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.
The sun breaks through the clouds, and I shade my eyes with one hand, glancing down the beach. Cam is nothing more than a speck, but I know it’s him, wrapping up his morning jog, and I smile to myself, patting my belly.
“That’s your daddy,” I tell my daughter, heaving myself out of my chair to make my way—slowly, very slowly—back up the steps to the deck and the sliding glass door leading into the open kitchen and den.
“Morning, Ruby,” I call.
Her portrait was the one thing that survived the fire. All of Ashby House was in ruins, but Andrew Miller’s painting was somehow mostly intact. The frame was too badly burned to save, and the edges of the canvas were stained with smoke and water damage, but Ruby herself had been no worse for wear.
“That happens sometimes,” one of the firefighters had said. “A whole house can be destroyed, but the paintings are virtually untouched.”
He said it was because the heat tended to snap their hanging wires early on, so they fall face down, protecting them.
Another story that made sense, sure.
But when I meet Ruby’s eyes over the fireplace of this new house, I wonder if there’s more to it.
I’d told Camden we could get rid of it if he wanted. I would understand. Now that I knew the full extent of what she put him through I wouldn’t have blamed him.
“We can donate it or something if you feel weird about throwing it away,” I said. “Any museum would be happy to take it, I bet.”
That had been in the early days, before we bought this place, when it was just the two of us （well, three, but we didn’t know it then） in a hotel room in Asheville.