guilt for adding yet another lie about my father-in-law to this morass, I’d told Freddie that Nick was really struggling, and that he needed Freddie to help defuse tensions with Richard in person. It was enough to get Freddie on a private jet, but not so much that he’d go rogue and phone Richard on the sly. It wasn’t even that far from the truth. Technically, Nick was having a hard time with Richard—it just wasn’t, for once, Richard’s fault.
Freddie had turned up at our door six hours after I called.
“Where’s the fire?” he joked.
“We need to go someplace private,” I said, and I’d led him up the stairs into the master bedroom and opened the door to the Narnia closet. He’d stood there, blinking, confused.
“This is unutterably kinky, Bex,” he’d said, but he did as I asked, climbing up into Sex Den with deepest trepidation. “I’ve heard of safe rooms, but this is another level of— Oh.”
He’d stopped short when he saw Nick, ashen, clutching the sheaf of love notes we’d unearthed in the box along with some photographs of his great-aunt, presumably taken by Henry, that would have been better left unseen by anyone but them. Nick had handed Freddie the most revealing note of all, and we’d watched as the life drained out of him, too.
“I had to breathe into a paper bag after I read it,” Nick said to his brother now.
Freddie peered at it, as if proximity would change the words somehow. “Is it possible we’re not reading this correctly?”
Nick slid down the wall and into a sitting position. “Our grandfather and Georgina were in love, she got pregnant, and Gran raised the baby as her own,” he narrated. “And that baby is our father. Is that how you’re reading it?”
“Fuck,” Freddie repeated, covering his face with his hands. “Fuckity-fuck.”
Nick’s eyes were wild. “And if this is true,” he said. “Which…it must be. I mean, why would Henry Vane lie in his own love letter? But.” He gulped. “This means…”
“Father’s not the heir,” Freddie blurted.
“And neither am I,” Nick said. His hands were shaking. “None of this is ours. This whole life, all of it, everything we’ve been raised to do and say and believe, has been a lie. Our lives are a fucking lie. Our past. Our present. Our future. All lies. And we have babies coming who will make the lie bigger and bigger.”
His breathing sped up again. I made a move toward him but he waved me off, inhaling a huge, slow stream of oxygen. One of the twins nudged me in the ribs. My hand went to the spot where I felt it, and I thought about what Nick had said. This wasn’t just about the brothers; this unraveled everything about all of our lives. I wanted to put it back in the box, and cursed the nosiness that had caused me to dig into a life that was none of my business. No wonder Georgina was a hoarder. She was burying the truth of her life in stuff. She had probably hoped it would fill the space left by the things she had lost.
Freddie turned his face into one of the floor pillows and yelled into it. Then he jerked away. “This is their little place, isn’t it?” he gasped. “Father might have been conceived in this very room. I can’t. This is madness. Are we absolutely certain…?”
He pulled the box over to his lap and started sorting through the knickknacks Nick and I had already seen. Georgina had hung on to everything, from shards of paper scribbled with hasty words of longing to lengthier missives written in Henry’s sloping cursive, waxing rhapsodic about how long he’d loved Georgina from afar, and how agonizing it was to play out their dreams in hiding, how they dreamed of a different future.
It brought new clarity to the collection of family photos. In many of the early ones, Henry stood between his wife and his lover, all three of them smiling, Eleanor more primly and Georgina as if she held a dazzling secret. Which, of course, she did. I imagined her and Henry’s pinkies secretly touching, connecting them, the way Nick and I would sometimes try to do. But in photographs after Richard, they were as far apart as possible; Eleanor’s smile a bit more assured, Georgina’s strained and missing its light.