see her, and when I wouldn’t go away, she finally came out with it.” He drew in a breath. “She said Rachel had decided she couldn’t waste any more time with me. She wanted someone with the ‘resources’ to give her the life she wanted, and that wasn’t me.”
Even after all these years, the pain was evident in Scott’s voice as he related it. Tom wasn’t surprised. He knew how much Scott had to have been wounded by that. Scott hadn’t come from money, but he’d been smart and a hard worker, using scholarship money to pay for school. Meanwhile, Rachel’s family had been well-off. It had been a sore point for Scott. To have that be the reason she’d broken up with him... No wonder he hadn’t wanted to talk about it.
Kim would have known what hearing that would have been like for Scott, too. Yet she’d told him anyway. Tom didn’t know if it was kinder for him to know the truth, or if she’d simply been cruel by telling him. “Is that what Jess meant when she implied Kim wouldn’t have been invited even if she were alive?” he asked. “Because she’d told you that?”
“No, Kim had a falling-out with the rest of them a few years ago. Jess is actually the one who told me about it, since Rachel and I weren’t together then. Evidently Kim’s drinking had gotten worse after college, and she’d developed a drug habit, as well. She showed up high at some event Haley was holding and made a scene. Apparently they’d been trying to help her before then, but after that, they washed their hands of her. It sounds like she got clean last year and tried getting in touch with them, maybe to make amends, but whatever it was she’d done, they weren’t interested.”
“And now she’s dead, too,” Tom said softly, wondering if Alex was right and there was a connection. They’d said she’d overdosed and drowned in her bathtub—an accident, not a violent murder—but was it possible there was more to it than that?
“And Rachel’s the only one left,” Scott said, glancing over at his fiancée.
Tom followed his gaze, watching the woman talk with Meredith. Now that he knew what had happened between her and Scott all those years ago, he couldn’t help but view her with fresh eyes. “I have to say, I’m kind of surprised you’d want to have anything to do with Rachel after she treated you like that, let alone marry her.”
“Maybe there was a part of me that agreed with her,” Scott said quietly. “That didn’t think I was good enough for her. And now I am.” Something in his voice sent an uncomfortable feeling down Tom’s spine, a certain hardness that matched the stoniness of his expression as he stared at Rachel.
“And we both know it.”
* * *
BY NINE O’CLOCK, everyone was ready to retreat to their rooms. They wasted no time doing so, Greg and Alex heading straight up without a look back. Even Scott and Rachel, without a word and only the barest glance between them, moved silently upstairs.
And Meredith and Tom were alone again.
They sat together on one of the couches in the middle of the room. Meredith leaned back in her seat, puzzling over the multitude of questions running through her head.
“So Rachel broke up with Scott in college because he didn’t have any money,” Meredith mused. “I can’t believe he’d want to get back together with her after that.”
“That’s what I told him,” Tom said. “But the more I think about it, it makes a kind of sad sense. Rachel’s family was loaded and she inherited a lot of money when her father died. Scott was in school on scholarships and I know he always kind of felt he wasn’t good enough for her. It had to have killed him to hear that was why she’d dumped him. But now he’s made it, and he’s proven to her—and himself—that he is good enough.” He shook his head. “I knew it must have meant a lot to him to be able to give her a wedding in a place like this. I just wish he knew he didn’t have to prove himself like that to anybody, himself included.”
Meredith turned the information over in her mind. She knew he wouldn’t like what she had to say, but she had to say it. “Do you think he might have had an ulterior motive to bring her—to bring all of you—here?”
It took