The Liar

Maybe the room was half the size of the one in the big house, but it looked just exactly right. She moved through the Jack and Jill bathroom—sparkling, as her mother would have it no other way—and into what had been her brother’s room. What was her room now.

Her old iron bed where she’d slept and dreamed through childhood faced the window, just as it had in the room down the hall. As she’d liked it best so she could wake to the mountains. A simple white duvet covered it now, but Ada Mae being Ada Mae had set pillows in lace-edged shams against the iron headboard, and more in shades of green and blue mounded with them. A throw—blues and greens again—crocheted by her great-grandmother, lay folded at the foot.

The walls were a warm smoky green, like the mountains. Two watercolors—her cousin Jesslyn’s work—graced them. Soft dreamy colors, a spring meadow, a greening forest at dawn. A vase of white tulips—her favorite—sat on her old dresser, along with the picture in its silver frame of her holding Callie at eight weeks.

They’d brought her suitcases up. She hadn’t asked—hadn’t had to. The boxes, well, they were probably already stacked in the garage waiting for her to figure out what to do with the things she’d felt obliged to keep from a life that no longer seemed her own.

Overcome, she sat on the side of the bed. She could hear the music, the voices through the window. That’s how she felt, just a step apart, behind the glass, sitting in a room of her childhood, wondering what to do with what she’d carried with her. All she had to do was open the window and she’d be a part instead of apart.

But . . .

Right now, today, everyone said welcome home, and left all the rest unsaid. But the questions murmuring under the welcome would come. Part of what she carried with her were answers and still more questions.

How much should she tell, and how should she tell it?

What good would it do to tell anyone that her husband had been a liar, and a cheat—and she feared he might’ve been worse. She feared down deep in her bones he’d been a swindler and a thief. And yet whatever he’d been—even if it turned out to be worse—he was still the father of her child.

Dead, he couldn’t defend or explain any of it.

And sitting here brooding about it wasn’t solving a thing. She was wasting that welcome, that sunstruck day, the rising music. So she’d go down again, she’d have some cake—though she already felt a little queasy. Even as she ordered herself to get up, go down, she heard footsteps coming down the hall.

She got to her feet, put an easy smile on her face.

Forrest, her brother, the only one who hadn’t been there to welcome her, stepped into the doorway.

He didn’t have Clay’s height, skimmed just shy of six feet, and with a more compact build. A brawler’s build, their granny claimed (with some pride), and he’d done his share. He had his daddy’s dark hair, but his eyes, like hers, were bold and blue. They held hers now. Coolly, she thought, and full of the questions no one asked.

Yet.

“Hey.” She tried to boost up her smile. “Mama said you had to work today.” As a deputy—her brother the cop—a job that seemed to suit him like his skin.

“That’s right.”

He had sharp cheekbones, like their father, and his mother’s eyes. And right now he sported a faint purple bruise on his jaw.

“Been fighting?”

He looked blank for a moment, then flicked his fingers over his jaw. “In the line. Arlo Kattery—you’d remember him—got a little . . . rambunctious last night down at Shady’s Bar. They’re looking for you outside. I figured you’d be up here.”

“Back a few steps from where I started.”

He leaned on the jamb, doing his cool study of her face. “Looks like.”

“Damn it, Forrest. Damn it.” No one in the family could twist her up, wring her out and smooth her down again like Forrest. “When are you going to stop being mad at me? It’s been four years. Almost five. You can’t stay mad at me forever.”

“I’m not mad at you. Was, but I’m more into the annoyed stage now.”

“When are you going to stop being annoyed with me?”

“Can’t say.”

“You want me to say I was wrong, that I made a terrible mistake, running off with Richard like I did?”

He seemed to consider it. “That’d be a start.”

“Well, I can’t. I can’t say that because—” She pointed to the picture on the dresser. “That makes Callie a mistake, and she’s not. She’s a gift and a glory, and the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“You ran off with an asshole, Shelby.”

Every muscle in her body went hot and tight. “I didn’t think he was an asshole at the time or I wouldn’t have run off with him. What makes you so righteous, Deputy Pomeroy?”

“Not righteous, just right. It’s an annoyance to me that my sister took off with an asshole, and I’ve barely seen her or the niece who looks just like her in years.”

“I came when I could. I brought Callie when I could. I did the best I knew how. You want me to say Richard was an asshole? There I can oblige you, as it turns out he was. I had the bad judgment to marry an asshole. Is that better?”