Page 67 of With a Vengeance

Anna leans against the bar top. “To clear my father’s name—or to ruin yours?”

“My father’s doing that well enough on his own,” Dante says. “I learned, for example, that he’s a tax cheat. In addition to being a different kind of cheater. He’s had multiple mistresses over the years. No surprise there. He always treated my mother with the same disdain he shows to me. And I learned that his mighty railroad company has been losing money for years now. Train travel isn’t what it used to be. People nowadays prefer cars, and soon they’ll be preferring airplanes. Trains are the past. The future is in the sky. You didn’t need to buy up every seat on this train, Annie. There would have been plenty of empty space.”

“So your father’s company is failing,” Anna says, eager for him to get to the point.

“It would have already gone belly-up if he hadn’t been able to swoop in and buy your father’s railroad for dirt cheap.”

“You discovered his motive.”

“Trust me, that wasn’t his motive,” Dante says with a grim set of his jaw. “I found it out, eventually. After years of searching. My father hid things well, I’ll give him that. A file here. A document there. Then there’s the safe in his study, which had a combination that took me months to figure out. That’s where the bulk of the incriminating evidence had been hidden.”

Anna knows what he found. The memos and forgeries and bank records. All of it enough to arrest, try, and convict everyone responsible.

“How did it feel to learn all the horrible things your father did?”

“I was furious,” Dante says. “And unbearably sad. And betrayed. Most of all, though, I just wanted to know why he did it.”

“Greed,” Anna says.

“But it’s not, Annie. It’s…worse.”

The word wedges into her ribs like a dagger made of ice, shivery and ominous. Part of her doesn’t want to learn what Dante discovered, even as another part of her needs to know. And even though she’s certain she’ll regret it in a minute or so, Anna can’t help but ask, “What was his reason?”

“I think,” Dante says, “it was heartbreak.”

“That makes no sense.”

“It does once you realize it was your mother who broke it.”

The icy jab in Anna’s chest grows sharper, colder. “My mother and your father were—”

“In love, yes.” Dante gives her a weary look, as if he can’t believe it, either. “A long time ago. Before you and I were ever born. They were even engaged for a time, although it didn’t last very long.”

“How did you find this out?”

“The safe in my father’s study also contained letters,” Dante says. “From your mother to my father.”

“Love letters?”

He nods, and Anna’s cheeks begin to burn. She remembers writing her own florid declarations of love to Dante.

Her whole life, she’d been told that she took after her father, and she believed it. After all, it was Tommy who got their mother’s good looks, her vivaciousness. Yet Anna now knows that she was wrong. She’s more like her mother than she ever imagined.

“Except for the last one,” Dante says. “That was a breakup letter. Your mother wrote to my dad telling him that she was sorry, but she was ending things. She’d met someone else and fell head over heels in love.”

“Did she say who it was?” Anna asks, even though she already knows. It’s clear from the way her heart throbs and her body quivers and her head spins. Her body preparing her for news both shocking and so obvious in hindsight she’s stunned she never thought of it before.

“Arthur Matheson,” Dante says.

Anna sighs, for it all makes sense. Her parents married quickly. Only two weeks after meeting. To Kenneth Wentworth, that must have resulted in emotional whiplash. Loving someone. Thinking they love you. Then being left behind while they immediately find a new, permanent love.

Now Anna understands her mother’s angry reaction when Dante and his father crashed that final Christmas party. She was worried Kenneth Wentworth was there to cause a scene. Anna also realizes why Mr. Wentworth forbade Dante from seeing her. He wanted a Matheson to experience the same heartbreak he did. Finally, it explains why Kenneth Wentworth ultimately targeted her father.

“I had it wrong,” Anna says. “The whole thing.”

This wasn’t about making money. Maybe it was to Lapsford and Herb Pulaski and all the others. But for Dante’s father, it was personal. And what he did wasn’t merely an act of sabotage.

It was revenge.

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