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Maggie gasps, and her eyes go round. “You’re in love with her.”
“Well, of course, I’m in love with her.” I throw my hands in the air and stare at my baby sister like she’s lost her mind. “I’ve been in love with her since before I even knew her name.”
“That’s sweet. A little on the stalker side, but sweet. I’m sure she loved hearing it.”
“I’ve not told her.”
“Why wouldn’t you tell her?”
“Because the time hasn’t been right.” I was ready to tell her, but then she got hurt. Family has been in and out daily, and just this morning, she decided to go home. “There hasn’t been a good moment for it.”
“Well, maybe if you tell her how you feel, you won’t be so damn grouchy.”
I laugh and turn off the furnace. I’m finished for the rest of the day.
“I’m always grouchy.”
“No, you’re moody. Not usually grouchy.”
“Let’s go sit in the sunroom and change the subject,” I suggest as we leave the barn, lock it up tight, and walk to the house. Murphy bounces next to Maggie, happy to have one of his favorite people here for a visit.
We walk inside, and I go into the kitchen to retrieve two of the Cokes I keep on hand especially for Maggie because she favors them.
“Thanks,” she says when I return to the sunroom and pass her one. She’s curled up on the sofa with Murphy’s head in her lap, the Lab sleeping contentedly.
We sip our drinks, and I wait patiently for Maggie to pull her thoughts together. She’s something on her mind, but she’ll come around to what she wants to say in her own time.
I’ve watched several birds fly around the bird feeder in the yard when Maggie starts to speak.
“I’ve started going through Joey’s things,” she begins. “Everyone says that I can wait, but I need to get it over with. And at first, it was just the usual stuff like canceling his cell phone line and boxing up his clothes to be donated to charity.”
She licks her lips and clears her throat before continuing.
“Then I started looking through his phone and his computer. It took a few days to comb through everything.”
“What did you find?”
“Well, first of all, Beth wasn’t lying. He’d been seeing her for quite some time. I found emails, text messages, and tons of receipts from things he bought for her or did with her. She lives in Dallas.”
“Joey spent a lot of time there.”
She nods. “But that’s not all. There were other women. I was able to go back years, and I could see when he’d start to get tired with someone and move on to the next. From what I can tell, he didn’t have affairs with more than one woman at a time, but they never lasted more than about two years. Some affairs were much shorter.”
She shook her head. “I can only assume it was a game for him. Like, how long can I keep this going before Maggie figures it out? I found women going back to about a month after we got married.”
My blood is boiling now. I want to kill the arsehole. We always suspected but never looked more deeply into it, thinking we were minding our own business and staying out of Maggie’s personal affairs.
Well, feck that. We were wrong.
“That’s not the worst of it.”
“Feckin hell, Mary Margaret.”
“There’s a bunch of money that Joey went to a lot of trouble to hide,” she continues, her voice steady and sure. There’s little emotion in her tone as she runs down the list of horrible things she’s discovered about her gobshite of a late husband. “Quarter of a million in one savings account in California. Another with more in Oregon.”
“Where the hell did he come up with that much money?”
“I have no idea. He made decent money, but not like that. I’m still finding accounts on his laptop. At least there’s one thing that Joey never cared to hide or change, and that’s his password. He used the same one for pretty much everything.”
“And what is it?”
She laughs. “Maggiemylove2013. Ironic, isn’t it?”
“I’ve never claimed that Joey was a smart man.”
She shakes her head slowly. “No, he was. Maybe too smart. Because he fooled me for a long damn time, Kane. These kinds of secrets are insane. It’s not a couple hundred dollars here and there, hidden away for a rainy day. We could be talking about millions. And when I called the banks to ask about them, they wouldn’t talk to me about it until I sent them the death certificate and our marriage license because he didn’t have me listed as a beneficiary.”
She shoves her hand into her pocket and comes out with a key.
“And then I found this.”
“What’s it unlock?”
“I don’t know. I think it’s a key to a safety deposit box, but I have no way of knowing where or to what box.”
