The Heiress(65)

I pick the phone up, unplugging the cord from the back, and clutching it to my chest, I begin to back away from the bed.

Ruby watches me, panting now, fighting to keep her eyes open, her mouth opening to scream, but all that comes out is a breathy sort of moan, and I keep backing up, backing up, backing up until my heels hit the wall, my head thumping back, my eyes never leaving her.

As Ruby McTavish Callahan Woodward Miller Kenmore slowly dies in her bed, I sink down against the wall, holding on to the phone so tightly that later, I’ll find red grooves in my palms, a bruise making a purple line against the skin of my chest.

I sob as she finally stops struggling, sitting there on the floor as her breathing slows, steady at first, like she’s sleeping.

But there are gasps after that, and then, for a long time, so long I can feel my mind cracking inside my skull, there’s a rattling, guttural noise.

And my mind must crack because that’s when I get up from my spot against the wall, the phone clattering out of my grip, and grab a pillow from her bed and press it over her face, just wanting her to stop, stop making that sound, she needs to stop …

She does.

Later, I put the phone back into place, plug it back into the wall. I wipe it down with a washcloth from Ruby’s bathroom that I shove in my back pocket and, later, throw out the window of my car somewhere near the Georgia border.

I’m in my bedroom that next morning when Cecilia knocks, her face tearstained, her hands reaching for me.

Oh, honey, she says, and I let myself be hugged and wonder how soon I can leave Ashby House forever.



* * *



WHEN I’M FINISHED, I’ve stopped crying, but Jules had started somewhere around the part with the phone, tears dripping onto her gray T-shirt, leaving dark splotches.

“She gave me everything,” I say. “And she trusted that I’d save her. She took all those fucking pills because she believed I was a good person. But I wasn’t. She was right. If she died, I was free, and I … I chose that. Chose it over her. I let her die rather than stay here.”

Jules gets up then, moving across the carpet on silent feet, and stands in front of me.

She cups my face in her hands, and then leans down and kisses me.

“I love you,” she says when we part, and I didn’t know until that moment how much I needed to hear that. “I love you, and you are a good person, Camden. The best person I know.”

I shake my head, wanting to deny that, needing to, but she won’t let me. “You were a kid,” she says, her grip tightening on my face. “And she threw you into this … this fucking snake pit to prove something to herself. She let Nelle and Howell and even Ben and Libby treat you like shit just to see what you could take. She killed herself, Cam.”

Jules is right, I know she is, but I still want to deny it, am already opening my mouth to protest when she pulls me to my feet, her hand firm in mine.

“You need to see something.”

She pulls me out of Ruby’s room and down the hall, back to our bedroom, and picks up a sheaf of paper from the nightstand. Even without her letterhead at the top, I’d know it was from Ruby’s desk. I’d seen that heavy, cream-colored vellum my whole life, done my fucking algebra homework on it.

“The other day when I was in Ruby’s office, looking through photo albums, I … okay, I took the snooping a little too far, and went through her desk. I found these.”

Letters. Not addressed to anyone, but I can hear Ruby’s voice as my eyes scan the first line.

Well, darling, here we are.

“I took them out because I thought they must be to you, but I didn’t read them until last night. I couldn’t sleep, and after I read them, well … then I really couldn’t sleep.”

Pages and pages, written in Ruby’s careful, neat hand, all dated in the days just before she died.

I’ve never seen them before.

I don’t want to read them, I don’t want Ruby’s voice in my head, and I try to hand them back to Jules. “It doesn’t matter,” I tell her, but she patiently shoves the papers back at me, her hazel eyes imploring.

“It does, Cam,” she says softly. “I promise you.”

I’m exhausted, drained, but I sit on the edge of the bed, willing to humor her.

I read the first page, then the second. Three more, five more.

Page after page, confession after confession, Ruby’s familiar, chatty voice, and then all these nightmares, all this death. I feel heavy with it, weighed down with the knowledge of who this woman, the only mother I’d ever known, really was.

But right behind all of that?

Relief.

Because now I know. The rumors, the whispers, the secret Google searches at the library, the guilt for suspecting that the woman who raised me was a murderer making my palms sweat and my stomach ache.

All of it was true.

What’s more, I feel like I understand her better now. She did these things, and she wanted to tell me about them because I was her son, and she thought I deserved to know.

And then I get to the last letter and remember that nothing was ever that simple with Ruby.





CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Jules

I watch as Cam reads Ruby’s letters, waiting for him to say something, but when he’s finished, he just places the last page facedown on the growing stack beside him on the bed, his expression far away.