“Is your family far?” Simone asked. “Not close enough to head home for the holiday?”
“My parents have both passed,” Betty said. She always let a beat of silence fall after this admission. A proper mourning period for the conversation. “And my siblings…” She waved a hand. “They’re all over.”
Some of that was actually true. Betty didn’t know where Levi was these days, though she’d tried to track him down these past few weeks. His radio silence unnerved her, and if she weren’t already not sleeping, the worry probably would have kept her up all night. Early on after their dad kicked him out, they’d stayed in touch as much as was possible. She set up an email account to use at the school library’s computers just for him, and he’d also left her an emergency way to reach him. But only if things were dire. They used to message back and forthevery few weeks. Levi was a nomad, and he assured her she was ready to do the same, ready to leave when the opportunity arose. He was the one who taught her to be overly cautious, to look not just over her shoulder but out front and to the left and right too.Once you leave, he said over email,you have to be sure that you are never dragged back.
But once she fled Georgia in a hurry and determined to leave no trace of where she’d gone, their correspondence became even sparser and more coded. He told her in another email that she couldn’t be too careful, even if it meant leaving him behind too. And she told him she never would, but it had been a few months now, and she had no idea where he was in the world, and he certainly had no idea about any of what had happened to her. Zeke, the commercial, Caleb, all of it.
Sometimes, now, at night when she couldn’t sleep, she thought about Patience. What she would say to her if their paths ever crossed, what she would ask of her and if her sister’s answers would ever be enough. Patience’s betrayal—how easily she abandoned Betty when she bound herself to Matthew—was still the most acute. An open oozing wound, and so it really was her sister’s face, not her father’s, not her mother’s, that Betty envisioned when she envisioned returning home, saying her piece.
“Anyway, my family is too scattered, and we weren’t big on holidays,” Betty said to Simone. Only Christmas, and even that was all for show for her father’s benefit to gin up money for the church. Which mostly went right into his own pocket.
“Oh, well, that’s too bad,” Simone had said. “Though family can definitely be complicated.”
“We’re not complicated,” Julian said, and Simone rolled her eyes, then huffed air through her nose.
“You two are lucky,” Betty said. “I was never close with my dad.”
She thought of being called to the altar a week before her eighteenth birthday. The empty auditorium. How her footsteps echoed as she made her way to him. Her dad telling her he’d decided that Silas, Matthew’s odious brother, was meant to be her husband. God had told him. God had sent him a vision.
Maybe God forgot to tell him that everything was about to go up in flames not even a week later. Maybe God forgot to tell him that it was only a matter of time before your luck ran out.
26
Night Ten
Julian
Julian should havementioned to Simone to keep things close to the vest, but he was so happy that she was willingly spending time with him that, in a rare lapse of foresight, he’d forgotten. He didn’t want or need any of these people to know the dynamic of their relationship or really any of the pertinent backstory unless he was offering it himself.
“Simmy,” he said in the kitchen while she and Betty were exchanging getting-to-know-yous. “Could you run to the car and get the gifts we brought? I forgot them in the back seat.”
She swiped his keys and nodded. He’d taken great care with the basket for Sybil—imported chocolates, rare German gummies, marzipan flowers—though he doubted she had passed a piece of candy through her lips in decades. The other one was just a hodgepodge for the rest of them to enjoy over dessert because Julian had always hated pie, even Robin’s. Even on Thanksgiving. Also, it was important that they saw him as a laconic candy store proprietor. He hadn’t spent decades of hislife learning how to be deep undercover without paying attention to all the smaller details of how people sized you up.
The front door swung open again, and Zeke strode in with his parents and sister, Simone trailing them, a gift basket in each hand. Zeke toted an enormous bottle of Veuve Clicquot under his good arm, resting it on the kitchen island, and proceeded to disappear into Sybil’s dining room and emerge with as many champagne flutes as one hand could carry. It was interesting, Julian thought, how Zeke knew exactly where to find those. He wondered how much time the two of them were spending together and what else he didn’t know.
Introductions were made, Zeke hugging Simone like they were childhood friends, so he left her in Zeke’s company, to find Betty sitting in the backyard on the same chaise lounges they’d lain atop a few weeks back. The dog curled up at her feet.
“How are things? It’s been a bit since we’ve really had a chance to catch up.”
Julian hadn’t seen Betty in person in over a week, too long for his liking. He’d wanted to check in, make it to the city and swing by the diner, but then Simone showed up and stayed, and he spent the time duping her into thinking everything was normal. That he was healthy, that he was sleeping, that he didn’t open and close his old files several times a day, looking for any questions he’d forgotten to ask, looking for the answers he hadn’t known to seek.
“Well, you know, life is absolutely wonderful. I won the lottery, met the man of my dreams, am now a major philanthropist.”
“You want to be a philanthropist?”
“That’s what you took from that, Julian?” Betty sighed. “No, it’s fine. My life is fine.”
Julian knew that she had met a boy, but Betty wasn’t aware that he had kept further tabs.
“Speaking of dating—”
“Is this the part where you pretend to be my dad?” Betty stretched her legs out, and Pluto reoriented himself to rest his head on her shins.
“Well, with no family to speak of, would that be so bad? To have someone?”
“No,” she said, and to her credit, Julian thought, she didn’t even hesitate, didn’t even flinch. She was as good as he was.
“Come on, aren’t you freezing?” he said, nudging his chin toward the house.
