I followed her into the house, and she led me to the kitchen where Cai’s dad was standing by the sink doing dishes.
“Dan, we have a visitor,” Nina announced, and he turned to take me in, his expression mildly wary. “Oh, hello, Jace, what brings you back here?”
“He wants to talk about Melanie,” Nina explained, a slight quiver in her voice.
Dan’s eyebrows jumped as he grabbed a dish cloth to dry his hands. “I see.”
“You said she lives in Canada,” I ventured, eyeing them both for signs of deception. I didn’t spot any, but I did see a whole lot of something else: Shame.
Nina nodded. “That’s the last we heard from her. She had a boyfriend who was moving there, and she went with him, saidshe had a job all lined up. That was almost twenty years ago now.”
“And you haven’t heard from her since?”
“No, Melanie, she … well, we didn’t have the best relationship. It seems like a long time not to speak, but we understand why she didn’t want us in her life any longer.”
She paused to share a look with her husband, and again, they were both drowning in shame. What exactly had happened between them and Melanie that she chose not to speak to them for twenty years?
Dan turned to me, casting me an assessing glance. “Forgive me, son, but why exactly are you here asking about our daughter? You’re upsetting my wife, and it’s a subject that’s painful for both of us.”
I pressed my lips together, staring at the table for a moment before I met his gaze steadily. “This isn’t going to be easy to hear,” I warned, and they both appeared to steel themselves before Dan nodded for me to continue. “I think your daughter is back in Ireland, and I also suspect she’s been meddling in mine and my ex-wife Shannon’s lives.”
An audible silence fell before Nina asked, “What has she done?” Her inner brows raised and drew together, her chin lifting while she pursed her lips. I knew this one, too: Concern.
“You first,” I said. “Tell me why she might be doing this because for the life of me, I can’t understand. I was there when Cai died, but everyone knows it was an accident.”
“It’s our fault,” Nina blurted, her voice quavering with emotion. She glanced at Dan as though looking for permission, and he lowered his head to give it. “Melanie had been a difficult child, but Dan and I, we made some decisions that, looking back, certainly exacerbated her problems. If we could do things over again, we’d do them a lot differently.”
Dan’s shoulders slumped, like there was an invisible tonne of guilt there that he carried daily. A sense of unease swept over me. What had they done?
“You’d better take a seat,” he said, motioning to the table. I pulled out a chair, and Dan sat across from me, clasping his hands together while his wife hovered nearby, nervously fidgeting with a button on her cardigan.
“As I said, Melanie was an unruly child. Maybe we spoiled her, or maybe we just weren’t strict enough, but we tried our best. By the time she entered her teens, we’d completely lost control of her. She’d go out drinking, doing drugs, shoplifting, and getting involved with boys. She’d lie to us constantly, but when she came home pregnant at fifteen, Nina and I were at our wit’s end. Melanie didn’t feel ready to raise a child, which was completely understandable. She was still so young. So we came up with a plan to home school her until the baby was born, then we’d raise him as ours so that Melanie could go on with her life, complete her education, and hopefully go to college.”
“Him?” I asked, starting to put the pieces together.
“Cai,” Dan explained. “He was Melanie’s son, not her brother.”
Holy shit.
“It was the worst mistake,” Nina confessed, a tear falling down her face. “After Cai was born, keeping the secret only made her so much worse. She started drinking again, going missing for days on end, not turning up for school.”
“We told ourselves we were doing it for Melanie and her future, but really, we were just ashamed and wanted to avoid judgement from our family and friends,” Dan said, getting choked up.
Wow. This was so much more complicated than I ever could’ve expected. Cai wasn’t Margie’s brother; he was her sonwho she’d been forced to pretend was her brother. No wonder she’d left and not spoken to her parents in twenty years.
“So, Cai was Margie’s … I mean, Melanie’s child?”
“Yes,” Nina replied. “He was hers, and we … we never should’ve taken him from her. Perhaps if we hadn’t, things wouldn’t have turned out how they had.”
“Who’s Margie?” Dan asked, eyes narrowing in suspicion.
I cursed myself for letting the name slip. Margie obviously had good reason to estrange herself from her parents, and I had no intention of telling them her new name or where she was living. That wasn’t my place. I did, however, have no problem informing them that she’d befriended Shannon under false pretences and that she may have been orchestrating some kind of revenge against me through my ex-wife. I didn’t tell them about the catfishing or the near hit and run because, so far, there was no evidence to prove she’d been behind those things, even though in my mind I was almost certain it was all her.
Nina burst into tears when I’d finished speaking, while Dan stood and went to wrap his arms around her. I had empathy for them, sure, but what Dan and Nina had made Margie do was cruel and messed up. Living your life having to lie to everyone that your son was your brother would eat at anyone’s psyche. But it made sense if she were out for revenge. If Cai had died while she was away in Canada, I’m sure she had a lot of anger over losing him before she could ever tell him the truth of who she was to him.
When I was ready to leave, I promised Dan and Nina that I’d keep them updated as much as I could before I texted Dixon. He pulled up outside the house, and I slid into the passenger seat, mind racing.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
