Never Tell (Detective D.D. Warren #10) - Lisa Gardner Page 0,68

at all. It feels awful and unjust, a final act of betrayal by a man I’d genuinely loved. True, I had my own suspicions. But then, maybe that’s what love was for me. An exercise in mistrust.

“Evie?” Mr. Delaney prods again, his voice gentle.

I pull my attention from the window.

“My mom never told you?”

“All I’ve ever known is what she said that afternoon. That your father had been showing you how to handle the shotgun. There was an accidental discharge. She saw the whole thing from the kitchen doorway.”

I nod. That was our story, and for sixteen years we’d been sticking to it.

“Do you think my parents loved each other?” I hear myself ask.

He doesn’t answer right away, tapping his finger on the steering wheel. I always thought of Mr. Delaney as one of my father’s friends. But all these years later, he continues to come around the house. Unmarried. Attentive to my mother’s moods. Now I can’t help but wonder.

“I met both your parents in college,” he says now, surprising me. I’d known that he and my father went way back, but I hadn’t realized it included my mother as well. “From the very beginning, their relationship was … volatile. And yet, the more they collided, blew apart, collapsed back, the more it seemed to work for them. You know your father genuinely loved math?”

I nod.

“Well, over the years, I’ve come to think of his relationship with your mom as his exercise in physics. She challenged him, in a wholly different way, and your father liked a good challenge. As for her … Your mother was never meant to live an ordinary life. Your father, in his overly intellectual, unquestionably brilliant, completely indulgent way, was perfect for her.”

“The cocktail parties. University functions. Build the legacy. Protect the legacy.”

Mr. Delaney smiles. “They fit together, Evie. Whether it made sense to outsiders or not, they were meant to be. And they both loved you.”

I return to the window. My father loved me. I know that. My mom, on the other hand, is a different story. A genius husband had fit the exotic storyline of her life. A slightly above-average-intelligence daughter who taught math at public high school, not so much so.

“You can talk to me,” Mr. Delaney is saying now. “You’re my client. Our conversations are protected by privilege. Whatever you say stays with me.”

“And not my mom?” I can’t help it; I sound bitter, maybe even petulant.

“Mum’s the word,” he says so quietly, I almost miss the pun. When I catch it, I smile, and he smiles back. It occurs to me that Mr. Delaney has been one of the few adult fixtures in my life. First as my parents’ close friend and confidant, then as a substitute father figure, coming by the house regularly to check up on us in the months following the shooting. He’d been holding my mother together, though I hadn’t thought about it back then. But Mr. Delaney had been the one who’d appear three or four nights a week, quietly making sure food appeared in the fridge, vodka bottles disappeared from the cabinets. He’d tried to get my mom to sell the house, then failing that, at least remodel. For me, he always said. She should do these things to ease her daughter’s stress, help in my recovery.

She’d listened to him, certainly in a way she never would’ve listened to me. My father had been her world. Whereas she and I could never even agree on much of anything.

“We found him … dead, when we first arrived home,” I murmur now. “Clearly, it had just happened. You could smell the gunpowder. And the blood … it was hot on my hair.”

“I’m sorry, Evie.”

“There was no sign of anyone else. No cars on the drive, no one in the home. And my father, those past few months, his mood had grown darker.”

“On occasion, the genius in your father got the better of him. But he always came out the other side. He told me once, that was the power of fatherhood. Even when he felt he was failing at solving the great mysteries of the universe, he knew he would never fail you.”

“I thought he had.” Suddenly, I’m crying. I hadn’t expected to. But all these years later … I haven’t been carrying around just the shame of my secret, but the pain that my father chose to end his own life rather than stay with us. The father I loved so much. The father