Her aunt’s words sank in, and Adelaide rose from the couch, her hands shaking as all the blood rushed from her face and made her dizzy with horror and understanding. “Pretended? Are you saying…are you saying that your brother and his wife took in the child? Pretended the baby was their own?”
“I didn’t want you,” Opal hissed, rising as well and glaring at Adelaide. “I looked at you and I saw that horrible night. A reminder ofhim.”
Adelaide lifted a hand to her lips. “You are lying,” she said. “You are deranged. They were my parents. No one ever hinted otherwise. I was theirs.”
Opal shook her head. “No, you weremine. You stole my future and my hopes, and I loved you and hated you so very much.”
Adelaide was shaking so hard, she was hardly able to stay upright. She stared at her aunt. Oh, she’d always seen the similarities between them. The faint reminder that her aunt’s hair had been blonde before she went gray. The hands that were the same. The lips.
But she’d always chalked those things up being family. She’d never thought, not once, not ever, that the woman who raised her, who held her at arm’s length, who gave her only the bare minimum of support, was her mother.
“If that is true, why did you take me when they died?” she whispered, her voice cracking on every word, because the truth of what was being said was starting to sink into her body, her skin, her soul.
It was tearing her apart piece by piece.
“Because no one else wanted you. And I knew that their deaths were my penance being forced back on me. So I took you. And I prayed you wouldn’t be like him.”
“Him?” Adelaide’s stomach turned as she comprehended what Opal meant. “How can you compare me to a man who forced himself on you?”
“You are a wanton, Adelaide!” her aunt roared. “You were for that boy, that boy who came mooning about. I saw what you were then. I thought I could stop it by stopping him.”
“Stopping him,” Adelaide repeated, backing up a step. “What does that mean? How did you stop him? He left.”
Her aunt shook her head slowly. “I let you believe that, hoping that you would recognize your true nature and work to better yourself. To rise above your natural tendencies.”
“What did you do?” Adelaide asked.
“I killed him,” Opal said. “I killed him.”
Adelaide staggered backward, as far as she could from her aunt. Until her back hit the window, until there was nowhere else to run. No way to hide from the horror that her aunt spewed at her.
“No,” she said. “No, that isn’t possible.”
“It very much is.” Her aunt was nodding and nodding, like her head was on a hinge. “You pay a man enough and he’ll help you get rid of a body and make it look like he left London of his own volition. So I did.”
Adelaide covered her mouth with both hands, praying she wouldn’t cast up her accounts then and there. She thought of that man, Charlie, who she had taught herself to hate. Taught herself to forget because she’d believed he’d used and discarded her.
Now she knew better.
“Poor Charlie,” she sobbed. “Oh God, Aunt Opal, how could you?”
“So you would stop!” her aunt burst out. “I had to make you stop. And you did, for a long time. You wore the clothing to cover your shame, you stood along the wall as you should. You hid away as was your destiny. But thenheappeared.”
“Graham,” Adelaide whispered, and came forward a long step. “You will not hurt him, Opal. I’ll not let you. You will not hurt a hair on his head.”
“No,” her aunt agreed, walking across the room. She picked up a small statue that she’d given Adelaide years ago. A figure of Persephone, forever torn between two worlds. Forever punished by both her lover and her mother.
Now Adelaide stared at it, and everything made such perfect sense.
“I’m not going to hurt him,” her aunt continued as she moved forward. “Because I realize that it isyouwho must be silenced. Stopped. Or else you will make more spawn like you who will only do worse. We are damaged women, Adelaide. And the only way to stop it is to die.”
She swung the statue, and Adelaide lifted her hands with a scream. But she couldn’t block the heavy statue as it hit her in the side of the head. She slid down the wall staring up at her aunt, her mother. The world was spinning, going black. She had to fight it, had to stop it, but it was too powerful. Too strong.
And she slipped into unconsciousness with one thought in her mind.
Graham.
Chapter Twenty
