“I’m sorry for the interruption,” he said as he approached me. He hitched his thumb back toward his office. “Wes is still in there, making some phone calls.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
He blanched slightly at my indifference. “It does matter. Everything—all of it—matters.”
“I suppose Wes knew all along? About your vendetta against Noah Madaster? I guess he’d have to be told something, given the fact that I look exactly like Elizabeth. You’d have to tell Wes, or he’d blurt out something stupid when he saw me.”
Evan squinted at the lake. “He doesn’t know about my plans in regard to Noah, no. He just thinks that I met you and… ”
“Fell in fake-love with me because I look like Elizabeth?” I finished for him.
“I’m not sure what he believes, exactly. I haven’t been very forthcoming on the subject of you. I just told him about the resemblance, and asked him not to show shock, because you didn’t know about it yet. And yes. I told him that I was in love with you. In love. Not fake love,
Anna.”
I laughed harshly. “Wes wouldn’t have any trouble believing that, I can imagine.”
“What do you mean?”
“I look like Elizabeth. And Wes was in love with her, just like you were,” I said recklessly. “He slept with her. Right?”
I liked his startled expression. It was nice, not to always be the stupid, naïve one.
“How did you know that?”
“I see the way he looks at me. Like I’m a ghost. Like part of him wishes like hell I really was her, while the other half wants to turn tail and run. I heard the way he talked about Elizabeth.”
For a few seconds, Evan didn’t respond. The narrowed crescents of his eyes glittered as he stared out at the sun-gilded lake.
“Wes was the first,” he admitted gruffly. “Not the first ever—I doubt there was a time that Elizabeth was ever faithful to me—but Wes was the first I found out about. He was the one we went to therapy for… the only one we really ever worked as a couple to get past. Or so I believed at the time. After that, I didn’t really focus much on the identity of Elizabeth’s men anymore. It wasn’t the individual man who mattered. It was her desperate hunger. Her need to be desired. It gave her a semblance of control over men. Over her world.”
“A control that her father had stolen from her years before,” I added.
I absorbed it all for a moment. Wes may have been a blip on Elizabeth’s sexual radar, but she’d been a game changer for him. Somehow, I just knew that.
“How can you still be friends with him?” I asked Evan.
He seemed unsurprised by the question. I realized it was because he’d probably asked himself the same thing many times before.
“Wes and I have a long history. Our friendship goes back, even before Elizabeth entered the picture.”
A thought occurred to me. “You knew he was Madaster’s physician, didn’t you? Before we ever came here?”
He met my stare squarely.
“I did, yes.”
“Of course you did. You called Wes and renewed your friendship because you knew he could offer you inside information about Madaster and what was going on in the South Twin. You were using him, like you used me. How else could you possibly find out what effect your plan was having on Madaster? What effect I was having on him.”
“In part, yes.”
“So actually, your long history with Wes has little to do with you ever contacting him. You’re tolerating him because he fits into your plans to drive Madaster crazy with my presence. You’d even put up with one of Elizabeth’s ex-lovers, if it meant getting your revenge.”
“I know that you’re angry with me, Anna. But you’re wrong to think that I resent Wes’s affair with Elizabeth, to this day. I forgave him for it years ago. She made a fool of any number of men, including me. It’s hard to hold a grudge, when you understood what she could be like… the kind of power she could wield.”
That irritated me.
“Wes is having an affair with Valeria, you know,” I said dully.