When she finished, the silence resumed. Caitlin squirmed in her seat. The worst was that there was more to come. That she hadn’t even gotten into what George’s father had done for Finn, after the accident, and how Finn had threatened to use it against him, against them all. That wasn’t a conversation she wanted to have—there was so much other air to clear about Maribel. But she would. She just had to finish this one first.
“Say something,” she pleaded.
When Violet finally spoke, her voice was cold and incredulous. “That is the reason you didn’t tell me—or the FBI, or anyone—you knew where my son was days ago? Days that I’ve spent curled up in his bed and crying, thinking my life was over? Days that he’s spent crying for me?”
“I know it sounds selfish.” Caitlin started to cry again. “I know. It’s just … this isn’t just any male ego we’re talking about here. It’s George. His father has plans for him, you know, and he has plans for his sons…” Her voice trailed off, but she knew Violet knew their family well enough to know the rest. With the long history of the Bryce-Daniels name, it was important to have a lineage. That was a part of the reason she’d never understood George’s refusal to undergo testing. But it was also a part of the reason she knew that he could never, ever find out about what she had done. It wasn’t just the infidelity that would turn him against her—sometimes she even wondered if he half expected that, traveling as much as he did, though her own thoughts of the opportunities he must have had on the road were usually fleeting and easily dismissed. They loved each other. But if he were ever to find out that the twins weren’t his, and if his parents were ever to find out, or if the media were ever to find out—
“Caitlin.” Violet didn’t just sound furious, she sounded annoyed. “George already knows the twins aren’t his. For God’s sake.”
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AUGUST 2016
Finn raised the glass to his lips, then hesitated. George seemed unhinged enough that Finn didn’t want to test him. Yet he knew that if he allowed himself to go under again, there was no telling what he might wake up to. “Before I drink this,” he said. “Just … thank you.”
The hand holding the gun didn’t move. “For?”
“For not calling the cops. Yet, anyway. I know I messed up. I never meant to put you in this situation.”
“To which situation would you be referring?”
Finn was taken aback by the solid ice in George’s voice. He gestured to the cabin around him, indicating the obvious circumstances at hand.
George stood and paced across the room, then back again. “I know what all of you think of me,” he bristled. “That I’m just this entitled rich kid. But I didn’t get to where I am because of my dad. I happen to have a good head for business. My clients trust me implicitly. My colleagues would say I’m smart. Which is why it amazes me that when I’m not on the clock, everyone else seems to think I’m so stupid.”
Finn squinted at George in confusion.
“I don’t think ‘everyone’ thinks of you that way at all,” Finn said carefully. “Not me. Not Caitlin.”
“Oh, especially Caitlin,” George snapped. “And you. You know what, I wasn’t going to get into it—I was just going to wait the two of you out, like I always do. But you have the audacity to thank me? Do you think if it were up to me, I would even be here right now? Don’t you think I would have turned you in the second I found out about all this nonsense?” George gestured wildly with the gun. “I wanted to call the FBI from the hospital!”
“The hospital?” Finn tried to keep the alarm from his voice.
George went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “But it’s not only up to me. I have to look out for Caitlin. And the boys. I might be at my limit as far as how long I can go along with this ridiculous charade, but that doesn’t mean I want them growing up with their father in jail.”
Finn wished the drug would clear from his brain. This mess he’d made was a lot of things, but was it really a charade? “I won’t let you go to jail, George. If I get caught—” George opened his mouth to speak, and Finn held up a hand. “I mean, when you turn me in, I’ll tell them you didn’t have anything to do with this. I’ll tell them I threatened Caitlin. Which I did, by the way. I’m sorry. I never expected her to follow me down here…”
“Why the hell not? Do you think she’s going to just let you disappear on Bear and the boys?”
“You keep saying ‘the boys.’ This doesn’t have anything to do with the boys.”
“STOP already!” George’s voice thundered through the high-ceilinged living room. “It has everything to do with the boys.” His eyes were reckless, unfocused.
Finn raised both hands, as if he were under arrest. He had to hold off whatever this was until Caitlin got back. “Whoa, man. Listen, forget the juice. Why don’t we have a drink together, okay? Relax for a minute.”
“We aren’t friends, Finn. We never were.”
Finn cringed. Of course George wouldn’t take this lightly, Finn getting his wife and sons involved in his own mistake. Still, something deeper seemed to be fueling his fury. Something dangerous. He’d never seen George quite like this, like something pent up under pressure was about to burst loose. He had to keep him talking.
“You only drink with friends?” Finn asked, keeping his voice jovial, calm. “Those are pretty stringent standards.”
George’s eyes rested on a framed photo on the mantel. In it, he was a teenager, and his dad’s face was tanned and smooth, and the two were wearing matching fishing vests down at the dock. “My dad always said, ‘Never drink to feel better—only drink to feel even better.’”
“Oh, come on. That sounds good on paper, but I can think of plenty of times you haven’t followed that.”
“I think I’ll start today. Because this is going to be the day all the nonsense stops and we start doing things the Bryce-Daniels way. No more going along with whatever imaginary rules the rest of you keep putting into play.”
Rules? Finn tilted his head. “George, I have to tell you, I’m feeling a little lost here. It’s like we’re dancing around some kind of elephant in the room, but I honestly have no idea what the elephant is. You care to enlighten me?”
“Why don’t you tell me. I’d like to hear you say it.”
Finn took a breath. There was so much he hadn’t ever said aloud. So much he probably should have. George had chosen the right words after all. His whole life was a ridiculous charade. “I ran out on my wife? I appear to have abducted my son?” Finn began ticking off points on his fingertips. “I should have been charged with involuntary manslaughter—or negligence, or something? I should have been convicted? I can’t seem to stop being in love with my dead fiancée? I feel guilty every time I catch myself feeling happy with my wife? I don’t know how to live a life I don’t deserve?” He raised his eyes to George. “Which thing?”
“An impressive résumé. You just forgot a line.”
Finn threw up his hands. “References?”
“The part where you fathered my children.”
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AUGUST 2016
“What do you mean George knows?” Caitlin felt sick, but also skeptical. Violet was hurt. It would be natural to lash out with the first thing that came to mind. That didn’t mean it was true.
“He told me himself. I mean, not about Super Sperm—God, what a stupid name. Honestly, Caitlin, I expected something classier. But that the boys weren’t his.”
“When?”
“Years ago.”
Caitlin’s mind raced. Then a furious thought pushed its way in. “Does Finn know that he already knows?”
“I have no clue what Finn does or does not know. Which should be more than obvious right about now.”
Caitlin checked herself. She had to tread carefully here. Violet was the one being wronged. Except—all of a sudden Caitlin didn’t know where she stood either.
“Where was Finn when George told you this? Where was I?”
“Not there, obvious
ly.”
“When were you alone with George?” Caitlin heard the accusation in her voice and didn’t bother to mask it.
Violet sighed heavily. “We tend to romanticize those early days, when the kids were babies: It was so much fun to be on maternity leave at the same time, and blah blah blah. But do you remember how exhausted we were? I mean, I came to understand why they use sleep-deprivation as a form of torture. And you had the worst of it, with two newborns on different feeding schedules.”
Caitlin nodded irritably. Of course she remembered. But she’d been so happy to have the twins after lonely years of failing to get pregnant that she’d felt as if she had no right to complain—and so mostly, she hadn’t.
“Well, one night George was trying to let you get some sleep. It must have been midnight, or later. I’d just gotten Bear settled back into his crib and went outside to dump out the diaper pail—it was stinking up the whole house—and George was coming up the sidewalk with the stroller. The boys were asleep in there, but as soon as he stopped to talk to me, they woke back up. I was kind of beyond sleep myself at that point, so I got us a couple of beers and walked up and down the driveway with him, keeping him company. It was the only way he could get them to stay down.”
“And that was such a bonding experience that after one beer he decides to spill his guts that he doesn’t think he’s the father of his kids?”
“It was two beers. And the added factor of no sleep. But yeah, basically. He sort of mentioned it as if I already knew, as if it were something I myself had to have come to terms with too. I remember that striking me as odd. He seemed surprised, almost apologetic that he was the one telling me.”
“What did he say, exactly?”
“That he was ‘shooting blanks.’” Violet made little air quotes with her fingers. “Now that I’ve heard your side, I gather that’s why he never wanted to have the test done. He said he’d known since he was a teenager—some kind of sports injury turned it up.”
“A teenager? So his parents know?”
“It didn’t sound like it. Maybe he was eighteen, an adult? He said he was afraid that you wouldn’t marry him if you knew. And then after the fact, his fear was that if you adopted, his parents would be disappointed about the Bryce-Daniels line ending. He seemed pretty humiliated about the idea of anyone knowing. I tried to tell him that was silly—it’s not like it’s anything he can control.”
“So all those years, he knew we couldn’t get pregnant, and he let me keep on hoping? I mean, he knew I wanted to be a mother, and he married me without telling me that he couldn’t father children?”
Caitlin reeled. Through the fog, her high beams illuminated a sign for a rest area two miles ahead. She was going to have to pull over. She didn’t feel safe driving with this tornado swirling around in her head.
Violet’s voice softened a little. “He said he hoped that if he stalled long enough, you might change your mind and decide you didn’t want kids. But then you got pregnant with the twins. And of course he knew they couldn’t be his, but he just—” Violet shrugged. “He just played along. He said as sad as he was to think of you having an affair, in some ways he was actually relieved. You would have what you wanted, his family would never know about his shortcomings, and he would get to continue being your husband and even become a dad.”
But Caitlin’s racing thoughts had stalled. “He was hoping I’d change my mind? So he could blame our childlessness on me? So his parents could resent me instead of being disappointed in him?”
She slowed the car as the off-ramp for the rest area approached. It was as if all the insecurities she’d ever had about not being good enough for George’s family were coming to a head. Of the whole hoity lot, her own husband would have been the one to throw her under the bus.
“I don’t think that’s what he meant, Cait. He probably just figured it would be easier to tell people the two of you had decided against it.”
Caitlin’s very skin was tingling with embarrassment. That Violet had known all this and had never told her—what Violet must have thought of her, of George, of their marriage … And yet even as her fury built, there was something as bizarrely comforting as it was disturbing about the fact that George had known all along and had stayed. George had stayed. Every time Caitlin had imagined him finding out and leaving her, she’d played it out wrong. That was one nightmare, at least, that would never come to life. At least, not the way she’d pictured it.
“If you had any idea what it would have done for me if you’d just told me this—if you’d been enough of a friend to tell me this—” Caitlin could hear the hypocrisy in her words even as they escaped her mouth, but it was too late. Violet’s face changed. Caitlin had rarely seen so much as a hint of sadness, or resentment, or remorse, or even wistfulness from Violet before Finn disappeared with Bear. Now, here it all was—years’ worth, condensed into one searing, disbelieving, mocking, frozen glare.
Caitlin swung the car into a spot near the restroom and switched off the ignition. “All the wrong people know all the wrong secrets here,” she said, her voice small in the suddenly silent space. She tried to manage a nervous laugh, but even to her own ears, it sounded more like a whimper from a wounded animal.
“Sometimes I wish I’d never met any of you,” Violet said quietly.
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AUGUST 2016
The part where you fathered my children.
Finn actually laughed—until he saw that George was serious. “Whoa,” he said, his smile fading. “Whatever you think you know, you’ve got it wrong.”
“Oh, it’s wrong, all right. Like I said, we’re not friends.”
“We were. We are.”
George’s arm went flying, palm splayed, and caught Finn’s plate at the edge of the coffee table. Peanut butter crackers rained across the room; the dish shattered on the brick hearth. Finn jumped. “Jesus, man, if the kids are sleeping back there, they won’t be for long.”
“So now that the cat’s out of the bag, you’re going to start acting like their father? Way to step up.”
The shock of George’s accusations dissolved the lingering fog of Finn’s deep, drugged sleep, and an anger of his own filled him with surprising intensity. He hadn’t managed to devise much of a plan these long days on the run, but this was so far from how he’d wanted things to go. This was, in fact, the last thing he needed.
“Look,” Finn said. “No offense, but if I wanted to fuck Caitlin, I would have fucked Caitlin, okay? It’s not like you would have been in the way. You’re never there.”
“At least I don’t sit around wallowing in self-pity! You kill someone, and instead of being there for her family, or honoring her memory in some meaningful way, all you do is feel sorry for yourself!” George was yelling now, his face pink, a vein throbbing at his temple. “I might not be the perfect husband, but you are not even close to good enough for Caitlin! Or Violet.”
From the counter, George picked up a tablet computer, pressed the button that brightened the screen, and shoved it into Finn’s hands. “Look at that,” he said. “Does that seem to you like it was written by someone who’s worthy of your kind of ‘love’?”
Finn recognized the Missed Connections page of Craigslist instantly from his own ill-fated posts there. But this one was dated today—or yesterday. He didn’t know what day it was anymore.
Papa Bear: I can see that we shouldn’t have ended up here. But here we are. We can do things your way, or no way at all. I’ll go along with whatever you want. And no one has to know. The choice is yours. The choice was always yours. Just please, bring our little cub home.
Papa Bear. Little cub. Clever. The investigators would never recognize Violet in this post, but Finn couldn’t miss her. And what he saw triggered an intense yet familiar wave of self-reproach. He raised his eyes to George. “How did you find this?”
“I’ve been checking every day, waiting to see if one or the other of you would post. It seemed obvious to me—the one place in yo
ur history that was plain to both of you but where the authorities wouldn’t look. Do you know, I actually thought it was more likely that I’d find an olive branch from you here? I already could picture how I’d be the one to crack the case, spotting your message and showing it to Caitlin, who’d call Violet, who’d get her little boy back. But I was giving you way too much credit. As usual, it’s the women around you who have the courage to step up, even when you don’t deserve it. And little did I know, Caitlin already knew exactly where to find you!”
“Violet, she’s—” Finn couldn’t think of what to say. He hadn’t thought enough about Violet. He hadn’t let himself.
George let out a cruel laugh. “That about sums up your thoughts on her, doesn’t it? Can you imagine someone taking your child, and you having the grace to post that you would do whatever they want to make them happy? That you would let them off the hook they had hooked themselves on? Of course you can’t! You’re too stuck on the irrelevant fact that Violet isn’t Maribel.”
Irrelevant. George was smart, smart enough to conjure the word that was supposed to fit—or so Finn had been trying to tell himself, for years. There had been moments when he’d almost listened, when he’d allowed himself to forget, just for a flash, and give himself over to life in the uncomplicated now. Violet, tipping her face up toward the stars on their honeymoon, the bonfire glowing on her skin, her fingers entwined with his. Violet, dancing with infant Bear in their living room, her hair wavy and loose, her laugh inviting and warm. Violet, sleeping the half sleep that mothers do, that worn Camp Pickiwicki T-shirt draped around her frame, her features steeped in the unassuming beauty that comes with contentment.
Almost Missed You Page 26