The Heiress(72)

I wasn’t going for Cam, I was going for me. Might as well try out the acting thing for real, right? And I had a friend from high school in San Bernardino, so off I went.

I’m not gonna lie, so far, it kind of sucks. California is expensive, for one thing, and also San Bernardino is not L.A. I’m not exactly getting discovered babysitting for my neighbor’s kids, you know? So it has not been the best time, and I was honestly thinking about heading home.

And then tonight happened.

God, Ruby, I wish you were really here. I wish you’d really read this. You probably wouldn’t believe me, but that’s okay. You’d laugh, at the very least. You’d spread your hands wide and say something like, Fait accompli, darling, and I’d wonder yet again if in addition to being a murderess, you were a witch.

Because it had to be magic, Ruby. It had to be something.

I met Camden.

Not on purpose! I didn’t seek him out. I wouldn’t have even known how to, since he seems very committed to never appearing on any social media, ever. But tonight, I walked into this place called Senor Pollo’s, and there he was, behind the bar.

I recognized him from the pictures you sent, and for a second, I’m pretty sure I just stood there with my mouth hanging open because how, right? Of all the wing places and all that.

He smiled at me. He poured me a beer. We talked, and we …

You know what? I’m gonna preserve a little mystery there.

I feel like you’d understand.

Was it fate? Destiny?

Ruby, was it you?





EPILOGUE

Jules

Eight Months Later

Mountain views are overrated.

Watching the morning sun break through the clouds over a navy-blue sea, whitecaps foaming, I sip my herbal tea and let that familiar contentment sink into me, wiggling my toes in the warm sand beneath my chair.

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 you not a 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 of fear.

For the first time since I’d read her letters all those years before, 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 goddamn good when 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 do something.

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.

The only Mrs. McTavish.

It didn’t hurt that Officer Jamison hadn’t been as easily dissuaded from looking more closely at Nelle’s death as I’d originally feared, and ultimately found those telltale marks on the inside of her lips.

My story of finding Ben burning something in the office, of asking him what he was doing, his sudden rage, an attack, and then a fire spreading out of control …

It made sense.

Or at least, people accepted it.