Page 120 of Secrets, Lies and Love

She makes a gesture, stopping me. Never once does she look at me. “I’m the one who has to speak. I was silent for too long. I hid the truth. I’m tired. I already told you about the promise I made to Keith and the reason I approached you: I needed to make sure Joseph was okay. When he kidnapped me, Cage put together the missing pieces of Sue’s story, Keith’s story... and ours too. You might want to sit down. There is a lot to be said.”

I pull a chair close to the bed, and Cecily doesn’t even look at me. It’s as if she’s oblivious to everything.

I try to take her hand. She shakes her head.

“You told me never to touch you again. When I finish telling you what I need to, you’ll probably repeat it, so I’m the one asking you now: don’t touch me anymore.”

I feel like I’ve been punched, and I imagine the same thing happened to her when I told her that in my office. “Tell me what you need to. First, we’ll talk about the past. Then about us.”

“There is no ‘we’. The only connection we have is the baby.”

I don’t argue, remembering what the doctors recommended. “Tell me what happened, Cecily.”

“If you found me, you probably saw me leaving the building with Cage. I think he drugged me. I woke up in a shack . . .”

She speaks calmly, and I don’t interrupt her. Her explanation is clear, and the timeline makes perfect sense.

Cecily takes almost half an hour to explain everything to me, giving details that I wouldn’t have believed if anyone else had told them to me.

I brought a monster into my house. I married her and started a family.

The devoted wife and loving mother never existed. Sue was a fake. In her place, there was a cold, calculating woman, capable of involving an altruistic and gullible young man in a plot of greed and death without a second thought.

“This first part of the story isn’t about you—it’s about Keith. I had a hard time finding Sue. I only found out that she came to New York when I saw a photo of the three of you in the newspapers, where the report portrayed you as a happy young family. You were newly married and had a new baby. I knew immediately it was Keith’s son because of Joseph’s age.”

She reveals to me how she contacted Sue and the meeting they had at the motel. The threats my late wife made to her.

None of this surprises me, until the moment Cecily tells me that Sue tried to kill her on the road.

“I managed to escape, and according to the nurses and medical team, it was a true miracle that I came out of the accident with just a few scratches.”

“And she died, falling down the cliff.”

“Yes. But that’s not the whole story. Cage told me that Sue was pregnant with your baby, Dionysus.” Her voice shakes when she says this. “I’m not a hypocrite, and I’m not going to say that I regret her death, but even if you don’t believe me, I regret the death of your son, and even if I wasn’t directly to blame for the accident, I ask for your forgiveness.”

“What? Even if there had been a baby, you played no part in her death.”

“Even if there had been?Shewaspregnant. Cageassuredme. It was a kind of gift that Sue gave him. A kind of ‘insurance policy’ was the term he used, so that she was tied to you forever, and they would profit from it.”

“Sue wasn’t pregnant, Cecily. I’m sure about that. She no longer had a uterus. She suffered a complication during Joseph’s birth. She couldn’t have children anymore.”

“What? But Cage . . .”

“It was just another lie she told. She deceived both her husband and her lover.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“I remember that at the time of Joseph’s birth, I wondered how a young woman, who had already suffered so much, could be punished by God even more, prevented from having other children. Today, I think it was divine justice doing humanity a favor. No child deserved a monster like that as a mother.”

“I . . .”

“Have you said what you needed to say?”

She nods.

“Are you okay to talk?”

“Yes.”

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