Page 90 of Scoring Grey

“Keely Balfour.”

I thought the bomb Eloise dropped about Dash was big, but Keely being his mother is next level. I pinch the bridge of my nose and try to wrap their words around the reality I lived. Is it possible? Yes, but fuck if it doesn’t reshape everything I thought I knew.

“Keely was suspect number one. Her sister, Blair’s mother, snaked her way into marrying rich and I was highly suspicious she coached Keely into doing the same thing. They might be Wyndhams, but they’re cousins without a penny that comes along with the name. It seemed too coincidental that Keely was not only one of Virginia’s nurses but Lucas’s next wife. Sure, they played up the role of finding a bond through shared grief, but anyone who knew Lucas would have known that was bullshit.”

My father was not a frivolous man. Everything was well thought out and planned. Even his plans had backup plans. I never believed he married Keely out of grief. For that to happen, he’d have to have a heart.

“Tell me something about my father I don’t know,” I say. The man I’ve always known is cold, callous, and manipulative. From the few entries my mother wrote in her journal, I don’t get the impression she embodied any of the same traits. “Why did she marry him?”

“He was different to her and to be fair, while your father was an opportunist who I’m sure sought her out because of her net worth, I believe he fell in love with her. Lucas was good to her.”

“Then why do you suspect he played a role in her death?”

“Probably for the same reasons you think he’s capable of a crime so evil. He’s a narcissist. When Virginia and I concocted our baby plan, your fathers were on board. As you know, making babies is the fun part.” She clears her throat and flattens the lapels on her suit jacket. “But the further along Virginia got in her pregnancy, the more it became real. Her belly was growing, and so was his home. She spent almost every day planning for your arrival in some fashion, and everyone knows a narcissist doesn’t like to share the spotlight.”

I pace the side of Eloise’s bed. Sitting still isn’t an option. I never had any relationship with Keely, but looking back, I’m not sure my father did either. For years, I thought they were happily married, but it was because I didn’t know what a happy marriage looked like. As I got older, my view of their dynamic evolved. I saw exactly what Ada believed she saw: a gold digger and a man happy to add a pretty woman ten years younger than him to his belt. However, that was before I knew Keely had a baby. Moments I thought were her acting the role of an entitled, kept woman could have been her hitting him where it hurt—his wallet. My father was cheap. Now I know it’s because he never had my mother’s money.

“Where does Blair Wyndham fit into all of this?” Eloise asks, her eyelids getting heavy.

“Eloise, I didn’t raise you to be anything but direct. If you have a question to ask, then ask it.”

“The car Cal was driving tonight was meant to take Blair home.”

“I’m aware.”

That confession alone has my eyebrows rising to my hairline. We didn’t give her that information. We only just revealed it to Elias.

“Why would she help Lucas?” Eloise asks.

“Did she tell you she was helping Lucas?”

I rub my chin as I go over all the conversations we’ve had. Half of the reason Eloise was so quick to believe Blair’s words at the Bronson Estate was because she didn’t use any names and assumed she meant me.

“If you had asked me two months ago if Blair would play the role of Lucas’s pawn, I would have said yes, but I can’t say that’s true now.”

“Blair hated me for years. That woman is the reason I left Cal. She gave him a drink that was laced with the same stuff Lucas used to lure you and Dad into that scandal. I saw her on Cal’s lap and assumed he wanted her there, and that’s why I didn’t tell him about Adler.”

Ada nods, but not like she knows something. More like she’s piecing something together herself. I thought Keely was a gold digger all these years, but I now believe she was trapped, the same as me. If my father was callous enough to allow his own wife to get pregnant with another man’s baby in the name of blackmail, I wouldn’t put it past him to have used that same woman to assist or cover up his tracks at the hospital.

“Keely wasn’t his wife. She was his prisoner,” I say the thought aloud.

“I think so. Keely believed we were friends, and I didn’t hate her, but our friendship wasn’t easy for me. She couldn’t step into the shoes that belonged to your mother, and since she lived in your mother’s house and married her husband, that’s all I could ever see. When I didn’t fight Lucas harder and instead went along with his demands, I made an enemy in her. If anyone could have fought him and won, it would have been me, and I let her down.”

“She didn’t want to get rid of Dash. She wanted to keep her baby. She was willing to divorce Lucas, wasn’t she?” Eloise states as though she knows it’s a fact.

“Yes,” Ada confirms.

“And you didn’t want Dad to find out.”

“No.” She drops her head. “When I found out she was pregnant, I was mad, but more than that, I was scared. I was scared I’d lose my husband.”

“But you left him anyway,” Eloise states. “It doesn’t matter that it was years after the fact. You still left. It doesn’t make any sense.”

She stands and looks at me. “That’s because I let my fear win. I was scared I’d lose him, and so I did. Every year that passed, I told myself this would be the year I told Elias what happened that night. Hell, it was me who worked behind the scenes to bring Dash’s adoptive family to Copper Falls so he’d be close, but every year I didn’t say something, the truth ate me alive, and I told myself there was no excuse for keeping my husband away from his son. It didn’t matter that Elias had no feelings for Keely. In my head, she was now my competition. My reasons for keeping him in the dark are petty, insecure, and, in the scheme of everything, selfish, but no one knows how wrong they are more than me. I lost the only man I ever loved because I couldn’t stand to look at him, knowing the secret I held inside. So I left.”

“Why not just tell him?” I ask. I’d bare my soul and risk it all before I ever walked away.

“Because breaking his heart I could bear, his hate I couldn’t, and that’s exactly what I’d see every time he looked at me if I gave him the truth.”

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