She shook her head, not trusting her voice.
“Beauty.” He smiled, looking down at the pictures fanned out on the bed between them. “Truth and beauty. That’s all I see when I look at these.”
“Susan told you about this,” Leah nodded toward the photographs. “Her relationship with my mother…” She still was trying to process the fact. Saying it out loud made it more real somehow. It was slowly starting to make some kind of strange, surreal sense. “But they didn’t tell you about the Mary Magdalenes?”
“No.” Rob looked away, shaking his head, and she saw his jaw working again like it did whenever he got mad. “Not until the end. Not until she had to.”
“My mother said you made some kind of deal with Father Patrick, about keeping Erica out of it?”
Rob had a faraway look in his eyes. “Susan made me promise that I’d raise her to be a Mary. But once she was gone, well… at least Patty and I saw eye to eye on one thing. It was the only thing Patty and Susan ever fought about. Me and Patty didn’t want either of you involved in the Mary Magdalenes. Of course, Father Patrick had other ideas.”
Leah touched his cheek, feeling his jaw working, teeth grinding. He looked at her, his face softening, reaching over to tuck a stray strand of hair behind her ear.
“I would have done anything to keep you girls safe and out of this mess.” He shook his head, his mouth pressed into a thin line. “I failed you both. I’m so sorry.”
“I don’t understand why didn’t you just take Erica and disappear?” Leah wondered out loud. “I mean, you could have gone anywhere. Somewhere Father Patrick couldn’t find you.”
“I couldn’t do that to your mother.” He swallowed, taking Leah’s hand in his, looking at the ring on her finger. “I couldn’t take her daughter away from her. She’d already given up so much. It would have been like putting the final nail into her coffin.”
He looked up, expectant, searching her face, and Leah didn’t understand at first what he was looking for. She replayed his words in her head, searching for a clue, and when she found it, her jaw dropped, the information hitting her like a lightning bolt, straightening her spine, the hair on the back of her neck standing up.
“Her daughter…” Leah repeated the two words that had jolted her like an electrical current.
“Erica is your sister, Leah.” Rob took a deep breath, letting it out in a long, slow sigh. “Patty gave birth to twins. She kept you. Susan and I adopted Erica.”
“We look nothing alike…” Her voice shook, and she looked down at her hand, still resting in the cradle of Rob’s. It didn’t feel like hers anymore. She couldn’t feel her body at all, in fact. She was floating somewhere above it, hovering, the only barrier keeping her on earth the ceiling above their heads. “My birthday is in February, Rob. Erica’s is in January.”
“Fraternal twins don’t look identical. And you were the smaller baby. That happens with twins sometimes. One gets a little more nutrition than the other in the womb.” Rob stroked her hand, turning it over and lifting her palm to his mouth, planting a soft kiss there. “So we just fudged things a little on the birth certificates.”
“But how?” She felt like crying, but her eyes were dry as a bone. Her mouth too. She could barely get words out, like her tongue was trapped in spider webs.
“Donald Highbrow,” Rob replied. “His father’s firm served as the executor of Susan’s will and trust. He helped us with the birth certificates. And Patty’s marriage license of course.”
She looked at him, incredulous. His revelation had gone off like a nuclear bomb in her head. Leah had been reduced to dust in its wake. There was nothing left of her.
“After Susan died, we talked about telling you.”
Rob’s words were far, far away. Like an echo.
“We talked about getting married, making a little family unit, and I considered it, for your sake and Erica’s. She may not always know how to show it, but Patty really does love you both in her own way. I think my wife was the only person she ever let her guard down with completely.”
“I probably would have married your mother after Susan died if I hadn’t gotten involved in… this.” He nodded toward the cabinet filled with film reels. “But once I found out about the Mary Magdalenes, about what Father Patrick had done to my wife, to your mother, and then to my daughter…”
“What, Rob?” Leah croaked, her anger surfacing like molten lava from a volcano. “What did you do? Nothing! You did nothing! Absolutely fucking
Rob caught her wrists as Leah flew at him, avoiding her intended blows, twisting her around while at the same time pulling her close, enfolding her so she couldn’t do anything but struggle against the circle of his arms. She couldn’t even bite him-he had turned her to the wall-although she tried, her teeth bared like a wounded animal at a perceived threat, snapping at the air.
“You have every right to be angry.” Rob’s voice was calm, soothing, a fact that made Leah struggle even more in his arms. “And when I’m done telling you what I have to tell you, I promise, you can do whatever you like. You can hit me. You can walk out that door and never come back. I will write you a blank check. You can go anywhere in the world.”
“Let me go!” she cried, but it was impossible to break the hold he had on her. She was folded up like a pretzel in them.
“When I’m done.”
“There’s more?” She looked over her shoulder at him, incredulous, like a child whose parents had informed them that no, the doctor wasn’t going to hurt you, while they stood there and watched the needle being prepped. It was always for your own good, wasn’t it, Leah thought. They always said it was for your own good.
“The only think I will not allow you to do is throw away five years of my life. I’m so close to putting that bastard away for the rest of his life, I can almost taste it. Father Patrick is going to pay for what he’s done. I’m going to make sure of that, or die trying.”
She relaxed in his arms, feeling his body trembling with emotion, tense with fury.
“Tell me the rest.” She whispered the words, her throat hot and raw. “Just tell me.”
“Father Patrick came to me,” he began. “He came to throw me a bone, like I was some milksop pantywaist groveling at his feet. He mistook me for one of his bootlicking parasites.”
Leah felt Rob’s heart beating hard, his chest against her back.
“That degenerate pervert had the audacity to come into my own home and brand me a cuckold. Here I thought my wife had been faithful to me, aside from her liaisons with Patty. And those, well… those were filling a need I couldn’t. But in the end, I discovered my wife had been unfaithful to me not one time but a hundred. And she’d been in love with another man all along.”
Leah made a soft, wounded sound, feeling his pain. “Father Patrick?”
“She’d told him everything.”
She wiggled in his arms, his grip like a vise. “Owww, Rob, it hurts.”
He let her go instantly and she turned to face him.
“Susan had betrayed all of us. The way her will was structured, Erica was her sole heir, and Father Patrick the trustee. I was her father in name only. All Susan’s money was tied up in the church.”
He pressed his lips together, looking at the wall.
“But you make so much as a photographer!” Leah exclaimed. “You’d already photographed Eisenhower and Marilyn Monroe! Couldn’t you have made a living on that? You could have taken me and… my mother…”
The realization that her mother was also Erica’s stopped her words, her train of thought. It was still too much of a shock to her system.
“I didn’t stay for the money.” Rob smiled grimly. “I stayed for the revenge. I wanted to put that sick motherfucker away for the rest of his life. That’s why I stayed.”
“How?”
“He thought he had me dead to rights. After he gleefully informed me that he had ritually fucked my wife for the entire duration of our marriage, he then told me he not only held my purse strings, but he intended to ritually rape my daughter too.”
“Oh my God.”
“He then told me he had already laid the groundwork for this by having her sterilized at the tender age of seven.” Rob rubbed his eyes again with his palms, as if he still couldn’t quite believe the images his mind was showing him. “And if I didn’t agree to this, he would remove Erica from care, cut me off from Susan’s trust fund, and he would show the world this.”
