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Stunned, she sank into a chair. She’d stepped outside to talk to her grandmother, where Cal and Nathan could not hear her conversation.
“And you’re certain they were hers?”
“Well, who else would they belong to? Not unless he had another woman on the side.”
If her grandfather was lying, he deserved an Academy Award. As a lawyer, she was trained to recognize the tells when someone was lying. He’d shown nothing.
“Did you ever tell him you’d found Barbara’s panties in his truck?”
“No, why should I? I was so angry that I wasn’t speaking to him. I packed up the stuff I could, and Kenneth and I left.”
Why hadn’t these people talked? Why had it taken almost twenty years before the details were revealed? If only they had spoken, maybe they would have realized they were being set up.
“He’s dying, Grandmother. He has lung cancer and has months to live,” she said softly.
Her grandmother gasped.
“Don’t you think it’s time we all sat down and talked about what happened? Figure out who is lying and who is telling the truth, and forgive one another. We don’t have much time left as a family.”
She heard her grandmother crying over the phone.
“We suffered so much because of what he’d done,” her grandmother said. “It’s hard to forgive him. We were so happy there, and then suddenly everything was destroyed.”
“Yes, but was he truly a drunk? Or was his drink spiked with some drug?”
Her grandmother was silent. “Paul liked to drink every so often, but no, he’d never been a drunk. He’d never come home like he did that night. How he got home without killing himself or someone else, I don’t know. And then, Ron showed up with the sheriff to evict us, I was beside myself. Later that day, I went out to his truck, and the panties were sitting on the passenger seat.” She paused. “I just knew he’d cheated on me.”
And yet her grandfather kept saying how much he loved her grandmother.
“What did Kenneth say to all of this?”
“We were both sick. We didn’t have the money to fight Ron Thomas over the ranch. We were stuck. We couldn’t even afford a lawyer.”
“Grandfather Paul says he still loves you,” she said.
A sob came over the phone. “Why didn’t he fight for us? He should have fought Ron.”
“Because what money was left, he wanted to make certain that all of us had a place to live.”
Her grandmother sobbed, and it broke her heart not to be there to comfort her. She hated what had happened to all of them.
“He was a good man,” she said. “Until that night…”
Lillian could hear the desperation in her grandmother’s voice. She now understood more about why she never wanted to talk about it again.
“Tomorrow, I’m moving my grandfather out of his current home and getting him into a senior center. It would be great if you all could come and see him. We could sit down and talk.”
With a sigh, her grandmother didn’t say anything for several minutes. Finally, she responded. “I’ve hated that man for nearly twenty years. I’ve hated him for tearing our family apart. What if I’ve been wrong all these years? What if I’ve been hating the wrong people?”
Lillian’s chest squeezed with hurt. That was a great question.
“This is why I had to learn the truth,” Lillian said. “I don’t know all the answers yet. But from what I have been told and the paperwork I saw, it looks like he was conned. And the sad part is I’m falling in love with Ron Thomas’s grandson, Cal. So I’m in just as much of a tough spot as you are, Grandmother. I don’t know what to do.”
Again, there was silence on the phone.
“Lillian, you’re a smart woman. If Cal is the man for you, let him have the ranch.”
All day long, she’d been thinking maybe this was what she should do, but then her heart would say no. She needed to clear her grandfather’s name, and if the ranch rightfully belonged to her grandfather, she wanted to keep it.
