the couch and fold my arms, watching her reaction.
She keeps her eyes on the blank screen, her jaw resolutely set.
“OK, let’s try it this way.” I’m losing patience. “You were having an affair with William Liebling when we were living up at Tahoe, right?”
Her eyes flicker to me. Her voice is barely a whisper. “Yes.”
“You met, I’m going to guess…at the Academy? At Back to School night?” Faint amusement flickers across her face and I realize my mistake—school events would have been Judith’s domain, not William’s. I guess again: “No, you met at the casino. The high-roller room? He came in to gamble and you served him drinks.”
She’s blinking too rapidly, and I can tell that I’m right. “Nina. Please. Don’t. Just let this go, it’s really not important.”
“But it is, Mom.” I study her, thinking. “What was your plan?” She shakes her head slowly, her eyes fixed on me, assessing, waiting to see how much she can still keep from me. “Identity theft? Credit cards?” She shakes her head again. “OK, what then? What was the deal?”
“No deal,” she says defiantly. “I liked him.” She wraps the cord of her robe tightly around her hand, until her palm is turning white.
“Bullshit,” I say. “I met him, Mom. He was an asshole. You didn’t like him.”
She gives me a wry smile. “Well, I certainly liked that he was paying our bills.”
I remember now, the way our money troubles abruptly stopped that spring; how I attributed that to the tips in the high-stakes rooms at the Fond du Lac. Still, I don’t quite buy it. Bilking a business tycoon out of a few hundred bucks for the heating bills? She would have aimed higher than that.
“But what else?” She hesitates. “Come on. You were running a con on him, right?”
There’s a wicked twinkle in her eye, and I can tell that she’s dying to tell me despite it all, that she’s proud of herself for some reason. Her lip twitches into a smile. “Fake pregnancy. I was going to threaten to keep it, scare him a little so that he’d pay me off to get rid of it and go away.”
I want to cry. What a tawdry and sad scam. “But how? Wouldn’t you need a fake pregnancy test and an ultrasound?”
“There was a girl I worked with at the casino, she was knocked up and needed cash. She gave me the urine, in case he wanted me to pee on a stick to prove it to him. And she was going to go to a clinic, pretend to be me, get an ultrasound with my name on it. I was going to give her five thousand dollars when it was all done.”
I finally snag on a word she’s been using: was. “But you didn’t go through with it.”
“Things…changed. Unexpectedly.” She sighs.
I am mentally running through those months in my head; remembering the silk scarf that appeared around her neck, the nights that she arrived home at dawn because of “late shifts” at the casino, the subtle change in the color of her hair. And then something else horrible occurs to me. “Did you know about me and Benny when all this was going on?”
She shakes her head. “It started before I knew about you two. And I never really knew for sure, darling. You never told me, you were so…elusive. Such a teenager, with your secrets. When I met Benny that day, at the café, I suspected—the way the two of you looked at each other—but I didn’t know. It wasn’t until…” She stops.
“Until the Lieblings called you? When they drove us out of town?”
“No.” She is quiet for a moment. “At Stonehaven…” Her eyes have gone dark and distant again. At Stonehaven? And then I understand, with sickening clarity: The day that Benny’s father caught us in the caretaker’s cottage, what had he been doing out there anyway? Had Lourdes given us up, told him where to find us? Or had he been headed to the cottage for a discreet assignation of his own? “You were with William Liebling that day,