Page 65 of A Life Betrayed

His mother bristled. “That’s what you want to do—come here and rehash old memories? When did you get so nostalgic?”

“I picked up the phone, but I left off the last number.”

His mother stood jerkily, picking up the cups of untouched coffee as though rescinding her offer.

“I stood there, pretending it rang and rang.” Mathias looked up at her. “Because I wanted you to do it.”

The cups trembled in his mother’s hands. “Is this some cruel joke? Why are you talking about this all of a sudden?”

“I was eleven, with a father who didn’t want me and a mother I wanted dead.”

She stepped away from the table and slammed the cups down on the kitchen counter, the coffee sloshing over the tops and spilling down the sides.

“He changed his mind anyway, didn’t he?” Mathias said. “Then ten years later, he changed it back. This time for good.”

Her blue eyes burned. “You think I don’t know you hate me? You think you haven’t made that clear all these years?”

“And you don’t hate me?” he spat. “I was raised knowing everything went bad after I came along.”

His mother didn’t deny it, and he didn’t expect her to. If Mathias had been a pawn, an object in their poisonous love affair, she had been too. Except his mother had chosen her fate, and that was too pathetic to hate.

“I don’t think that anymore,” he said quietly. “Maybe that’s what’s different.”

Marguerite blinked, her face wiped clean. She stared at him, her eyes welling with tears. “I just wanted him to love me more than anyone else.”

Mathias felt a tearing in his chest.How petty.What a shallow riptide he’d been pulled into. He’d been tossed about in its turbulence for too long.

“I’m going away,” he said. “I might not be back.”

“Why? What’s happened?”

“Nothing.”Everything. “It felt like time for a change.” Mathias stood and pulled out a slip of paper from his jacket. He placed iton the table. “I’ve made arrangements. Monthly payments into an account under your name. You’ll be taken care of.”

“And you?”

He thought of the darkened room with the locked door, dinners of cold canned soup alone at the kitchen table, the glare of the television as it taunted him with lives so unlike his own—fathers who doted on their children, mothers who remembered birthdays.

Mathias smirked. “If I learned one thing from you, it was that I can take care of myself.”

Chapter

Twenty-Five

Deputy Commissioner Gill’s face shifted rapidly from astonishment to disappointment as he shuffled through the stack of photos Frances had handed him in his office at the RCMP headquarters in Ottawa. On the drive over from Montreal, she’d tried to predict exactly how the man would react to the news. He wasn’t nearly as surprised as she’d imagined. Perhaps in his time on the force, he’d become well acquainted with the various ways a case might turn.

“Beauvais gave you these?”

“No, his subordinate.”

“Just what we need—more scrutiny.” The deputy commissioner tossed the photos down on his desk. “You know, Inspector, sometimes I wonder if we’re more susceptible to this sort of thing because we spend our days in the muck. We know exactly how it’s done and how to cover it up.”

“That doesn’t make it any better.”

“Of course it doesn’t. If anything, it makes it worse,” he said, pressing his thumbs against the bridge of his nose. “So, what are we handing over in return?”

“A moratorium on the investigation into Beauvais’s involvement with the Hamilton shipments.” Frances thrummed her fingers against Gill’s desk. “You could say I was somewhat ambushed on this one. Caught between a rock and a hard place.”

The deputy commissioner looked up. “If the commissioner asks, I’ll back your call. I’d say we got off rather lightly, considering. If I’m being honest, I could barely justify sending you out there, let alone the continued man-hours. Maybe Beauvais has done us a favor.”

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