Lure Poppy.
Deal with Poppy.
End it with Poppy.
“What do you want?” Bitterness laces her question.
“You saw my list?”
Heat flares into her face. She glances at the closet. Closed now. Can’t see the safe inside.
“I knew you’d look, if I left it open.”
Poppy closes her eyes, overwhelmed.
“I know you went through my medications, Poppy. You’re trained as a nursing aide. You have a palliative background. I knew you’d figure it out—that I’m dying.”
Anger begins to leak into her shock, and it surges up inside her like a defensive wave. She welcomes it. She allows it to wash throughout her veins and spread to the very tips of her fingers and toes. She allows the anger to turn toward rage.
“So you abandoned a newborn. You were too busy becoming a famous war correspondent to allow your duty as a mother to get in your way. You were too damn chicken to even go through a proper adoption process in order to give me away. And now you want to come back into my life and mess with my heart and fucking soul andconfess? Soyoucan die in peace? Fuck you, Lillith. Fuck you to hell!”
She surges to her feet and marches to the door.
Avi steps in her way.
She shoves both hands into his chest.
“Fuck you, too, you goon. Get out of my way.”
He doesn’t move. Poppy hesitates, thinking of his flick-knife.
Get rid of Arra.
No good for my Patrick.
She spins back to face Lillith. “What really happened to Arrabella on Crete?”
Lillith gestures to the chair. “Sit, Poppy. We need to have this out. I understand your anger. I deserve it. But this is not just about me. I need to tell you something in order to keep you safe after I’m gone.”
Poppy swallows.
“Please.”
Slowly, she returns to the chair, sits.
“I don’t know what happened to Arra,” Lillith says. “That’s the truth.”
“Your list—you wrote—”
“‘Get rid of Arra,’ I know. Love is blind, Poppy. Patrick was unable to see, or unable to admit to himself, what Arrabella is. A seductive and transactional vulture. She’s still seeing her ex. She has other sexual dalliances on the side. But she’s after the McGregor legacy. I just wanted Patrick to see her for what she is. Avi is well connected to the PI world. And when I got wind via Avi that Arrabella was looking for a certain kind of private investigator to dig into your past, we set it up so that Avi was presented to her as the best candidate for the scope of her work. The idea was for him to feed her bits of information about you, let her take the bait, and sink herself by being forced to admit to Patrick she was paying a PI as a means to get rid of my assistant, get back into my orbit, and basically subsume me. I gather they had a terrible row about it. We haven’t seen her since.”
Lillith’s words start rolling over Poppy as other huge and pressing questions swell in her mind, taking up all the space in her brain.
“Who’s my father?” she blurts. “Do you even know? Am I some mistake? A dirty little secret you needed to discard?”
“That’s the ‘why,’” Lillith says. “Your father. He’s the reason I’m doing this now. I had no choice.”
Poppy goes still. Her mind returns to her conversation with Dr. Marsh under the tree in Turkey, and a horrible snake of a thought begins to uncoil from deep inside her belly. Cold. Writhing. Slowly rising more fully into her consciousness.
