Page 106 of Merging Wright

“She did not.” Surprise laces her voice as Ainsley twists to face me. Her hands slip into her jacket pockets. “Why would you say that?”

“She left that night with Myles. They had been best friends. He always loved her, and she loved him.”

“Like a sister loves a brother.” Ainsley’s eyelids flutter in surprise as she defends her sister.

“She didn’t want to leave with me.” I jab my chest.

“That doesn’t mean she wasn’t going. She was scared, Mach. It was a big change for her, but she would have gone to the ends of the earth with you if you asked her to.”

Ainsley doesn’t know. That isn’t the truth. Tracy wasn’t leaving with me.

“She went home with Myles.” That night, she left Charlese’s house with my brother. We’d had a fight earlier in the day where she told me she wouldn’t go with me. Or was that just one more fuzzy memory? Did she say she didn’t want to go? The difference was semantics, or was it?

“He was drunk that night. So were you. She offered to give him a ride. She was coming back to pick you up.”

I don’t recall that at all. She left with Myles. She was going to stay behind with him. “She was pregnant with his child.”

Ainsley’s eyes open wide. Her face brightening in anger. “The hell she was.”

“She was pregnant when she died.”

Ainsley gasps, unsteady for a second before her legs catch her and she restores her balance. “I didn’t know.”

“Only Myles and I knew she was pregnant. He told me.”

Ainsley’s eyes narrow. “But that doesn’t mean it was Myles’s child. He wasn’t sleeping with her.”

“How do you know?” My voice strains. My blood boils. How does she know anything about her sister and my brother?

“Because I have faith in my sister’s loyalty to you. She would never, ever cheat on you. She loved you, Mach. She. Loved. You. She was your wife, and that meant everything to her.”

The words strike hard. Deep, deep down, I know she’s right. Tracy wouldn’t have been unfaithful to me. She was better than that. She would have told me if she was unhappy. She did tell me. And she wouldn’t have stepped out on me to prove some point or find comfort in another. She would have faced off with me. It’s one of the reasons I was so upset that night. We’d had that fight, but it still didn’t make sense that Myles knew before me that my wife was pregnant.

“As for Myles. I know for a fact he wasn’t sleeping with Tracy. He wouldn’t have done that to you.” She waves toward me. “You are his brother. His twin. He would have never crossed that line.”

“He loved her like I did.”

Ainsley tips her head, searching my face for a moment before looking to the side. “That might have been so, but he wasn’t sleeping with her.”

“How can you be certain?” I practically yell.

Her head snaps back, and she faces me once more. “Because he was sleeping with me.”

All the wind is knocked out of me. I stare at Tracy’s younger sister, a mirror image of what my late wife might have looked like as she aged. They didn’t look similar as young women, but the blonde hair and green eyes are the same.

“I didn’t know.” My stunned voice cracks.

“No one did.” Her hands cover her face, and she sobs.

I step over to her, wrapping my arms around her, tugging her tight to my chest. Heartbreak vibrates off of her.

Did she love Myles?

Myles might have even been in love with Ainsley.

He’s my twin, and I didn’t know.

How could I have been so wrong about everything?