“So it was guilt.”
“Partly.”
Before I could ask what she meant, I heard movement behind me.
“Mom?”
I turned.
A thin young woman stood in the doorway.
She looked tired, but there was color in her face. One hand rested lightly against the center of her chest.
Colleen stood immediately.
“Sadie.”
The girl looked at me.
“You’re Bryce’s mom.”
I nodded.
She came farther into the room and sat beside Colleen.
For a moment, nobody spoke.
Then I asked the question that had been tearing through me for days.
“Trevor wasn’t your father?”
“No,” Sadie said gently. “Martin was.”
“And Bryce knew that?”
Her eyes filled with tears.
“Yes. He found out a few months before he died.”
I looked from her to Colleen.
“How?”
Bryce had apparently become suspicious after finding the old transfers among Trevor’s papers. He contacted Colleen himself, expecting to uncover the same affair I had imagined.
Instead, he learned about Martin, the business, the lie, and Trevor’s guilt.
During those conversations, he also learned that Sadie had a serious heart condition and was waiting for a transplant.
“He knew he was getting worse,” Colleen explained. “And he knew Sadie was running out of time.”
I looked at the young woman sitting a few feet away from me.
The hand over her chest suddenly seemed unbearably important.
“Did Bryce know you might receive his heart?”
Sadie nodded.
“He hoped I would.”
My throat tightened.
“He never told me.”
“He didn’t want his last months to become about what your husband did,” she said. “He said you had already spent years carrying everyone else. He wanted you to learn the truth, but only when you were ready to go looking for it.”
That was why he had written the letter the way he did.
The sentence about Sadie being Trevor’s daughter had not been the final truth. It had been a trail.
Bryce knew me well enough to know I would follow it.
For weeks after his death, I had believed there was nothing left of my son except photographs, old clothes, and the silence in his bedroom.
