“Mrs. Teeks?”
“Yes,” Rayna Jo said, tears streaming. “How… How is he?”
“Mrs. Teeks, I’m Dr. Abbot. Your husband had a lot of internal bleeding and damage from the accident. We did everything we could, but your husband passed on the table. I’m very sorry for your loss.”
Devon closed her eyes when her mother released a sobbing wail that tore at her very soul, the cry sounding like a wounded animal being tortured.
A hand touched her shoulder and gently squeezed, and Devon felt herself being turned and hugged against a strong male chest.
She breathed in Oz’s scent but she didn’t cry. Couldn’t.
She was too angry. Too horrified that her father would always be remembered as the man who died that way. What was he thinking? Why had he done this? How could he?
“It’s going to be okay.”
Oz’s softly whispered words brought out the tears she refused to shed for a man who would do this to his family. To his loving wife of forty-two years.
She swallowed hard and forced the tears away. “It’s not,” she said. “It’s so not okay.”
Oz didn’t speak again. He just squeezed her tight and held her, and she was grateful for that support because, at the moment, she wasn’t sure her legs would hold her.
This was why she’d wanted Ted here with her. This was what she’d feared.
And even though she told herself to extract herself from Oz and not give in to the need to be comforted, she couldn’t force herself to move.
The whirl of multiple cameras sounded loudly in the room.
“Hey!”
Adam Shipley, Mary Elizabeth’s husband, hurried after the photographers who’d managed to sneak into the hospital.
Devon stared in horror while the cameras continued to click, and just as Adam and Michael reached them, the men ran out the door.
And though she didn’t say a word, everyone turned to look at them, and Devon realized, given their position, they would be very much front and center of the photographs depicting Richard Teeks’s family.
She pushed Oz away, feeling sick to her stomach and praying somehow her face hadn’t been visible, and rushed to her mother, who sat sobbing.
“It can’t be,” Rayna Jo said. “It just can’t be.”
Devon was exhausted by the time they got back to her parents’ house situated along the Carolina Cove boardwalk.
She and Dara had rented a vehicle at the airport, but because of the reporters and their upset, Oz had volunteered to drive so that Devon, Dara, and their mother could sit in the back behind the darker-tinted windows.
No one spoke during the drive from the hospital to the island, and as they traveled the darkened streets of Carolina Cove, Devon’s mind drifted between the past and present.
She’d had a good childhood. A stable one made richer by the people in her life. But now she wondered how much of it was a lie.
How long had her father been seeing the woman? Was she the first? The only affair? Were there more? If so, how many? How long had he snuck around and betrayed their mother?
There were three news vans parked in front of the house when they arrived, but Oz drove up the driveway and across the lawn, right up to the steps so that the vehicle mostly hid their entrance.
Devon and Dara walked on either side of their mother, lending what support they could to her trembling form, while Oz hurried ahead to get the door open. Michael and Logan parked in the driveway and made sure the reporters kept their distance before the brothers jogged toward the house and joined them in the foyer.
“Come on, Mama,” Devon said. “Let’s get you upstairs and into something more comfortable.”
“I’ll be up in a minute,” Logan said. “I have something to help calm her.”
Devon nodded, worried about her mother’s blank expression. She’d cried at first, completely heartbroken. But then she’d gone silent. Silent and unresponsive.