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“And let Richard take the fall for it,” I said, and Mom looked chagrined.
“I suppose I owe him an apology. But I couldn’t say anything, not then. The last thing we needed was for your grandmother to go paging through those albums, having her memory jogged. It wouldn’t have been good for her. And I also didn’t want to have that conversation with my brother and sister just yet.”
“What about Jack? Did he know?”
“He might have suspected,” Mom said. “I found several letters from him mixed in with Mother’s correspondence when I started looking through everything. He had written to her several times, asking for money for his mother’s care. He clearly felt that a debt was owed.”
“It sounds kind of like blackmail,” I said.
She shook her head. “He was just desperate. Shelly eventually married another man, but apparently he died a while back and they never had any children, so when she had her stroke, there was nobody to help except Jack. He had to put his life on hold to move back here and care for her.”
“I guess you knew how that felt.”
“Of course I empathized,” she said. “But I also wanted to be smart. Your grandmother didn’t have long, and if Jack was connected to the family by blood, it could have made things complicated. Once we’d confirmed his paternity, assuming he was my half brother, I thought we might be able to come to some sort of arrangement. But—”
“But Mimi had already taken care of it.”
“That’s right,” she said, and looked at me curiously. “How did you know that?”
I dug into my bag, finding the letter and handing it over. “She sent this to Shelly, right before Christmas.”
I waited while she read it, watching emotions flicker over her face until she reached the postscript, and her eyebrows went up.
“Huh,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Mom, how many times has Jack Dyer been at the house? Apart from that first morning, when he scared Mimi.”
She looked cautiously at me. “Why?”
“He smokes a pipe. I’ve seen it. And that thing she mentions at the end, about the scent of tobacco? I’ve smelled it, too, here in the house. I smelled it that day when she went missing. If he was coming around here when we didn’t know about it, messing with Mimi’s head—”
“Oh, god, I’d almost forgotten about that,” she said, cutting me off. “He needed a wheelchair for Shelly and I told him he could stop by and take ours, since your grandmother was so intent on not using it. Apparently he was getting it out of the closet, but then you all came back from your walk, and he thought seeing him might upset her, so he just took off rather than try to explain. He’s been by a few times, actually.”
“To see you?”
“And to see about the furnace,” she said with a laugh. “He’s actually a very good handyman. He’d park on the road and walk up through the woods so he didn’t disturb anyone.”
“Those pistachio shells Diana found—”
“He leaves those everywhere.” She grimaced. “I guess he eats them while he works. He’s kind of a slob, all told.”
I thought back to the one conversation I’d ever had with Jack, the strange way he’d looked at me when I said that Mimi never talked about his mother. As if I was lying or crazy—my ma sure remembers her, he’d said—but now I finally understood. He thought I knew, and what I’d mistaken for anger was just confusion.
And I’d been wrong, not just about Jack, but about everything. My grandmother’s great love—that gorgeous, tragic romance like something out of Hollywood, so incredible that all I wanted was for a little bit of its magic to rub off on me—was just another ordinary drama, full of disappointments, complications, betrayal. The man who’d saved Mimi’s life, captured her heart, kissed her in the anonymous darkness of the Ellsworth movie theater, vowed in front of their families and God to love her, honor her, comfort her in sickness and in health: he was a liar and a cheater who had broken every promise heever made. The beautiful stories Mimi used to tell me were nothing but a highlights reel with all the dark parts clipped out, as fake and filtered as a lifestyle influencer’s Instagram feed.
It made me furious. Not at Mimi, but at myself, for being duped by it. Forwantingto be duped.
“Is it for sure?” I asked. “That Jack is your brother, I mean.”
My mom squeezed my knee. “Yes. That’s where I’ve been since yesterday. We did a paternity test. My father was his father.”
“So there’s no way...” I shook my head, still unable to believe how wrong I’d been. “I thought maybe he hurt her.”
“Your grandmother?” She looked aghast. “Good lord. Is that what you were shouting about when you came in? Where on earth would you get that idea?”
“It’s just, they said her death was an accident, but—”
Her face fell. “But you didn’t think it was,” she said, and hesitated. “The thing is, I don’t think so, either.”
