Total pages in book: 108
Estimated words: 100853 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 100853 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
Harvey let his eyes open, his gaze lost and pained.
“I couldn’t understand the laugh, his ease with the idea of Sarah being dead. For so many years after she left, he wouldn’t let anyone speak her name, and now he was laughing? I reminded him I couldn’t have her declared dead when she was out there somewhere. Prentice said, ‘She isn’t anywhere. She’s been gone a long time.’ I didn’t—” Harvey shook his head, his eyes fixed on the bodies under the concrete. “I didn’t understand. I should have. I should have known. This was Prentice, after all. But beyond everything else, he was my friend. And I didn’t want to think he could have done—” Harvey shook his head again. He drew in a long breath that hitched as he exhaled.
“What did you think he did?” Hope prompted, looking to her uncle to see if Edgar was surprised by any of these revelations. He was clearly annoyed. Nervous, maybe, but not surprised.
I found I wasn’t surprised either. Edgar had always kept Prentice’s secrets.
“I asked what he was talking about,” Harvey went on. “And he told me. Said so much time had gone by that it hardly mattered. That he’d caught them—Sarah and Paul—that he’d known she was up to something with someone, and finally he caught them. And then he smiled at me. He said no one betrayed him. Not a business partner. Not a friend. Sure, as fucking hell, not a wife. She thought she could have an affair and send her lover away, and come back to his bed like nothing had happened. But Prentice wouldn’t bear the insult. He shot them. One bullet each, he said. They didn’t deserve more. And then he dumped them in the hole in the garage floor like they were trash.” Harvey’s voice caught.
“He killed both of them?” Paige asked, breathless. “He shot them?”
Harvey nodded. “They weren’t leaving you,” he said, sounding desperate for us to understand. “Prentice overheard everything the day he caught them. They’d decided they couldn’t be together. They couldn’t leave their children. They’d agreed they loved each other, but they’d realized they were spinning a fairy tale of running off together. So, they met that one last time to say goodbye. And their luck ran out.”
“Why did he kill them?” Paige asked, tears spilling down her cheeks. “It was over. What was the point?”
I tightened my arm around her, my own vision blurring as the pointlessness of it struck me. I’d lived my entire life without the mother who’d loved me because fucking Prentice couldn’t accept the ding to his ego. “She’d betrayed him,” I answered. I hadn’t known my mother beyond those two short years, but I sure as hell had known my father. “Like he told Harvey, he didn’t tolerate betrayal.”
“Yes,” Harvey agreed. “It didn’t matter to him that they were calling it off, that they’d never see each other again. She betrayed him, and they both had to pay.”
Paige stiffened, her eyes narrowing on Harvey. “Did you know they were having an affair? Did she confide in you?”
“No, I—” Harvey’s eyes skipped around the room, bouncing off Edgar, off Griffen, skittering around Hawk, until they landed on me.
And I saw. I knew.
“You,” I said. “You killed him, that day, after he confessed.”
Harvey’s breath caught in a sob. “I loved her,” he said. “Sarah. God, I loved her so much. She never knew, but I loved her.”
I tore my eyes from Harvey to glance at Edgar, who had a hand to his face, shaking his head. Edgar fucking knew everything. If he wasn’t such a goddamn vault with the secrets, we might have known all of it so much earlier.
“And you let me go to prison for a year?” I demanded.
“I’m sorry, Ford,” Harvey said. “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t mean to kill your father.”
“It seems like you did,” Griffen said, “because—I’m trying to picture this—you’re in his office, he confesses he murdered our mother and Paige’s father, and you, what? You were packing a weapon for a simple business meeting with an old friend?”
Harvey shook his head, swinging it from side to side like a bobblehead. “I…I broke. I walked out of his office, went to my car, got my handgun from my glove compartment, and went back in. He looked up at me and said, ‘You’re still here?’ and I shot him. I must have dropped the gun since Haywood had it later. I only remember that I walked out and drove away. No one was around—no staff in the Manor, no security, no sign I was ever there—and I went home.”
Harvey’s knees gave out in a slow slide that brought him to kneel at the side of my mother’s grave.
“I couldn’t make sense of it all,” he said, tears streaming down his cheeks. “You don’t understand. I loved Sarah so much. She was so perfect, so beautiful and kind. She deserved so much better than your father.”