The Heiress(59)

Scribbling a number on the back, I said, “In case you change your mind,” then laid the card on top of a wicker and glass table by the front door.

“I won’t,” Claire replied, but I pretended not to hear.

I thought it would feel better.

Knowing at last. The true story, the one that made the pieces click into place. Mama’s weeping and drinking, her face sometimes crumpling when she looked over at me. In her heart, she must’ve known. Daddy had thought the loss of Ruby would eat her up, and it had. My presence only made those teeth sharper.

And Daddy. My beloved father, ruthless in business and now, I knew, in everything.

His wealth and his family name were supposed to protect him and his own from tragedy. Parents lose children in a myriad of ways every day, but Mason McTavish was not supposed to be like ordinary people. He was supposed to be blessed.

Special.

He couldn’t accept his loss, so he did the only thing he knew how to—threw money at it until it went away. Until his world was right again.

No matter who got chewed up in the process.

I might have had my answers, but I didn’t know what to do next.

Amends felt called for, but Claire wouldn’t take my help, and I couldn’t blame her for that. Besides, if I had given her money, it would’ve made me just like him, like Mason (I couldn’t bear to think of him as “Daddy” for some time after that).

There had to be some way, though, something I could do. Something that would, if not right the wrong, then balance the scales of the universe somehow.

It would be almost ten more years before I’d figure it out.

I couldn’t give the Darnells back what they’d lost, but I could take from the McTavishes. What’s more: I could take and give to someone else, someone more deserving.

Claire’s question, about if I’d had children, kept coming back to me. I had never gotten pregnant despite my many husbands—the fear I’d had in Paris had proven unfounded—and I suspected I wasn’t capable of it. And by that point, I was in my midforties with no intention of marrying again, so that door was firmly shut to me.

It was yet another sign of my strangeness within my own family—well, not my family at all, I knew that now—that the question of who would inherit after me had never really raised its head until that moment. The money, the house, everything that came with being a McTavish … I had been happy enough to embrace it for myself with little thought to what would happen after I died.

Why would I care? Like Roddy, I had begun to live only in the present, terrified to look back, indifferent to what the future might hold. But Claire’s revelations changed things for me.

When I died, everything McTavish would go to Nelle. And if she died before me, then it was Howell’s. Cruel, stupid Howell, who had Daddy’s eyes and Nelle’s pinched mouth.

Howell, a real McTavish, as I was not.

It irked me, darling. The Darnells had given up everything for a shot at something more, something bigger. In a twisted way, I was the result of all of that, and it seemed … I don’t know. Unfair, I suppose. Unjust. Daddy had won, and when I died without children, the McTavishes would slowly reclaim what had always been rightfully theirs, the same way kudzu climbed the trees around Ashby House.

But there were other children out there. Children like me, without families.

And the more I thought of it, the more I became sure it was the way forward.

I would adopt a child, make him or her my heir. Mason’s will had been an exacting, exhausting thing, leaving it all to me, every last cent, every stick of furniture. At the time, I thought it was about preserving the fortune, that he didn’t want to see it divvied up into smaller shares, and that he trusted me to take care of Nelle and hers.

Now I wonder if it wasn’t his own form of penance, or else some sort of delusion? Maybe he’d convinced himself I was Ruby, and that the whole sordid business with the Darnells had never happened. Maybe leaving everything his family had built over three hundred years to me made that lie feel real in his own heart.

In any case, once this idea took hold, I couldn’t think of anything else.

But it couldn’t be just any child. I would have to feel it was the right one.

And of course, I’d keep an eye on them through the years. If their soul showed any signs of curdling under the influence of all our largesse, then I’d rethink the plan.

I know this must sound insane to you, but you have to understand, the sins of my family—my sins included—were too great for reasonable measures.

The rot had to be cut out, and this was the only way I could think to do it.

Took ages, though.

I became convinced that I’d know the right child when I saw him (and I knew it would be a boy by then. I can never decide if that was intuition or some sort of internalized sexism, but there you have it. I was born in 1940, I do the best I can).

I’d almost given up until the adoption agency I’d hired called. Until I looked into a pair of eyes, one blue, one brown. Sad eyes, like Andrew’s.

Camden. My beautiful boy. The one good thing I’ve ever done.

Oh, my darling.

I can’t wait for you to meet him.

-R





CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Jules

I’m at the top of the stairs, staring up at Ruby’s portrait.

It’s dark, the house quiet, and I’m still in that fancy dress, the crystal beading digging into the skin of my collarbone. Those crystals glitter in the dim light from the sconces lining the wall, but Ruby’s eyes are shining brighter, and as I watch, they begin to move.