Page 76 of Ebbing Tides
“She was going to throw you off a bridge.”
I couldn't help it; I gasped at the full-circle, fated admission. And although I wanted it to be bullshit, I knew he was telling me the truth.
“She was going to get rid of you. Do you not understand? When I told her I wouldn't leave my wife, she was out for revenge. She had a bargaining chip—you, boy—and she was going to use it in any way she could. She squeezed you out of her tight little cunt and held you over my head. If I refused to give her money or take you off her hands, she was going to get rid of you herself and find some other way to ruin me.”
“And why? Why the hell would she do that?”
“Because she was crazy! She was obsessed with me! She couldn't stand the thought that I could fuck her and go home to my wife!”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “You're lying to me again.”
He sighed, his body slumping further into the bed. “I don't know what to tell you, Maxwell. You wanted the truth; I gave it to you. Now you're accusing me of lying again. You're impossible. Always have been. Defiant, determined … you get that from me. But, oh, you're vengeful and insane, andthat… you get fromher.”
It was laughable, the things he was saying. He didn't see himself as vengeful? The man had spent nearly fifty years of his life tormenting his only son for his own goddamn mistakes.
I slowly rose from the chair and faced the door, my back to him. My palm covered my mouth as I tried to make sense of it all in my head. I didn't want his confession to be the truth, but it felt far from a lie, and that knowledge crept deep inside my chest, inside my gut, and burrowed down until I felt it heavy against my soul. It crushed against me, like a prisoner sentenced to death by pressing. Every year of my life, another weight added to the tremendous load.
Could I ask Lilly?I wondered, grasping for any shred of hope I could find.Is there a chance I could talk to her?
I turned on my heel, taking a step closer to my father's bedside. “Where is she?”
“Who?” His voice was quieter now, as if he'd used the last bit of his life's strength to tell me the truth of my beginning.
“My … my m-mother,” I stammered, hardly able to believe those words were being said about any woman but the one who had raised me.
She truly hated me, I realized.Oh God, she truly hated me. I always thought she did. I thought …
Oh my God, I really was the reason she killed herself.
It was me.
“She's gone,” he answered matter-of-factly, a frown settling in the lines around his mouth.
“Wha-what do you mean, she's gone?”
“Dead.”
He was fading faster, slipping again into slumber, but that one horrible, hopeless word left his lips, as clear as the sky outside his window.
I rolled my lips between my teeth, biting back the need to cry out and scream and wrap my hands around his brittle fucking throat.
Then I said, “You don't know that.”
He slowly nodded, his eyes closing heavily, and quietly murmured, “Lilly Meyer.”
Then he slept and said nothing more.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Ten texts were sent to my phone between the moment I’d left my father’s room and when I climbed the porch steps of my house—the very same ones my wife had slipped on years ago, resulting in her death. I thought about that now, as I often did, but there was a wish attached. A desperate plea for my shoe to land on a rogue patch of ice, for me to fall over the banister and crack my head on the same brick she had years ago. It would be tragically poetic—husband and wife, both met with the same fate, ten years apart.
But I had no such luck, and I unlocked my front door as another text came in.
They were all from Sid, asking what was going on, what had happened, and if I was still coming by later with Melanie and her kids. I wished he’d leave me alone, but it was my fault he didn’t because I had been the one to call Grace and tell her I needed to be at my house instead of with Dad.
“If you can’t come by and sit with him, it’s fine,” I’d said. “But I can’t be here right now.”
I should’ve known she’d tell her husband that I had called. I should’ve known he would harass me. And hell, maybe I had known, and that was exactly why I had called her and not Lucy.
