Then, just like that, Colin smiled as he pressed the button. And they realized, in that instant, that there were no other buildings wired. Just the guesthouse in which he stood. The same guesthouse they had escaped. It folded inward and collapsed onto itself into a fireball of wreckage that took him with it.
They all were amazed by what they were seeing. And for Edmund and his parents especially, it was devastating. They had no idea he harbored such hatred and evilness.
Even Natasha, who was still in a state of shock that her baby brother had betrayed her, fell to her knees. She loved Colin. He was her favorite person in the world. But now he was gone?
“It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” she cried unconsolably. “It wasn’t supposed to be this way!”
But nobody cared what she had to say. In their eyes, she was as guilty as Colin.
Edmund pulled Maude into his arms, and they began get even further away from that wreckage.
Samuel and Eloise watched them head their way. But Samuel was in awe. “She went back in there,” he said to Eloise. “She risked her life for our son and went back in there.”
And despite the unbearable pain they felt for their youngest son’s demise, and their oldest child’s culpability, they began hurrying toward Edmund and Maude and threw their arms around them. It was a group hug of emotion that Edmund had never seen his parents display. It touched him. It touched him deeply. The fact that his parents were including her in their group hug, touched Maude too.
Edmund felt for the first time in his life that he could no longer straddle the fence. He had to be the one to step up and hold together those three people in his arms that he knew were going to rely on him unlike they ever had before. He had to be the glue.
And when they stopped embracing, and as the police arrived onsite, Samuel looked at Maude and reached out his hand to her. She understood exactly what that meant, and she shook it. And all of it, including that handshake, including Edmund and everything they had been through, shook her too.
EPILOGUE
Eight months later and they were back in Kennebunkport for a Saturday barbecue.
Samuel was manning the grill. Eloise and Wyatt were having a Karaoke contest. Don and Edmund were complaining about the other one cheating as they trash-talked their way through another game of Tunk. Don and Wyatt’s girlfriends were further back on the property, on the tennis court, although they were laughing at their atrocious play more than they were hitting the ball over the net. But it was all good fun.
And Maude, helping Samuel at the grill, was checking her watch. Again.
It had been a tough eight months after all that went down on that very same estate. And then Natasha’s arrest and subsequent trial didn’t help to calm matters either.
Maude covered the trial for the Dillon Post-Dispatch after Edmund pulled some strings and got her rehired as a reporter. Natasha had once been an editor at the paper and the publisher wanted firsthand reports to keep their readers informed. When the hammer came down hard on her, with the judge giving her fifteen years in prison for conspiracy to commit murder, among other crimes, Eloise felt it was too harsh. But Samuel and Edmund felt it wasn’t harsh enough. Maude didn’t render an opinion. She was just glad it was all over now.
And it was. They were moving on together. Edmund kept his parents involved in his life for the first time in his life,and whenever there was a holiday or even just a desire to get together, they would fly to him, or he and Maude would fly to them. And Maude and Samuel, remarkably to everybody, had become thick as thieves. They spoke constantly on the phone. She sought his advice, and he sought hers. There was a mutual respect between the two of them as if they understood each other.
Then Samuel’s phone began ringing. They both seemed startled, because they had been expecting a call, and he quickly answered. Then he nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Send them back.”
And with those words, he ended the call, turned down the grill and closed the top, and looked at Maude. “Fingers crossed,” he said.
But Maude wasn’t crossing any fingers. She was inwardly praying and outwardly making the sign of the cross even though she wasn’t Catholic.
And then the glass doors slid open and Edmund Austin Keating, Junior and Princilla Meredith Keating stepped out onto the patio.
Everything stopped when they walked out. Even the two girlfriends, who didn’t know who they were, could sense it was something special. Eloise stopped singing and Wyatt stopped dancing to her tune. Don, who was about to sling his card onto the pile in a definitive show of who was really the master of the game, stopped mid-sling. And Edmund, who could hardly believe his eyes, began to slowly stand from his chair.
“Austin?” he said with a sense of shock in his voice. “Princilla?”
When the two young people, both in their early twenties, saw their father, a rush of emotion overtook them and they began rushing to him. His chair fell backwards as he began rushing to them. He had not seen his children in years. But there they were. Both of them together. And in the middle ofthat patio, they fell into each other’s arms. It was a reunion he did not see coming.
As his children was clinging to him and he was clinging to them, he looked over at his father and at Maude. Because they were the only two who didn’t appear shocked. They were the only two with big smiles on their faces.
But Edmund was elated and baffled too. He had no clue a reunion was in the works. “How?” he asked his father as he held his children.
“It was all Maude,” Samuel said. “She told me those children needed their father, and their father needed them.”
“But Austin was incarcerated.”
Samuel nodded. “Maude got on my case about that too. She said I was always getting Natasha out of tough spots, why wasn’t I doing the same for my grandson? When I told her he made his bed and had to lie in it, she called that bullshit. Especially when we knew he was taking the fall for Tasha. So I pulled out the stops and pulled some strings. And there he is.”
Edmund was amazed. He thanked his father. Then he looked at that woman called Maude and mouthedthank youto her so heartfelt that it made him even more emotional than he already was. And then he and his children walked over to the firepit further in the backyard, sat down, and caught up on all those years upon years that they had missed.
