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Cam’s confession, that horrible story, Ruby seizing on the bed, his sobs, the pillow over her face…
I knew that after ten years in the grave, there wouldn’t be any evidence left if someone decided to exhume Ruby, if Ben decided to follow through on his threat and actually accused Cam of murder. Nevertheless, I still found myself frantically Googling on my phone after he had left.
How to know if someone has been smothered.
Apparently, the evidence is usually in their mouths.
Bruising inside their lips, from their teeth pressing hard against the skin.
“And yet you tried to come in here, and hold it over my head that I lied?” I say to Ben now, my voice growing louder.“Yeah, I did, okay? I lied, and I schemed, and I wanted Cam to throw all of you out. I wanted this house, and to be a McTavish, but I amnothinglike you. And neither is Cam. We’re better than all of you, and that’s what you can’t stand.”
I snatch the letter from his limp hand, the pages almost tearing. “Get fucked, Ben. Sincerely. I’ll DVR your episode ofDateline.”
And then I make one last, stupid mistake.
I turn my back on a man with nothing to lose.
CHAPTER SEVENTEENCamden
I used to make this drive a lot when I first got a car.
Two hours to Knoxville, almost on the nose.
Ruby never asked where I went, maybe didn’t care, but if she had, I think I would have told her the truth.
It wasn’t that hard, finding my birth mother’s name. Ruby could be careless with paperwork, leaving sensitive things in places where anyone could find them.
I was fourteen when I saw the name for the first time.
Penny Halliday.
It didn’t even bother me that in the space for Father’s Name on my birth certificate, there was just one stark word: Unknown.
And I never planned on seeing her, on making these borderline-creepy drives to Knoxville, but as soon as I had my license, that’s where I’d found myself heading.
I’ve never spoken to her, never tried to make any contact with her. It wasn’t about that.
It was about reminding myself that whatever it is that runsthrough the McTavishes––whatever made them cruel like Howell, or dangerous like Ben, or even benignly neglectful like Ruby––was nothing that lived inside of me.
And hell, it was possible that Penny Halliday was all those things, too. But for some reason, I didn’t think so.
For one, she taught art at a community center for underprivileged kids, a place I couldn’t imagine any McTavish ever stepping foot inside. And when I parked my car outside that building, watched her walk out the front doors that first time, she’d been smiling. Laughing with another woman, in a carefree way I’d never seen from anyone at Ashby House––even though no one had more reasons to be carefree than they did.
I stopped making the drives when I was eighteen. I started feeling weird about it, like I was intruding on her life, even if I never talked to her. And anyway, what did it matter?
She’d given birth to me, but she was only my mother in the biological sense.
Ruby McTavish was my true mother.
For better and for worse.
So I don’t know exactly why I’m making this drive now, or why I looked Penny up on Facebook to see whether she still teaches these classes.
But I am, and she does, so I park where I used to park, and I wait for her to walk out of the building. For the sight of her to remind me that there’s another side to me, a part of myself that Ruby had nothing to do with.
Penny Halliday was only sixteen when I was born. I learned that the same day I learned her name, and I remember thinking, on that first drive over here, that I was the same age as she had been. How foreign it felt to me, the idea of being a parent.
I never resented her for giving me up. I understood it, honestly. She simply did what she thought was best. But I wonderedif she ever learned what happened to me, if she saw those pictures in that magazine and her heart swelled and broke all at once seeing me called “The Luckiest Boy in North Carolina.”
