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I keep thinking I’ll get tired of it eventually, sitting here just after sunrise, another gorgeous day unfurling before my eyes. But it’s been five months since we bought this place on a tiny spit of land off the coast of South Carolina, and I still feel my stomach flip with happiness every morning.
Or maybe, I think, resting my hand on the firm curve of my stomach, that’s just my little freeloader here.
Yes, it might be a little emotionally manipulative of me, telling you I’m pregnant, hoping you’ll forgive me for everything else, but hey. We use the gifts God gave us.
Ruby had it right, I think, in that last letter.
My great-grandfather sold his own child for a buck (okay, a lot of bucks). My great-grandmother burned that money to a crisp.
My grandmother turned down Ruby’s offer of cash. My mother once stole everything I’d saved from a year of babysitting so that she could buy a bunch of lottery tickets.
We’re made up of many different types of people, is my point.
Good ones, bad ones. Most of them, like me, probably fall somewhere in the middle.
That gives me hope for the little girl currently floating around inside me. Camden is good, through and through. Me? Only middling.
But surely that gives her a better chance than most.
I hope so, at least.
Are you frowning right now, thinking to yourself,Bitch, didn’t you set a house on fire? Didn’t you murder two people? In what world does that make younota bad person?
That’s fair.
Libby was an accident, though. I didn’t know she had taken an extra Ambien that afternoon, once they got back from the funeral home. She never even woke up; she simply breathed in all that smoke until she never breathed again.
That’s not my fault.
Ben, though…
After I turned to leave Ruby’s office––after he’d cornered and tried to threaten me––he struck me from behind with a paperweight from Ruby’s desk. The pain stunned me, made me stumble, literal stars in my vision. (I always thought people made that up! But nope.)
It makes you crazy, that kind of pain. That kind offear.
For the first time since I’d read her letters all those yearsbefore, I understood what had made Ruby pick up that gun and go after Duke Callahan on that hot Paris night.
For the first time, I felt like we must share the same blood.
Was that what made me curl my fingers around the fireplace poker, the first thing I laid eyes on?
Was that what made it feel so goddamngoodwhen I swung, hard, at his head?
I don’t know. I wish I could have asked Ruby.
Of course, once Ben was dead, I had to dosomething.
This is the part where I’m supposed to say I didn’t think I’d get away with it.
But I knew I would.
Ruby had showed me how.
No one in Tavistock liked the other McTavishes anymore. They were cruel, and petty, and ungenerous, and Cam still held every purse string.
And I was Cam’s wife.
Mrs. McTavish.
