Carolina Moon

Tory sipped her coffee again, then set the cup neatly back in its saucer. “I do have a question. I wonder, Mrs. Lavelle, what makes you think that I would be, in any way, receptive to the insult of a bribe?”
    “Don’t pretend a sensibility you don’t possess. I know you,” Margaret said, leaning forward. “I know where and who you come from. You may think you can hide behind a quiet manner, behind the mask of some borrowed respectability. But I know you.”
    “You think you do. But I can promise you I’m not feeling quiet or respectable right at this moment.”
    It was Margaret’s composure that unraveled, that had to be gathered back, tightly rewound like a ball of yarn. “Your parents were trash and let you run wild as a cat, sidling down the road to push yourself on my child. Luring her away from her family, and finally to her death. You cost me one child, and you won’t cost me another. You’ll take my money, Victoria. Just as your father did.”
    She was shaken now, down to the heart, but she held on. “What do you mean, as my father did?”
    “It only took five thousand for them. Five thousand for them to take you out of my sight. My husband wouldn’t turn them out, though I begged him to do so.”
    Her lips trembled open, then firmed. It had been the first and last time she had begged him for anything. Had begged anyone for anything. “Finally, it was up to me to see to it. Just as it is now. You’ll go, you’ll take the life you should have lost that night instead of her and live it somewhere else. And you’ll stay away from my son.”
    “You paid him to leave. Five thousand,” Tory mused. “That would’ve been a lot of money for us. I wonder why we never saw it. I wonder what he did with it. Well, it doesn’t matter. I’m sorry to disappoint you, Mrs. Lavelle, but I’m not my father. Nothing he ever did to me could make me like him, and your money won’t change that. I’m staying, because I need to stay. It’d be easier not to. You won’t understand that, but it’d be easier. As for Cade …”
    She remembered how distant he’d been, how removed after her episode the night before. “There’s not as much between us as you seem to think. He’s been kind to me, that’s all, because he is a kind man. I don’t intend to repay that kindness by breaking a friendship, or by telling him of this conversation.”
    “If you go against my wishes in this, I’ll ruin you. You’ll lose everything, as you did before. When you killed that child in New York.”
    Tory went white, and for the first time, her hands shook. “I didn’t kill Jonah Mansfield.” She gulped in air, let it out in a broken sigh. “I just didn’t save him.”
    Here was the chink. Margaret dug her fingers into it. “The family held you responsible, and the police. And the press. A second child dead because of you. If you stay here, there will be talk about that. Talk about the part you played. Ugly talk.”
    How foolish, Tory thought, to have believed no one would connect her with the woman she’d been in New York. With the life she’d built and destroyed there.
    Nothing could be done to change it. Nothing could be done but face it. “Mrs. Lavelle, I’ve lived with ugly talk all my life. But I’ve learned I don’t have to tolerate it in my own home.” Tory got to her feet. “You’ll have to leave now.”
    “I will not make this offer again.”
    “No, I don’t suppose you will. I’ll see you out.”
    Tight-lipped, Margaret rose, picked up her bag. “I know the way.”
    Tory waited until the length of the living room separated them. “Mrs. Lavelle,” she said quietly, “Cade is so much more than you believe him to be. So was Hope.”
    Rigid with pain, and with fury, Margaret gripped the doorknob. “You would dare speak to me of my children?”
    “Yes,” Tory murmured as the door snapped shut and left her alone in the house. “I would.”
    She locked the door. The click was like a symbol. Nothing she didn’t allow in would get in. And nothing, she told herself, that was already inside would hurt her now. She walked to the bathroom and stripped, couldn’t get her nightclothes off fast enough. She ran the shower hot, almost too hot to bear, and stepped into the vicious heat and steam.
    There, she let herself weep. Not an indulgence, she told herself. But because, as the water beat on her skin to make her feel clean again, the tears washed away the scum of bitterness inside her.
    Memories of