“I’m done, I’m done. Go ahead with your interrogation.”
“Esteban, Rafael, why are you here?”
She jabbed Beau’s side.
He winked.
Esteban swore.
“Oh good grief,” Rafael said. “I’m here because my sister called, told me my dead brother is actually alive. I’m specifically at this cabin as I already said because Esteban called and told me to meet him here so he could explain everything. Esteban, for the love of God, tell us what the hell is going on and why you pretended to be dead for more than a year and put your family through misery.”
Esteban’s jaw worked with anger. “Not the entire family. Not Dad.”
Sierra sank against Beau’s side. “No,” she whispered. “Please tell me he’s not involved.”
“Sorry, sis. Can’t.”
She bowed her head, tightening her hands into fists.
Beau gently squeezed her hand, then let go. She wanted desperately to cling to him, to take the comfort he’d only briefly offered. But she understood he wanted his right hand free to grab his pistol if he had to, which was sitting beside him at the ready. Still, without even knowing the details, just knowing that her father was mixed up in what was going on made her heart hurt.
“Go on,” Rafael urged. “Tell us. We’ve been living with your lie for months. You owe us the truth, whatever it is. And it had better be the truth if you’re going to smear Dad.”
Esteban drew a shaky breath before looking Rafael and then Sierra in the eyes. “A few months before I supposedly drowned, I was in Dad’s home office. He was at a business meeting and had forgotten some document he needed. So he called me and asked me to scan it on my phone.” He shook his head. “It was a contract amendment that could have put millions at risk if he didn’t have it signed at that meeting. Some kind of deadline penalty or something. The potential monetary losses are the only reason he allowed me in his desk. Heck, we’re not even allowed in his office normally unless he’s with us. But he was desperate. He told me where the keys were hidden and told me to get the document from the top drawer.”
He fisted his hands. “If he hadn’t been so adamant about only opening the top drawer, I never would have opened the others after scanning the document he wanted. But he made me so danged curious about what he might be hiding in that stupiddesk. I searched the other drawers. That’s when I found out…the truth.”
Sierra tensed. “And what’s the truth?”
His pain-filled eyes stared at her from across the room. “Mom didn’t commit suicide because the cancer treatments weren’t going well. The treatments made her sick, sure, but her prognosis—in spite of what Dad later told us—was good. She didn’t kill herself. Dad murdered her.”
Sierra gasped in shock.
Beau reached for her hand, and this time he didn’t let go.
“You’re lying,” Rafael accused. “He wouldn’t do that.”
“I’m not lying. Why would I?”
“I don’t know. The same reason you’ve lied to us about being dead for a year.”
Esteban and Rafael began shouting at each other.
Sierra sank back against the couch and covered her face.
Beau stood. “Enough.” His deep voice cut through the noise. The brothers went silent.
“Fletcher?” Beau asked. “Anything I need to know about?”
“Not unless you want to learn more Spanish insults.”
“All right. Esteban, what did you find in the desk? Why do you think your father murdered your mother?”
“I don’t think, I know. In the bottom drawer was, well, I guess you’d call it a journal or a diary. It was my mom’s. I never knew her to keep anything like that. But the first dated entry was the day she had her biopsy. So I guess she was writing down her thoughts and experiences to help her sort it out or something. I don’t know. I felt guilty reading it, but it made me feel kind of…closer to her, you know? Seeing what she went through, how she felt. It wasn’t long, maybe fifty pages. I skimmed a lot of it. I was more interested in how she felt at the end, before she…left us. You guys remember that page, front and back, that was found by her body? Her suicide note?”
“It was so sad,” Sierra said. “So much talking about her pain and despair.”
“Well, lots of pages in her journal were like that. And a lot weren’t. The days she was going through side effects from chemo were days she’d write that way. Then she’d start feeling better and talk about her hopes for the future. You get it, right? Dad’s the one who supposedly found her suicide note when he found her body. And that supposed note was a torn page from her journal. It wasn’t a suicide note at all.”
