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“Should we tell her what happened?” Shirl asked as she, Theo, and their brothers drove down to Jacksonville to collect their father’s things from his apartment.
“Who?” Luke asked, his eyebrows raising in confusion.
“Shelly,” Theo supplied as Steven said, “Alice.”
“Alice?” Theo wrinkled her brow in confusion.
“Alice Barclay.”
“Oh. Weird. I could have sworn it was Shelly.”
“So who is Alice/Shelly?” Luke asked, growing impatient. He hated how much he’d missed in their lives.
“Dad’s girlfriend,” Steve said.
“We don’t know that she was his girlfriend,” Shirley replied.
“Oh, come on, we all saw the picture that Nell shared,” Theo shot back.
“I didn’t,” Luke said.
“Well, she’s his landlord, if nothing else,” Steve shrugged. “She deserves to know he isn’t coming back.”
“I think she’ll figure it out when she sees us taking his belongings out of the apartment ,” Shirl shot back, putting emphasis on the word ‘apartment’ as though she didn’t believe there really was one and their father had really just been living with Alice/Shelly.
Theo pulled her phone out of her pocket and began scrolling back through pictures from her chats with Nell, pausing to side eye her younger brother. “She’s a murderer.”
“What?” He laughed in disbelief. “No! Really?”
“She killed her husband when she was twenty-three,” Steve said, as if reciting facts for one of his books. “She spent six years in prison before being found not guilty by self defense in a retrial.” He turned to look at Theo over the back of his seat. “How do you know she’s a murderer but not her name?”
Theo shrugged, “I didn’t want to know anything about her. Nell said she had spent six years in jail for killing her husband. I was afraid that if I tried to find out anything else about her that I’d start to feel sorry for her.”
“For killing her husband?” Shirl half laughed. “Why would you feel sorry for that?”
“Women don’t usually kill their husbands for no reason,” she replied, still scrolling. Finally finding the right picture, she held it up for Luke.
Luke took the phone from Theo for a closer look.
It showed Hugh hugging a blonde woman. He guessed it was about ten years ago. That would make sense. Nell had gone to stay with their father in Jacksonville for a few months when she graduated college and had interviewed at a few places, hoping to move there before deciding she liked California beaches better than Florida ones. Luke himself had gone to his first rehab after their graduations.
The blonde had her face turned towards the camera but her eyes were closed, her head resting on Hugh’s shoulder. Hugh had one arm around her waist, the other hand on her back as if stroking it.
It did look rather telling at first glance. Alice/Shelly wasn’t beautiful as Olivia had been, but she was pretty enough he guessed. It wasn’t like anyone would ever be as beautiful as his mother though so maybe that was a bad comparison.
He zoomed in and looked at her closely. That’s when he noticed that her eyes weren’t just closed, they were squeezed shut and she was biting her lip as though she was trying not to cry. Her arms were around Hugh’s shoulders and her fingers were gripping the back of his jacket so tightly her knuckles were white.
He knew that grip. He knew that feeling of having to hold on to anything, to anyone, to keep from falling over that edge, to keep yourself from imploding your own life.
Of course his siblings didn’t see it. You couldn’t see it until you’d lived it. Until you’d white knuckled yourself through the next second, the next minute, the next hour, you just couldn’t see it.
He zoomed back out and handed the phone back to Theo. “Why did she kill her husband?”
Alice’s heart sank when she saw the rental car turn off the main road onto her winding drive. She’d hoped more than anything to see Hugh’s beat up old truck rattling down the drive instead.
It had been two weeks since he’d taken off in the middle of the night, stopping by her house long enough to let her know he was leaving and didn’t know when he would be back.
Nell was in trouble and he was about to move heaven and earth to get to her.
That was one of the things she admired most about him. It didn’t matter how many times his children had pushed him away, threw his help, his love, even him, away, he’d always run the next time they called.
She’d known that was the last time she would see him but she’d had hoped that was wrong.
When he’d called her just a few hours later, she knew that she wasn’t wrong at all. She'd barely said hello when he'd broken down, sobbing that Nellie was dead. That he couldn't save her. That he couldn't fix it.
He’d called once more, the next night, telling her that he’d met up with his sons and they would be going to Boston for the services and everything was going to be okay now. That he was going to fix once and for all.
But she knew it wasn’t going to be okay. She knew what he planned. She knew why he’d given her the key. She’d just hoped that it wouldn’t come to that, but as the days slipped by, she knew it had.
She knew he was gone, but something deep inside of her had wished that she was wrong.
That something died with a painful twist to her heart as she saw the car turn in.
It was rare for someone to come out to her place, so far out in the woods that it was in Jacksonville by name only. She’d gotten good at knowing the intentions of every car that took that turn on the main highway.
And she knew this one was Steven. And Hugh was dead.
A sob tore from her throat and she’d pressed her hand against her mouth to stifle it. She’d had more than a week to prepare herself for this but she hadn’t thought it would hit that hard. That it would feel that bad.
It wasn’t like they were together.
They weren’t lovers. They weren’t anything of that sort.
She didn’t know what they were, but she knew it wasn’t that.
Sure they slept together sometimes but they weren't lovers.
Being lovers required an intimate love and they didn't have that.
She did Love Hugh. He was the dearest person in her life. Hell, since her grandmother's death, he'd pretty much been the only person in her life, but that was beside the point.
In him, she'd found such understanding, such friendship, almost a kinship of sorts, but she wasn't in love with him.
And his heart would always belong to his wife Olivia and Alice had never wanted to change that.
Friends didn't nearly encompass what they had been, but they hadn't been lovers.
They weren't friends with benefits either. That term, when applied to them, made her want to gag. That was about sex, about scratching an itch with someone safe so to speak.
That part of their relationship hadn't been about fulfilling a sexual need. It had been that sometimes, pretty words just weren't enough and comfort needed a physical touch.
But his children weren't going to understand that. All they understood was that she'd slept With their father and he was only ever supposed to be with their mother.
So she couldn't show any emotion to their news. She couldn't let them see her cry. She couldn't be nice or even warm to them. They would hate her even more if she tried.
She had to be the stone faced bitch they wanted her to be.
After all, she was just the desperate, pathetic woman who'd shacked up with their dad after their mom died.
But she knew that he'd felt the same way about her as she did him. He'd told her as much before he'd left to go help his daughter and that was enough.
So she took a deep breath, drowned her feelings in the last dregs of her coffee and stood to greet Hugh’s children at last.