“And that’s nothing to be proud of, so keep your high and mighty BS attitude away from me.”
“Mother always said you were such a prude.”
“Obviously I didn’t know them at all,” Gemma said. Inside, she was more than a little heartbroken, and yet she shouldn’t be. She understood her mother hadn’t been anyone she could relate to. It had sent her to bed to cry herself to sleep many nights. It took her a while to realize it wasn’t her fault. It was her mother’s.
“Well, you should understand that because you’re not hers and Daddy’s child anyway.”
“Yeah, I am,” she said. “You might want to think that I don’t belong to the family, but you’re wrong.”
“No. That’s not true,” she said, as if privy to a secret. “Mom told me.”
“Of course she did. She was as much of a liar as you are. That was her way of disassociating from having to look after me as being hers. She never related to me, but we were blood.”
“No,” she said. “You’re just thinking that you are.”
“I had the DNA test done, Rebecca,” she said. “Dad told me that, if I wanted to, I could, but that I belonged to them. That was after I threw it back at them, saying I wasn’t even theirs, after Mom had told me the same thing. He just laughed and said absolutely I was. So I had the test done. It didn’t take much, and he paid for it, but then money was never a big thing to him, was it?”
“No, which is one of the reasons Mother was setting up to leave him.”
“Ah,” she said. Gemma thought back over the years to the car accident. “And Dad was driving. Don’t suppose she told him that she was leaving him that same night, maybe in the car, right before they died, huh?”
An odd silence came as Rebecca looked at her. “You’re not saying that he killed her, are you?”
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised, but it’s also possible they had a hell of a fight, and a terrible accident stemmed from that,” she said. “When you start wrapping people around and making yourself so dispensable to these people who are lovesick, overwhelmed, and caught up in making your life happen, cutting them loose with that same bitterness, well, it’s not hard to imagine that they might snap.”
“Well, Joe did,” she said resentfully. “He didn’t want a divorce, and then he told me that he would let everybody know what I was like.”
“Ah. I see. So you had already asked for a divorce. So, more lies. Layers and layers of lies.” She looked over at the guy holding the gun on her. “What are you, her next life?”
He shrugged. “I fucked her a few times. It’s nothing special. But then getting laid is getting laid.”
At that, Rebecca looked at him with a glacial gaze that would have cut him in two if she could have. “Well, you won’t be doing it again.”
“Until you need something,” he said. “One thing about bitches is that you just have to put them to good use. And they’re only good for one thing.” Then he waved the gun at Gemma. “Still, I got the ledger I was after, so it’s all good.” He glared at Rebecca. “And it’s mine, not yours. Oh, and let’s not forget who’s holding the gun.”
“Oh, absolutely not,” Rebecca said with a sneer. “Let’s not forget you’re the one who broke into my house and stole that ledger and killed my husband.”
“Is that your line? We’ll see how that works in the future. Besides, you brought the gun that killed him here and kept it for more of your dirty work, but I have it now,” he said with a smirk. “Let’s not forget that too, sweetheart.”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “No judge will believe you over me.”
“Well, maybe if we got a female judge,” Gemma chimed in, both her and the gunman chuckling at her quip. Relaxing, Gemma shifted with Becky, stepping a little farther back into the cabin, to the side, where she had last been with Galen.
A shot was fired into the cabin, slamming into the wood at the far end. She stared at everybody, for a fraction of a second, grabbed her niece firmly, and dropped to her knees, hit the floor on her back, rolling gently to shield Becky.
*
Galen bailed out the bedroom window and came around the back, looking for this guy’s partner. But he saw no sign of him. He