Behind Every Lie

by Christina McDonald

I dropped my head into my hands, my breath coming in short, shallow bursts. The lightning marks on my arm had gone all prickly, the way a limb feels when it’s fallen asleep.

  “This must be rather shocking to you,” David said.

  He looked like he was going to get off the hospital bed to come to me, but that was the last thing I wanted. I put a hand out, to stop him, and to steady myself, and he stayed where he was.

  “I’ll be okay,” I said roughly.

  Blood whooshed around my brain. I felt like I was rising out of my body, up to the ceiling. The air was too thin. Sweat prickled under my armpits. I took my coat off, trying to get some cool air against my skin. David’s eyes widened as they landed on the lightning marks on my arm.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “I actually got struck by lightning.”

  “Lightning? Oh my God! Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. The doctor said they’re called Lichtenberg figures.” I twisted my arm to look at the marks, which had faded to a dull pink. “They’ll go away.”

  “It’s actually very beautiful.” He smiled at me.

  I snorted. “Ha! I look broken.”

  He shrugged. “In Japan, they believe in the ethos of wabi-sabi, which says there’s beauty in the broken.”

  “Like kintsugi,” I said, thinking of the pottery I’d seen at his art gallery yesterday.

  He looked pleased. “Exactly. The cracks are essential to our history, rather than something to disguise.”

  David leaned his head against the bed, seeming to have suddenly lost all energy. “I wasn’t sure if Kat would tell you about my condition. Please extend my gratitude to her.”

  “She didn’t,” I said. “Mom was murdered four days ago. I found your address in her office.”

  “Murdered!” David’s hand fluttered to his chest. He turned an even more sickly shade of gray. “Sebastian.”

  My stomach clenched as I thought about the man following me yesterday. “I think so. And now he’s looking for me.”

  twenty-six

  eva

  DAVID DIDN’T WANT ME to leave the hospital. He was terrified for my safety, afraid Sebastian would find me. I was scared of that too, but I was more afraid of going to jail.

  “I’ll call you as soon as I get back to Seattle,” I promised. “I’ll tell the police everything I’ve learned. They’ll protect me. I’m sure they’ll be in touch.”

  “Don’t forget Charlotte,” he murmured as I left, his eyes already drooping shut.

  I looked at him blankly.

  “Charlotte. Your sister. Half sister. She’ll be across the street at the café with Eloise. She grew up in your shadow, so, yes, maybe she hates you a little right now. But you’re family.”

  Outside, the cold wind bit at my fingers. A heavy drizzle quickly saturated my coat. People had started to put up umbrellas, the rain splattering against building windows and plummeting to the ground. It slapped into my hair, cold but oddly refreshing.

  My mom had loved the rain. “Rain washes the world clean, Eva,” she always said. “It makes everything fresh and new again.”

  I was quickly getting soaked and didn’t have an umbrella, so I jogged across the street and pushed open the door to the Tea and Sympathy café.

  I could use lunch about now anyway.

  Steamy air smacked me in the face, the competing aromas of coffee and fresh baked goods greeting me. The décor was somewhere between douchey hipster and slick Manhattan—exposed brickwork, pale hardwood floors, reclaimed wood tables.

  Charlotte was hunched at the back of the café, her back to me. She was trying to get Eloise to eat a spoonful of something green.

  I ordered a sandwich and a pot of tea and plopped my tray on the table next to her. She glared at me, baby spoon hovering in the air. Eloise smacked it, spraying sludgy green food all over Charlotte’s face. She gasped and froze. I expected her to be mad, but instead her eyes softened and she laughed.

  “You cheeky little monkey.” She grabbed a napkin and wiped her face, then unbuckled Eloise from her stroller and wiped her clean too.

  She was so young. Far too young to be responsible for both her child and her parent. I scanned her face, devoid of a scrap of makeup, blue smudges underneath her eyes. She must’ve caught the pity on my face because her smile dropped, her jaw jutting out defensively. “I know what you’re thinking. Silly cow should’ve remembered her birth control.”

  “What? No!” I was shocked by her acerbity.

  “Eloise is the best choice I ever made. And believe me, there have been days when it’s been hard. Especially now that Dad’s sick.”

  She jiggled Eloise on her knee. Eloise held her fingers and laughed, a sound that squeezed my heart.

  “You’re right, I was judging you,” I admitted. “I’m sorry. We all make the choices we can live with, and you’ve clearly made a good one. Eloise is beautiful.”

  She turned away and took a sip of her coffee. “Listen, Eva, or Laura, or—I don’t know what to call you.”

  “I’m …” I stared at her, unsure what to say. Was I Laura now?

  “Whatever. You can go home. I don’t want you here. My mum will be here to collect me in a minute anyhow.”

  Hurt cracked through me. I doctored my tea with sugar and milk, trying not to be so sensitive. This girl was my sister. All of this was new for her too. I folded my hands together and leaned forward.

  “Tell me about her.”

  “My mum?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s lovely. She’s an academic. She teaches art history at Oxford.”

  “She doesn’t live here?”

  Charlotte shook her head. “No. She and Dad divorced when I was two. I think what he said is true—he never got over your mum, and my mum didn’t want to be second-best. After they divorced, she took a job at Oxford and I stayed with Dad.”

  Seeing the look on my face, she rolled her eyes. “People don’t give men enough credit. Dads can be amazing too.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, sorry. That was a little sexist of me.”

  She laughed drily. “I know I chose to have Eloise and stay home with her, but some women don’t want or can’t have that. Mum has a fantastic career and I’m really proud of her.”

  “She sounds really great.”

  “The best.” Charlotte agreed. “It must be crazy, right? Finding out you aren’t who you thought you were your whole life?”

  “I’m not sure I’ve wrapped my head around it, to be honest.”

  Eloise bashed both hands against the table, rattling the saucers and mugs. Intrigued by the vibrations, she reached for my mug. I moved it out of her reach, sloshing tea onto my jeans. Eloise laughed, holding a hand out to me. Charlotte sighed and stood up.

  “I’ll grab you a few napkins,” Charlotte said. She thrust Eloise at me and hurried to the front of the café.

  I held Eloise like I would a football, cautiously, with my fingertips, afraid to drop her. I stared into her wide blue eyes, thinking of the massive, breath-stealing pain I’d carried under my heart ever since giving up my own child.

  In the end, I’d decided on adoption. I knew I couldn’t keep my baby, because how could you be a good mother to a child you didn’t even want? A child you hated and blamed, whose every glance would remind you of what you wanted to forget?

  Even now, I could picture Mom in the hospital room with me, the baby nestled in her arms. “Hold her just for a minute, Eva.”

  “No.” I’d turned my face away. I couldn’t even look at the baby without thinking of that night. How could I possibly care for her, love her the way a mother should?

  “Eva—”

  “Get her out of here!”

  I had wanted to protect my daughter from my past, not make her a part of it. I wanted her life to be fresh and innocent and pure.

  Maybe Rose had wanted the same for me.

  twenty-seven

  eva

  THE NEXT MORNING, my plane set down at Sea
-Tac Airport. A bank of clouds was just disappearing, a pink smear of light touching the horizon. The tarmac still glistened from the rain, drops of moisture dribbling down the plane’s windows.

  I’d slept in random bursts most of the flight from London, the stress of the last few days wearing on me. My eyes were gritty. My mouth tasted like a badger had crawled into it and died. I could feel my body inching toward total collapse, so after frog-marching through passport control, I headed to Starbucks.

  Even though it’d only been three days, it felt like a lifetime had passed since Jacob had dropped me off at this airport. Time was relentlessly ticking by, each second dissolving like a mirage across the desert. I’d found out so many things in London, but none of them answered my one burning question: Had Sebastian killed my mom?

  Or had I?

  Instead of taking the taxi to Mom’s house, where Melissa’s car was still parked, I gave the driver my dad’s address. He pulled up to a small rambler perched on a neatly manicured lot a few blocks behind Angle Lake. Dad had moved here after the divorce. Even though they’d tried to split custody of us, like most things in life, the break wasn’t even. I was mostly at Mom’s while Andrew was mostly at Dad’s because it was closer to his school. Gradually I visited less and less. It was too hard seeing how their lives had moved on, as if our family had never existed.

  “Eva!” Dad looked exactly the same when he opened the door: large potbelly, kind hazel eyes, a hooked nose, bald except for a thin ring of hair at the bottom, stretching from ear to ear. He grabbed me in a tight bear hug.

  “Hey, Dad.” I wrapped my arms around him, my voice muffled against his wool sweater.

  Ever since he’d remarried, there had been a shift in our relationship. But he was my dad, the only father I’d ever known, and it felt good to be in his arms.

  “I’ve been calling you. Are you okay?”

  I nodded.

  “Come in, come in.” He moved aside and I followed him into the living room. “I was just finishing breakfast.”

  I smiled. “Two eggs and toast?”

  Dad was a predictable man, wrapped in his routines. It was probably what had attracted Mom to him in the first place.

  The living room had been updated since I was last here. Donna, his new wife, had painted the walls a warm magnolia and hung sheer lemon drapes from the windows. A cream wool rug offset the brown carpet.

  I caught sight of myself in a wooden-framed mirror hanging over the fireplace. My roots were growing out, the mahogany red stark against the bottled toffee color I carefully applied every month. I looked haggard, almost unrecognizable, like I needed about four years of uninterrupted sleep.

  We sat next to each other on the corduroy couch. Tux, Dad’s ancient black-and-white cat, ran across the room and jumped onto my lap. I nuzzled his neck as his purr kicked in.

  “This is crazy.” Dad shook his head. “I mean … I just can’t believe it. This sort of thing doesn’t happen to normal people. I feel like I’m watchin’ a movie or somethin’.”

  I snorted. “Tell me about it.”

  “Do you know what happened? The police aren’t saying much, and Andrew’s too broken up to talk about it.”

  “Mom was poisoned.”

  Dad slumped against the couch in shock, blowing out a stunned breath. His cheeks jiggled with the movement. “But … she’s a high school teacher! Why would someone poison her? Do they know who did it?”

  I hesitated, stroking Tux’s silky fur. “No, but I think I might be a suspect.”

  “You! Why?”

  I tried to process that question.

  What if I did what the detective thinks I’ve done?

  Had I, in a moment’s fury, lashed out, foolish and impulsive, an action bitterly regretted but impossible to undo? Maybe Mom had told me about our past. Maybe I’d meant to punish her for lying to me. I’d lashed out before. How could I trust that I hadn’t done it again?

  “Do you remember when I left Seattle and moved to Whidbey Island?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “I left because Mom and I got in a massive fight. I was living with her after … what happened to me. I’d given the baby up for adoption, and Mom came into my room one day. We started shouting at each other.”

  “You made the choice to give the baby up, Eva. Now it’s time to stop being a victim and start being a survivor.”

  Only now did I realize I’d never forgiven her for those words. My bitterness and unforgiveness had burrowed inside me, folding into the fabric of my identity and creating the distance that had grown between us.

  “The cops didn’t even believe me when I told them what happened, and then I found out I was pregnant and I had to give the baby up. I was so angry that she could think everything would just go back to normal. I totally freaked out.”

  “Move on? I can’t just move on. This isn’t some science experiment where the answers are black and white! What happened will never be over for me!”

  I had started crying, tears hot and sticky on my face. Dad wrapped his arms around me. I laid my head against his chest, the way I used to when I was a little girl.

  “We shouted at each other. We said some horrible things.”

  “Maybe it’s fine for robots like you!”

  “You’re acting like a weak-willed little child!”

  “Mom stormed out of the house and didn’t come back all afternoon. That night I woke up to a scraping sound outside. When I looked out the window, I saw someone was jimmying the lock on the front door. You can’t imagine how scared I was. Mom was still gone, and my phone was downstairs. I know it was totally irrational, but I thought the guy who attacked me had returned. I’d been so scared. I picked up this really heavy vase Mom had and, when the door opened, I smashed it into the burglar’s head.”

  Understanding dawned on Dad’s face. “Ah. It was your mom.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. There was no burglar. It was all in my head. Mom had forgotten her keys and didn’t want to wake me. One of the neighbors called the cops when they heard me screaming. They arrested me and I spent the night in jail for assault. Mom told the police it was all a misunderstanding, and eventually they decided not to press charges, but I left Seattle after that. That’s why the detective thinks I killed her. Because I’ve assaulted her before.”

  Dad rubbed a hand over his balding head. “You didn’t mean to do it, though.”

  “No, but they don’t care about that. They just care about what I did before.” I laughed, a dry, bitter sound. “Plus, I can’t remember a single thing about the night she was killed.”

  “There’s no way you did it, Eva.”

  I shook my head, and Tux hopped off my lap, tossing a disdainful look over his shoulder. “Did you know my real name is Laura, not Eva? Or that Mom wasn’t even my biological mother?”

  “Honey, what are you talking about? Your name is Eva.”

  I pulled Mom’s letter and the copies of the newspaper clippings I’d taken from the British Library from my purse.

  “Mom lied about who we were my whole life.”

  Dad read the articles. His face reddened, his breath coming in short little puffs. He stood and strode across the room. He stared out the living room window, a hurt sort of anger radiating off his back.

  “She never … I never …”

  “I know.” I folded the articles and the letter into small, neat squares and slid them back into the envelope.

  “I have to go in to the detective’s office,” I said. “I have to let him question me.”

  “No, don’t do that.” Dad shook his head vigorously. “Don’t talk to that detective.”

  “I have to, Dad. What if I did it? Maybe I’m dangerous. Maybe there’s something wrong with me.”

  Maybe I’m losing my mind.

  Dad knelt in front of me. “I’ve known you since you were four years old. From when you were a rambunctious little girl to when you got your driver’s license to now, this beautiful, kind-hearted, sensitive wom
an here in front of me. There is nothing wrong with you.” He touched my cheek. “You hear me? Nothing. This is all gonna get sorted out. They’ll find evidence of whatever really happened, and it won’t point at you. But if it will make you feel better to talk to that detective, do it. Just make sure you take a lawyer with you, okay? Promise me.”

  I nodded, my heart swelling with love. “Thanks, Dad. Liam organized a lawyer for me back in Langley. Maybe I’ll go back there first and have the lawyer come with me to the detective’s office.”

  “I think that’s a good idea.” Dad put a hand to his lower back and moved to sit next to me again. “I just can’t see why anybody would kill her. Kat was a good person. Don’t get me wrong, she could be hard to live with. She was … dry. Suspicious. Had that streak in her, you know, like you had to prove you weren’t up to something. I guess now I understand why.”

  “I didn’t know Mom was paranoid.”

  “Yeah. It was one of the reasons we divorced. She wanted to know where I was, who I was with every second. For a long time I thought she was jealous. I sold car parts for a living! I spent my days on the lot and was home by dinnertime. There was nothing crazy about it. And then, you know the rest.…” He shrugged.

  I frowned. “No. I don’t think I do. I only remember your last fight.”

  Dad winced. “Jesus, Eva. You remember that?”

  “Of course. I was, like, eleven, not a baby. We came home from hiking, and you were in the shower. You shouted at each other and you slipped when you were getting out. You smashed your head against the countertop.”

  I remembered the blood seeping between Dad’s fingers, splattering onto the carpet. He packed a bag and left that night.

  It wasn’t like I never saw him again. He picked me up from school all the time. But it was never really the same after that. The happy bubble I’d lived in until then had been burst.

  He shook his head. “I didn’t slip. She pushed me. Hard.”

  “Mom did?” I exclaimed. I couldn’t imagine my stoic, quiet mother lashing out violently. But I guess I was finding out there was a lot I didn’t know about her.

  Dad nodded. “Did you know what we fought about?”