Page 82 of City of Liars

Tonight, I take my life, in penance. Let me, at last, find peace.

The cup fell from Ella’s fingers, sending tea splattering everywhere. She'd gone pale, her eyes huge.

“I remember,” she said, her voice shaking.

“He committed suicide?” Liv’s voice broke. “Oh my God.”

Ella hugged herself, as if cold. “He left us,” she said. “He left me. I never understood why…until now.”

“He felt so guilty, he killed himself,” I said, remembering Liv’s dream about Charles, how he’d pleaded with her to forgive him, the way she’d woken to hear the piano playing. This shit just kept getting freakier. “What was it he said, a life for a life? I guess he was trying to right the balance. But…I thought he died of a heart attack.”

Ella shook her head. “That day, I found him lying in his study, his pistol next to him. There was blood all over the rug. Mama burned it in the hearth. She swore me to secrecy, and the servants too. We would never be able to bear up under the weight of the scandal, she said. So I had to promise to tell everyone his heart gave out from the stress of the market’s crash. She paid the servants bonuses to say the same. And she made me repeat it over and over again, until I believed it myself.”

I imagined a small, thin version of Grandma Susi, brokenhearted at the loss of her mother. And then, just a few miles away, a little girl who’d lost her dad.

I’d thought of the Carters as the villains. But the whole thing was a goddamn tragedy.

As I watched Liv wrap her arms around her grandmother, the truth hit me with the force of a hundred-mile-per-hour fastball. Even Charles Carter, who’d come from blueblood stock and had every resource at his disposal, had struggled with how to be a good man. Charles had killed himself rather than deal with his problems. My father had abandoned our family. And here I was, running away from Liv when she was the best thing that had ever happened to me.

I’d been a coward, like Charles. I’d spent my life on the run.

Well, fuck that. I still had no idea how to be a partner or a decent role model for a kid. But Will had been right: all anyone could do was their best.

And I was here now. Maybe I’d lost Liv for good, but I wasn’t going to give up without a fight.

51

Liv

My poor grandmother.

I thought of Charles in my dream, begging, Forgive me. Of the red-tinged shadows, pooling on the rug, shrouding him…like blood.

He’d died in that room. And I had the eerie conviction that I’d dreamed about the night of his death. That the words I’d watched him write in his journal might have been his last. The chiffon tunic dress Elizabeth had been wearing in my dream—it made sense, if they were supposed to attend a gala that night. She’d been sitting downstairs, waiting, while upstairs, Charles prepared to end his life. A chill rippled over me at the thought.

He’d been consumed with guilt. Maybe, for no reason at all.

“Charles didn’t know that Ella wasn’t his biological daughter, not for sure,” I said, looking down at the journal. “And neither do we.” I ticked off the next points on my fingers. “We know the girl who died of frostbite wasn’t Lily. We know Charles didn’t kill James, that James died before he could collect the ransom, and that Maisie didn’t raise Ella. But it’s still possible that Ella wandered off when James was killed, found her way to the orphanage, and ended up in Chicago. Charles could’ve been raising his own daughter the whole time, believing she was an imposter.”

My grandmother gave a small, hiccupping sob, and Theo took her hand. “Ella,” he said, his voice gentle, “are you okay?”

I wanted to be angry at him, but I couldn’t. He’d been protecting me, just like Grandma Ella said. But he’d made it clear in New York that there couldn’t be anything between us other than the physical. And I hated the fact that I wanted more.

My grandmother focused on Theo, color coming back to her cheeks. “Somehow, I think I always knew. I stuffed it down and forgot it, like my mother told me to. In time, I came to believe he’d really died of a heart attack. But something about that never felt right.”

Theo shifted his weight, his jaw tight. “I feel sorry for your father. Yeah, he might have been complicit in keeping Lily from my family, but he knew what giving her back would’ve done to his wife.” He dropped his head into his hands. “Charles made the wrong choice, but part of me feels bad for him. Does that make me messed up, or what?”

He raised his head, the frustration that emanated from him palpable. “I thought learning the truth would make me feel better, that everything would seem black and white. But Charles…he was a perpetrator, but a victim, too. And now I don’t know what to think.”

My grandmother sat up straight. “I do,” she said.

The room seemed to take a breath. And then it exhaled, sending a current of cool air rippling through the curtains despite the closed windows. I shivered, but my grandmother didn’t move an inch.

“I’m tired of other people making my decisions for me,” she said, her voice clear and strong. “I want to take that DNA test, regardless of how your parents or Jamison feel about it. If I have a sister out there, I want to meet her. I want to know for sure.”

52

The Belly of the Beast - 1927