She smiled and passed him one of the damaged pot plants. He looked down at it. The bright red flowers were drooping and he tried to lift one up. It flopped down immediately.
“It’s beautiful,” he said, placing it carefully in the car.
“It’s a poppy.” She said it in such a strange tone that he looked up at her.
“And this . . .” She passed him another pot. “This is a wild daisy.”
He nodded and put the daisy in the car, next to the poppy.
“And that’s my name,” she said.
He looked up at her.
“What?” he asked.
“Poppy Daisy Peterson. That’s my real name.”
CHAPTERSEVENTY-THREE
Poppy
The drive to his house was completely silent. He hadn’t said a word since I’d told him my name.My real name.The only talking there’d been was the call he’d made to his housekeeper, asking if she wouldn’t mind helping with the plants when we arrived. I had no way of knowing what he was thinking, and he was thinking something. I could see it on his face; he was sunk so deep in his thoughts that I could almost hear them churning about in his brain, as if they had been dumped into a washing machine. We finally arrived at his house and parked the car. I waited for him to say something, but he didn’t. We climbed out and I couldn’t take it any longer.
“I’m so sorry,” I blurted out desperately. “It was wrong and deceptive and I’m not even sure I had the best reasons for doing it, now that I look back on it. My only excuse was that I was desperate, I needed a job so badly and—”
“I’m not stupid, Poppy.” He said my name for the first time,my real name, and it felt so good. “I knew you weren’t telling the truth about things when I hired you. It became more and more obvious as the days went by. I’ve suspected it since the moment I met you, but . . .” He paused and shrugged thoughtfully. “I let it go, because I didn’t care. I let it go, because I wanted to see you again.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said again. This time there were tears in my eyes. I didn’t want him to think badly of me, especially after everything that had happened between us. “I don’t want you to think I am anything like that Sasha woman. I don’t usually tell lies like this. I’m not a liar.”
“You’re nothing like her,” he said. “She had a hidden agenda. A cruel one.”
“I didn’t have that. I swear. I just desperately needed a job.”
He looked at me and shook his head. “Doris Granger,” he smiled. “I suspected the name was fake from the moment I met you. It sounded made-up—and of course when I did a Facebook search for the name, only women who were in their eighties came up. And then I did some more research on the actual name and discovered that Doris was only a popular name between 1900 and 1930. So, it was pretty obvious.”
“You really did your homework,” I said nervously.
“Besides, you’re clearly not very good at making up names, Beatrice whatever-whatever.”
I smiled back at him. “So, you’re not angry?” I asked.
He considered that carefully. “That depends on what else you’ve been lying about, I guess.”
My stomach plummeted again.
“And now would probably be the right time to come clean about it, if there is anything else,” he said.
I nodded. Fear and nausea and nerves gripped me. I opened my mouth and was just about to say it all when . . .
I heard a gasp and looked behind me. A woman stood there with a look of shock painted across her face. This must be Ryan’s housekeeper.
“Ramona González!” she said, her mouth falling open. And then she rushed over to me excitedly. “I can’t believe they killed you!”
Ryan looked at me. “Wait, who is Ramona González? And why is she dead?”
I opened my mouth to speak and was cut off again.
“Ramona is one of the characters from my favorite telenovela,Venganza Ignacio.”
