“What kind of favor?”
“There was a portrait of my mother that used to hang in our dining room. She was wearing a deep blue gown with a spray of lilies pinned to her shoulder and her hair was all done up. It disappeared not long after my father sent her to Craig House. My sister claimed not to know what happened to it, but I didn’t believe her. It irked me to think she might have it squirreled away someplace. So I asked him to do a little poking around. He never found it, but he called a few weeks later—to ask me for a favor. He was about to graduate from college and he’d met someone he was crazy about. But my sister didn’t approve.”
“My mother,” Ethan said quietly.
“Catherine, yes. He was head over heels, poor boy, but his mother had someone else in mind. Someone more . . . suitable. I was the only person he knew who’d ever stood up to the family and he thought I might have some advice on how to navigate the situation.”
“And did you?”
“I told him to walk away—to run if necessary. From them, from the money, from whatever it was they were holding over him. I told him to screw the Mannings—pardon my French—and follow his heart, since he was apparently the only one of us who actually had one. I’m glad he found happiness. Heaven knows not many of us did.”
Ashlyn had been quiet, content to hang back and observe, but Marian’s last remark struck a slightly false note. Richard hadn’t been the only member of the Manning clan with a heart. She could still feel the memory of Belle’s echoes in her fingers, the way they had arced through her the first time she touched Forever, and Other Lies, the heartbreak so raw it had made the book hard to hold. But it wasn’t her place to say so.
Ethan looked awkward holding his teacup and saucer in front of him, uncomfortable and out of place. But his smile was comfortable, genuinely warm. “Thank you. He and my mother both spoke fondly of you, but I’ve never heard the full story.”
Marian took a cookie from the plate and broke off a small piece, then brushed the crumbs from her fingers. “He brought Catherine to meet me a few weeks later. She was so lovely, and she was obviously crazy about him. I told him not to be an idiot, that when it was right it was right and he shouldn’t wait for anything. Or let anything come between them.”
“She hated that you and my father fell out. But I never knew what happened.”
Marian looked away, a shadow briefly darkening her face. “He broke a promise and I lost my temper. I’m sorry about it now. Very sorry. Now, what else would you like to know?”
Ethan put down his cup and saucer and sat back in his chair. “I’d like to know about the books. How they ended up in my father’s study. How he wound up in the middle of it all.”
“He wound up in the middle of it the way he always did, poor man. He was pressed into service.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means he was minding his business one day when a package arrived from London, a book wrapped in brown paper with a note asking him to pass it along to me, unopened. He nearly threw it away. He didn’t trust Hemi, nor should he have after what he’d done to the family. But he sent it in the end.”
“Why send it to my father instead of you?”
“Hemi had no idea where I was living. Almost no one did in those days. Scandal has a way of making privacy rather precious. Dickey was easier to find, because of his writing, I suppose. And there was a bit of history there.”
“You mean the letter he delivered for you.”
A flicker of emotion ruffled Marian’s careful composure, a brief ripple of surprise or discomfort. “Yes. The letter.”
“It was pretty presumptuous to assume my father would do what he was asking.”
“Hemi was nothing if not presumptuous.” Her eyes clouded and for a moment she seemed to lose the thread of the conversation. When she looked up again, her eyes were clear but raw with memory. “He believed the ends justified the means—even with me. How else would he have the nerve to send me that book full of lies? You’ve read all of it by now, I take it? Both of you?”
“Yes,” Ethan replied evenly.
“He called me Belle, but there was no Belle. Certainly not the one he wrote about. She was a figment of his imagination. An invention.”
“And your book was meant to correct the record,” Ashlyn said quietly.
Marian’s gaze remained fixed on some distant point beyond the glass walls, her eyes wide and empty. “The things he wrote,” she said finally. “The distortions and the lies . . . I couldn’t let him remember it that way. He blames me, but he knows. We both know.”
Ashlyn caught Ethan’s eye, flashing him an “I told you so” look. It was exactly the point she’d been trying to make about things not adding up. The more she learned, the less she was convinced that either of them actually knew the truth.
Ethan was frowning, pulling thoughtfully at his lower lip. “I’m still not clear about how both books—Hemi’s and the one you wrote—ended up in my father’s study.”
“I’m getting to that,” Marian replied tightly. She lifted her cup, sipping daintily, then carefully returned it to its saucer. “When I finished Forever, and Other Lies, I sent it to one of those places that will print your book for you. I sent Hemi’s book with it and asked them to make mine look just like his. It cost a pretty penny too. As soon as it came back, I sent both books to Dickey and asked him to mail them back to Hemi—as a set. I’m not sure why. I suppose I wanted him to know I could give as good as I got.”
Ashlyn tried to imagine Hemi’s reaction when he opened the package containing both books. “And how did he respond?”
Marian eyed her without expression. “He didn’t.”
“Not a word?”
She shrugged. “He’d vented his spleen and I’d done the same. What else was there to say?”
Ethan looked confused. “If my father did as you asked and sent them to Hemi, how did they end up back in his study?”
Marian’s expression darkened and she shifted in her chair. “A few years later, Hemi phoned Dickey out of the blue and asked if the two of them could meet for a drink. Dickey should have known better, but he agreed. Naturally, I came up in the conversation. He told Dickey that we’d made plans to run away together but that I’d backed out because I was too proud to marry a man with nothing. It wasn’t true, of course. Dickey, of all people, should have known that. He knew better than anyone what losing Hemi had cost me.” She paused, shaking her head sadly. “Deep down, he meant well. He always meant well.”
“But?”
She shrugged. “But he broke his promise.”
Ethan still looked confused. “What was the promise?”
“Your father and I had an agreement. We made it one day after a ferocious argument. He’d been pestering me about the past, about how things had ended with Hemi. He thought I was being too harsh. Unreasonable, he called me. And cruel. Me . . . cruel.” She paused, shaking her head as if baffled. “After everything, he still believed there was a way to go back and fix things. I didn’t want his opinion, not about that. I told him that if we were to remain friends, he must promise never to mention Hemi’s name to me again. Unfortunately, the promise I extracted said nothing about him speaking my name to Hemi.