on her shoulder. Marti reached up and held her head to her cheek.
The lawyer turned off the TV. “Marti, if you please. Everyone else, we’ll continue in a few moments. Marti and Cameron need to have a private conversation.”
“Wait a minute. What does it matter what she has to tell Cameron for my father?” Walter asked.
Marti had enough.
“Walter, you’ll sit there and shut up for as long as it takes me to speak to Cameron,” she snapped. “Are you so eager and greedy you can’t allow George to have his final requests seen through the way he wanted?”
“Why the hell should I listen to you?”
“Because you asked why it matters what I have to say. I’ll tell you. It matters a lot. I’m about to change all of your lives.” Marti turned her back on Walter and faced Cameron. “If you’ll please join me in the other room, I’ll tell you what George wished he could have told you himself.”
“Please keep an eye on Emma. I’ll be back in a moment,” Cameron said to Shelly.
“Of course, darling. Don’t be long.” She couldn’t wait to hear what the old goat had left to Cameron. What was the big secret?
Chapter Thirty-Four
* * *
MARTI THOUGHT ABOUT what to say, how she was going to say it, and what Cameron would do once he knew.
George asked her to tell him the truth. She thought fleetingly about telling him the whole truth, who she really is, that she was pregnant with his child, and that Knight was his father. Marti followed Cameron out of the room.
Cameron sat on the sofa while Marti paced back and forth in front of the white marble fireplace.
“Marti, just say it. What did George want you to tell me?”
In the end, she decided to tell him about George and see where things went from there. Maybe he would understand what George was trying to tell him, besides the obvious.
He’s a smart man. He’ll figure it out.
“George had one great love in his life, his wife. He loved her very much.”
“Yes, I know. They were married for forty years. She passed away a week after their fortieth anniversary.”
“Yes. They had Walter and Claire. They raised them with love and gave them everything in the world two children could ever want. They went to the best schools, they had every new toy, cars when they could drive, money to spend, and anything else their hearts desired. They were rich and gave them everything a mother and father ever dreamed for their children.”
“Yes. They had all the best things.”
“Yes, things. Things they grew up to expect and demand and feel entitled to.”
Cameron followed along. “George often said he didn’t know where he’d gone wrong with them. I think he spoiled them until they felt like they didn’t deserve anything less.”
“That’s exactly what George and I talked about. He and his wife loved them. They had a mother and a father and still George felt like he failed them in some way. In the end, having two parents who loved them didn’t make them into good people.”
He sat back and rubbed the back of his neck. “I don’t want to make this about you, me, and Shelly.”
“It’s interesting you say that. George told me the truth about you last night. It was one of the last things he was able to tell me.”
Cameron rubbed the back of his neck again. George had wanted to tell him something and he hadn’t been there to hear his final words. “What did he want to tell me?”
“He said I have a way of seeing things as they are, and not as I want to see them. Do you understand?”
“Yeah, you see the truth of things, even if it isn’t what you want to see.”
“I hope you will see the truth of what I’m going to tell you, and not what you want the truth to be.”
“What is it?”
“What do you remember about your father?”
“He was never there when I needed him,” Cameron replied without missing a beat.
“Not the way to start, then,” she said and drew her finger over her ear, tucking her hair behind it. She paced a few more steps, Cameron’s eyes following her every move.
“George loved his wife . . .”
“We’ve established this,” Cameron said impatiently.
“Shut up and listen. I’m telling the story, and you’ll just sit there and listen to it. I’m trying to fulfill a dying man’s last requests. I gave my word. Let me do it,” she said, a trace of