible. “Holy crap,” Lana whispered. There was no mistaking that face. “What the hell?”
Lana mentally cycled through her conversations with the detective—the extortion ring, the celebrity hit squad, Vivien’s supposed conspiracy theory. She found herself staring at the phone. The phone. She straightened.
