Page 47 of One Last Night

“Oh, right.Servants. The otherservants.” She snaps her eyes back to me. “Tutor me, servant. That’s what your job is. The rest is none of your business.”

“I told you before,” I counter. “Your safety is more important than anything. I won’t let you and Kevin run around with loaded guns just because you want to act out against an unfair rule.”

She grabs fistfuls of her hair and shakes her head. “Oh my God. It’s none of your business. It’snoneof your business. It’s none of your business! It’snoneof yourfuckingbusiness!”

“I think we’re done for now,” Sean says. “Children, go to your rooms. Mary, you and I will go toourroom and have a little talk.”

“Good idea,” Luann says. “You two go talk, andIwill do whatever the fuck I want becauseyoucan’t tell me what to do.”

She stalks toward me, glaring fiercely at me as though daring me to stop her. I don’t. She stalks past me and descends the stairs. Nathan takes the time to shake his head disapprovingly at me and say, “Thanks for the help, Mary,” before following his sister.

The front door slams shut, and I stiffen, then turn to follow them.

“Leave it, Mary,” Sean calls.

“But—”

“Leave it.”

“But they’re going—”

“Mary, for the love of God, leave it!”

I stiffen when he raises his voice. This is only the second time he’s raised his voice to me. The first time he raised his voice was out of concern for my safety. This time is different.

“Inside the room!”

I feel an irrational urge to stalk defiantly down the stairs, but that would make me no better than the teenagers who’ve just done the exact same thing. I walk into the room instead, wiping tears from my eyes and preparing for the scolding to come.

When Sean closes the door behind me, I ask, “Where are Julian and Victoria?”

“They left for a board meeting. The company’s in the thick of it with the attacks on the vineyard, and it looks like Robert Cartwright is preparing a countersuit for defamation.”

His tone is calmer now, and for a moment, the irrationality returns, and I hope that I might get away without being scolded.I turn to him, and that hope vanishes immediately. The tired parent is there, but it’s the pity I see in his eyes that truly hurts.

He sighs and sits on the bed. He looks past me and takes a deep breath, which hurts like hell because I know he’s preparing for a frustrating argument with a grown woman acting like a child. But I’mright,damn it! I’mright!

“I think we should leave, Mary.”

I blink. I expected an argument, but I didn’t expect it to start this way. “What?”

“I think we… No, forget that. I know we should leave. We should leave.”

“Leave… what? Leave the house?”

“The house, the island, the family: all of it. We should leave and allow them to pick up the pieces without us here to rip them apart again.”

My stomach turns. He’s using the word us, but it’s very clear that he means me. “But… what about them? What about the children?”

“Oh Christ, Mary,” he says, rubbing his face and looking past me again. When he meets my eyes, the pity is stronger, and I hate it so much I want to scream. “We’re not helping the children.”

“Don’t say we if you mean me,” I snap.

He shows some emotion at that. “Well, I can’t bloody talk to you straight, can I? You’re going to get all pissy and hurt and tell me that you did all of this for the children, and I just can’t understand, and you can’t leave mysteries unsolved, and you need to speak for the people who can’t speak for themselves, and so forth and so on, and you know what? Maybe that’s all true. But you’re wrong. This time, you’re wrong.”

“No, I’mnot!” I stamp my foot when I say that, and when I realize what I’ve done, heat floods my cheeks. “I’mnotwrong.Luann and Kevin are behind this, and they need to be honest before an innocent man gets hurt—”

“Robert’s richer than God, Mary. He’s not going to be hurt. There’s going to be a highly publicized scandal, and the two of them are going to come to an agreement and then probably never talk to each other again. Which is for the best. The children are going to stop acting out because nearly burning down their own house is much more frightening than their nosy tutor threatening to tell on them. Julian is going to take the children away from their grandmother, and Victoria is going to be able to focus on her pet project vineyard without her family and her old flame getting in the way. They’re going to move on, and they’re going to have an easier time doing it without you.”

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