“About what? Her note?”
“Not about that, no.”
“What, then? Him being my father? I mean, it’s a bit scandalous, I guess, that he had another kid with someone else. But it’s hardly earth-shattering. Even when the truth did come out when he was desperate about Harriet, it might have strained their marriage behind closed doors, but they’re the type of family to push through it. It didn’t cause a blip, professionally.”
She looks wildly uncomfortable suddenly, even more than she did a minute ago. “It was more than that. While Anderson was throwing his weight around in my office, I felt physically threatened. And I had a flash of this time in Florence, withOliver. In bed. It wasn’t just once, to be honest. It wasn’t assault, exactly. But I suppose technically it wasn’tnotassault …”
She trips over her words as they struggle out of her mouth and I stare at her, horrified. Anger flaming right to the edges of my soul.
“It was borderline,” she concludes, her upturned, injured face telling me a completely different truth.
“There is no such thing,” I say, firmly. “No borderline. Evie, I’m so sorry.”
“But Drew”—she looks at me, tears spilling down her cheeks now—“it wasn’t borderline with Anderson and your mum. Not remotely.”
A large wave crashes onto the beach and barrels toward us. Evie lurches to her feet away from it, but I can’t move. It rushes at me. All of it. The white foam on the sand. The truth about who Anderson is. Who Oliver is.
Who I am …
The water recedes and she steps toward me again, holding out her hand to help pull me to my feet so we can stumble from the tide, where we fall again.
“By this stage I had almost given up,” she admits.
“On what?”
“I’d already lost almost everything that mattered. It was late. I was the last one working in the faculty. Anderson was drunk and dangerous. Maybe I had a death wish? So I went for him. I confronted him. And maybe he really did intend to silence me that night because, Drew, he confessed everything. I think he meant to cleanse his soul by admitting it, finally, to someone, and then to erase me. But he must have lost his nerve.”
I can barely breathe, with what she’s telling me.
“I know exactly what happened that day with your mum.”
88
Evie
Drew’s hand holds firm on my knee. I’m about to tell him the hardest thing I’ve ever had to say to anyone, but he’s looking at me, ready for it, while first light breaks on the horizon.
“Your mum knew she was dying,” I begin. “She reached out to Anderson in a last-ditch attempt to help you.”
The pain I’m inflicting, visible across his face, is almost too much to bear.
“Go on,” he says.
“She knew the truth about him and what he’d done to her. All she wanted in her final days was to set you up for life. Have him give you the financial comfort you deserved as his son.”
“She agreed not to ask him for more money. It was their arrangement,” he argues.
“She was the one with all the power, though. She had maybe days left. She knew his secret violent past. So she demanded he do the right thing by you and change his will.”
“He wouldn’t do that,” I scoff.
“No. So she threatened to file a report for a historic sexual assault offense if he didn’t, andthatwould have destroyed him.”
“He couldn’t risk an arrest,” Drew guesses. “And he couldn’t risk blowing up his family. Mum could have brought down his entire life.”
“Yes. And here he was, an experienced anesthetist with access to drugs that could have led to an overdose? And no one would be suspicious because of your mom’s condition.”
“Did he admit to that?”
