Cait swallowed. Funny, she’d believed herself more anonymous here than she’d have been in a deli near city hall. “I’m assuming you want to chew me out.”
A girl-next-door face like Nell McAllister’s—freckles across a small nose, pointy chin, childishly high forehead—shouldn’t be able to project icy disdain. Maybe she’d been taking lessons from Colin.
“Tell me you don’t really think Colin would have killed some guy in cold blood because he dared to screw around with your mother twenty years ago.”
“I told him I was sorry, that I didn’t mean what…what I guess it sounded like.”
“Sounded like?” Nell echoed, her incredulity plain. “I saw your expression. I heard you. You devastated him.”
Cait bent her head. She was having weird symptoms, her body flashing hot one second and cold the next. “It was…it was only for a minute. You weren’t there—”
“I was!”
“I mean back when I was a kid.” She made herself look at Nell. “He was already taller than our dad. And so filled with hate. He was scary. You don’t know what it was like.”
“What I know is that he was trying to draw your father’s fists so he didn’t use them on you or your mom.”
Heat blossomed on her cheeks. “I do know that,” she said in a small, tight voice.
“Because he loved you.”
“I know that, too.”
“He built that apartment above the garage for you. That’s the only reason. In case you ever needed him. Until me, he said you were his only family. Having you come home was this huge gift to Colin, and now it’s like it’s blown up in his hands.” Nell slid out from behind the table and stood. “You are so wrong. In hurting him this way, you’ve lost something precious.” She shook her head as she looked down at Cait. Then she walked out.
With her back turned, Cait couldn’t watch her go. She sat, not moving, feeling sick. She couldn’t eat now.
After a minute, she wrapped up the sandwich, a drippy thing she didn’t dare stow in her messenger bag. When she felt confident she could stand, she dropped drink and all in a trash can and went straight to her car, parked only a few slots from the door.
Having you come home was this huge gift to Colin.
She’d known that. She’d known for a long time how hungry he was to reclaim her as his sister. His family. And as long as she’d known, she had resisted, as if…
That was the part she didn’t know. The only two people she’d ever really trusted were her mother and Colin. Even though what Mom had done with Jerry had nothing to do with Cait, it still had felt like a huge betrayal. My mother had an affair. In Cait’s youthful world, her father had been the monster, her mother the…the good queen who had saved the princess by taking her away even though Mom didn’t have the skills to make an adequate living at first. Cait hadn’t told Colin that she and Mom lived in shelters off and on that first year. The battered wife who had fled with her young daughter. After finding out what else there was to the story, Cait wondered if she’d been a prop. She did know that Mom never mentioned the son she’d left behind to counselors or welfare workers. She also never said, I was having an affair and that might be what enraged my husband.
And maybe that wasn’t true at all. Cait’s father might never have known about Jerry Hegland, or other men if there were any. But…he might have, too.
Cait didn’t think Colin would have killed Jerry. Why would he have? It all happened so many years ago. He’d been mad when she’d told him, but probably only because she’d turned a part of his history inside out and it felt as if it were happening now to him, just as it had for her when she had found out. All she had to do was remember the way she’d gone off like a rocket, screaming at her mother the minute she’d walked in the door. And clung to her disillusionment all these years, as if…it was a form of protection?
She shied away from the thought, which didn’t really make sense anyway. And, gee, what great timing to be psychoanalyzing herself. She’d already been in a hurry to get back to the office. Sitting there brooding was accomplishing exactly nothing.