Candace tossed her towel on the floor and reached for a rumpled T-shirt on the bed.
‘You got this from Ben, didn’t you? You were the woman sleeping with him, the woman from the hotel. Except you were blond then. That’s what Noah meant when he said he liked your hair dark.’
She cackled, and it was almost painful to watch her crumble. ‘So you’re snooping and spying on me. Wait until Lane hears all about your delusions.’
‘Don’t worry, I plan on telling him everything. About how you’re still married to Noah. And how you were Ben’s mistress. I can’t believe I’ve been sharing a home with the woman who tried to steal my husband! Did you kill him too?’
She didn’t speak, and I couldn’t read if it was denial or blame on her face.
‘But why Lane? First you stole my husband, then you stole my brother. Was it a personal attack against me? What did I ever do to you?’
Her eyes widened, her bottom lip trembled, and I knew I’d caught her. But she wasn’t giving up. She was a fighter, like me. ‘First of all, don’t flatter yourself. You are nothing to me, so all of this,’ she waved her hand in a circle, ‘is not about you. And secondly, I didn’t steal your husband. He came to me first. I didn’t even know he was married in the beginning. And by the time I found out, things were already pretty … serious between us.’
Serious? No, it couldn’t have been more than a fling for Ben. Someone temporary to fill the emptiness. Unless …
‘Is Ben the father?’ I pointed to her stomach.
I didn’t think she was going to answer me, until she did.
‘Yes, he’s the father.’
‘Oh my God. Is that … is that why you killed him – because he didn’t want the baby?’ Before everything I now knew about my husband, I would have never thought he’d abandon a child. But now I knew better. He had done it before with Natalie. And he had done it again with Candace.
‘Why would you assume I killed him? We both know it was a suicide … which you covered up. I saw the note.’
‘No, that suicide note – that wasn’t Ben. It couldn’t be.’
Ben’s last words were engraved in my head. I had read the letter dozens of times, slept with it under my pillow even after Lane told me to burn it, because it was everything I thought Ben wanted me to know. I punished myself with his lyrics. And somewhere inside I knew it wasn’t his voice from beyond the grave, but I had doubted myself. One should never doubt instinct.
‘You want to know how I knew it wasn’t him?’ I continued in the fury of the moment. ‘Because I knew Ben, and you clearly didn’t. Ben didn’t say things like vanquish the cruelty of life. I always thought that was the weirdest thing for him to write, and now it makes sense. You killed him, then staged it as a suicide. How ironic, right? That you would stage it and I would unwittingly undo your handiwork.’
I snickered, not at the humor of it, but at the paradox of life. Candace stood there, buttoning her shorts as if we were discussing the weather, waiting for more. So I gave her more.
‘And Michelle Hudson? It was a pointless murder because the poor woman hadn’t seen you after all. But framing my mother for it? That’s an all-time low.’
‘Oh, that was just too easy. It literally fell into my hands. You can thank the broken clasp on her necklace for that. I found it in the living room the night of our dinner. It was fate opening a door for me, I guess.’
‘Why my mother – your own mother-in-law?’
‘Why’d she keep calling me Candy? Why did she hate me? Why did she try to push my buttons and tell Lane to leave me? There’s always reasons for everything we do, some understandable, others not so much.’ Candace didn’t flinch, didn’t move, didn’t show an ounce of remorse.
‘I understand all of that, I do. But Lane – why him?’ It was the only unanswered question I had. ‘I just want to know why you picked my brother. You owe me that much.’
She waited a long minute, the gears shifting in her head, then she spoke, each word slow, sure, mindful.
‘I’ll tell you why I picked Lane. I think you both earned the right to know. You see, Lane and I have history. But before I get to that, I want to set the record straight about Ben, because you’ve misinterpreted most of what happened. You want to blame me, but you really should be blaming yourself.’
‘Oh really? How so?’
‘When I met Ben, he was in a really dark place. After we spent some time together he finally told me why. He had lost Kira and his wife in one fell swoop. While you wallowed in depression, he was expected to carry all of you on his own. But you never considered his loss. I did, though.’
‘You know nothing about our marriage!’ I screamed, spittle spraying.
‘I know I didn’t go to him looking for love; he came to me looking for healing. He never mentioned being married until later, so it wasn’t like we plotted the affair together. He got drunk at a bar, I made sure he got home in an Uber. When he came back to that bar looking for me to return the favor, I agreed to a dinner. Dinner turned into dessert. And well, after that … it’s hard to turn a rich, handsome, attention-starved man down. At that point I still thought he was single.’
‘So you’re saying you had no idea he was married? I highly doubt that.’
‘Believe what you want, but it wasn’t until after we started seeing each other that he told me about you and your daughter. He never gave me much detail – it was clearly too hard on him to utter
