When I arrive, the estate entrance is miraculously free of reporters. I wonder if the deputies threatened to write them all tickets for blocking the public road or maybe my father used his connections to get them removed. It wouldn’t surprise me if he could mobilize the National Guard. Quaking, I press a button and the iron gates swing open. Part of me suspected they might already be reprogrammed.
As usual, I drive up slowly and park in the garage but nothing about this homecoming feels normal. All the cars are present, so I know my father is home. My unease grows. The strangeness is only exacerbated when I step into the dark house and call out, but nobody answers. Usually Mrs. Rhodes comes looking for me, and dinner should be cooking by now. It’s past six.
Exploring the downstairs, I feel like an intruder. Each room is pristine, but all the lights are off. Finally I tap on the door to the study and receive a quiet, “Come in.”
Shit. He’s in here.
After a steadying breath, I open the door. No lamps have been switched on, so the room is all shadows. With the last glimmers of the sunset shining through the windows, I can make out my father at his desk. His laptop is closed, however, and he doesn’t seem to be working. It’s probably not a good sign that he’s just sitting in the dark.
What am I even supposed to say?
“I’m sorry,” is what comes out.
Though if he asked me, I couldn’t say for what. For shaming him, making bad choices, or sullying my own good name? For at least a minute, though it seems like ten times longer, he nurses the silence like a strong drink.
“I gave Wanda the night off,” he tells me.
Really, it feels more like a warning. No one will be coming to save you.
“Oh.” The silence is deep and wide, a chasm I can’t cross, even with climbing equipment.
“You. And Jack,” he finally grits out.
His teeth are metal gears and his mouth is a machine that wants to grind my flesh to meat and my bones to splinters and dust. There are no words for the anger and disappointment and downright revulsion that slam into me. From head to toe, I tremble because I think I knew this was coming. Morgan had so many secrets, and she hugged them to her chest like body armor.
Why didn’t you tell me?
He should care if I’m all right. Why doesn’t he?
But he’s staring at me like I’m something he found on the bottom of his shoe. No, that’s not quite right. There’s also raw anguish and confusion, but I can’t understand that expression. This is … I don’t know. I can’t make sense of it. If he comes toward me, I’ll run. This doesn’t feel right. Everything about it echoes with wrongness.
“Anyone but him,” he says in a monotone. “It could be anyone but him. Even that worthless Claymore boy. I tolerated him, didn’t I? So why Jack?” But it’s a rhetorical question, I can see he doesn’t want an answer. “It’s always Jack. Just like your mother.”
My mother is dead.
Randall Frost should be angry at Patterson for betraying their friendship and taking advantage of me. He should be shocked. But there never was a bond between them; I see that now. Their association was more a matter of “keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”
“It was a mistake,” I whisper.
But that doesn’t appease him. “He’s a monster. I tried so hard to keep this from you, but I suppose it doesn’t matter now.”
“Why doesn’t it?”
You should run now. Morgan’s voice echoes in my head. Run.
Perfume fills the room, that overwhelming scent of citrus and flowers, and by the wild look in his eyes, he smells it too. “Get out,” he snarls, but I don’t know if he’s talking to me, or the ghosts. I’m afraid to find out.
The mansion is huge, so maybe I can hide long enough for help to arrive. The conviction rises that there will be terrible consequences for the way I’ve dishonored the family name, some attempt to cleanse the stain I’ve become. Any moment he’ll say, I’d rather not have a daughter like you. I need to call the nice officers, who would be so surprised that the greatest threat to me is already inside the house.
“She was leaving us,” he tells me in a broken voice. “Running to Jack … because of the baby. I begged her to stay. I said I’d do anything. I offered to acknowledge the child as mine, if she only promised not to see him again.”
Oh shit. He knew. About the affair, about the baby that wasn’t his.
All of my calculations tip over, spread sideways like spilled wine. My heart hammers so loud I can hear the tympanic echo in my eardrums. It nearly deafens me, though not enough to drown out what he’s saying. His voice is relentless.
“But she still packed a bag. She said I didn’t know how to love—that all I cared about was the company and my image. I didn’t mean to hurt her.” His voice drops to a whisper, tempting me to move closer.
But I don’t. I can’t. Fear has frozen my feet to the marble tiles. Hearing his final confession probably doesn’t promise me a bright future. But he doesn’t need me to contribute to this conversation; he’s been waiting ten years to tell someone.
“I only wanted to stop her from leaving. That’s all. My car scraped hers and she veered off the road. Morgan, when she realized I wouldn’t let her go, she sped up. She chose death over staying with me. With us.”
“Ten years ago, you were driving a silver BMW,” I whisper.
He doesn’t acknowledge that, but I remember the damage note from the body shop. I did find evidence, but I didn’t realize it. And maybe what he’s saying is true, or she panicked when the tree came hurtling at her, hitting the gas instead of the brake. Or possibly, he’s twisted everything in his head so he’s not responsible for her death. I’ll never be sure what happened on that deserted road, if he murdered her or if it was an accident.
I only know he did his best to cover it up all these years. That doesn’t speak of innocence.
“I could’ve lived with anything else,” he says. “But not you and Jack. Not Jack and my daughter.”
Once more I’m reduced to property. Jack’s lover. Randall’s daughter. It’s like it doesn’t even occur to him that I’m a person.
As he stares at me, something crystalizes in his gaze and then he unlocks the drawer I failed to get into when I searched his office. Out comes a small box. He opens it and produces a gun. I don’t know what kind because it’s dark and weapons aren’t my thing. I turn to run then, but the click of the safety being removed stops me in my tracks.
I’m afraid to face him. So I don’t see what happens next.
I only hear him whisper, “Don’t tell, Morgan. You can never tell.”
The gun goes off.
I scream then, and life floods back into my locked arms and legs. I stumble toward the desk and find my father slumped over. There’s not as much blood as the movies lead you to believe when a man shoots himself in the head with a small-caliber pistol. Before I touch him, I know he’s dead.
My knees collapse, dumping me on the floor nearby. There are pictures in my head now, things I didn’t want to remember. Morgan sensed how her father found it hard to look at her after her mother died. There were no hugs, no tenderness. Despite what I read, I’m sure—the situation with Creepy Jack wasn’t how she tried to frame it. That wasn’t her plan, only what happened to her. Lonely girl, disturbed man, plus the slow, awful seduction of it, and her love-hate relationship with him, the sense of never being able to fill her mother’s shoes—I understand why she couldn’t hold on, why it was too much. Her whole life was an open wound, wrapped in red cellophane so nobody could ever see her bleed.
Not even me.
She was so, so alone. And I failed her. That message from beyond I found on her computer? It was a sign she was thinking about the end, and that she wanted people to hate instead of pity her if they read how cold she was in her own words. But she wasn’t.
The tears fall in a heaving rush; I sob until I can’t breathe.
It’s over, everything is over.