Page 64 of What You Never Knew

“So, she confessed to you?” I encourage.

He takes a long drink of water, then takes his time setting it down carefully on the coffee table. “I guess you could say that,” he says, still looking unsure about what he’s about to reveal. “My mother said that she had made a plan to blackmail your mother for money, only because she was worried West would never work again. She and my dad arranged to meet your mother at Avril Island. They told her they were going to go to the police with the truth if she didn’t pay them.”

“Wait,” I interrupt. “So all this time you knew what the truth was and didn’t tell me?”

He quickly shakes his head. “No, June. My mother didn’t go into any details about what actually happened. Just that they knew the truth, whatever that was. Your mom apparently had a gun and said she’d kill them both before she’d be blackmailed. That it would be for the best anyway, since they knew too much. That she could call it self-defense. My mother was mostly afraid of me being left as an orphan, so she tried to backtrack, apologize, and say they wouldn’t do it, they’d keep the secrets, but your mother didn’t believe them anymore. She thought West had turned on her. My mother apparently became desperate, sure April was going to kill them both. So she lunged at April and got the gun away somehow. She knew, though, that if she hurt April, then both she and my father would go to jail, and again I’d be left on my own.” He pauses to take another drink of water.

“This sounds like some kind of bad movie,” I can’t help but interject.

“And I’m not even done yet,” he says. “That night that my mother thought I was a priest, she told me that she shot and killed my father. Thinking it was her only way out alive or free from jail time. She said that she and April buried him on Avril Island.”

“My god, Ezra, that’s crazy. How did you not tell me this?”

“My mother’s thinking was that if both she and April had secrets, then neither of them would betray the other. They made a deal that April would leave and never come back and my mother would protect the secrets of Avril Island. She said she did it all for her boy. So that I wouldn’t lose her as my mother. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to believe it. I convinced myself that it was just dementia talking, but you found his body, just like she said.”

We both sit in silence as this new truth sinks in. My head is throbbing with the realization that my mother and Willa, two women who were enemies, ended up bound together in their lies and crimes. My mother spent her life running from here and Willa spent hers slowly going mad because of what they’d done. The night it happened must have been when my mother asked Suzanne Swann to lie to the police, just in case West’s death came back on her somehow. Unfortunately, it all makes sense now.

Ezra gets up from the couch and goes over to a cabinet. He takes out a bottle of bourbon and pours us both some. I gratefully take the glass when he hands it to me. It’s not even noon yet, but the things we’re dealing with are beyond the parameters of time.

“I’m sorry I kept it from you, June,” he says. “I was protecting my mother. I think a part of me always believed it could be true. And then if it wasn’t, what good would it have been to go around telling anybody?”

“It wasn’t the only thing you kept from me, Ezra.” He gives me a look of surprised confusion. “Vandalizing my cottage?”

He rolls his eyes. “My god, June, where did you manage to dig that up?”

“I didn’t have to do any digging. Judy told me.”

He throws up a hand. “Yeah, I did a stupid kid thing and committed some light vandalism. I was angry and didn’t know what to do about it. I also cleaned it up and have more or less taken care of the place ever since because I felt so badly about it.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I was ashamed of it.”

I take a sip of my drink for courage and then get up off the couch and go into Ezra’s office. Opening the trunk, I find the cigar box. I bring it out to him in the living room. “And what about this?” I say, holding it up in front of him.

He looks confused at first and takes the box from me to look at it more closely. I can see recognition slowly dawning. “Ah, this,” he says, flipping the lid open. “It was my dad’s. Where did you get it?”

“I found it in the trunk in your office.”

He narrows his eyes at me. “Why were you looking in the trunk in my office?”

“I was snooping around. I admit it. The night I stayed here alone. I had a beer with Judy and she told me how angry you’d been at my family and about the vandalizing and seeing your dad leave that night in a boat headed toward Avril Island.” I sink down on the couch beside him. “I just didn’t know who I could trust, and I was feeling suspicious.”

In typical Ezra fashion, he reaches out and rubs my arm. “I understand, June. I probably would have done the same. I just wish you’d talked to me about it up front.”

I point at the cigar box. “Are you sure that was your dad’s?”

“Yeah, I’m sure,” he says, studying the box in his hands. “A little while after my dad disappeared, my mom and I were cleaning out his work shed. She pulled this down from a shelf. At the time, I was in this total ‘don’t throw anything of his out’ stage. I still thought he was coming back. Anyway, my mom saw what was inside and started crying. She said something about the girl—‘if it hadn’t been for the girl,’ or something like that—then threw it in the garbage and stormed out, calling my dad a bastard. As soon as she was gone, I took it out of the garbage and hid it away in that trunk.” He holds up the photo of the two of us fishing. “I think mostly because of this.”

The girl. The words roll around my head like a marble in a metal bucket, loud and loose. I’m the girl; Willa told me so herself. The one in the photos in the cigar box hidden away in West’s shed; the one that somehow made West’s betrayal unforgivable to Willa. Willa used the girl like an exclamation point every time she talked about the secrets kept by my mother and West. Suddenly it becomes so clear. I was the greatest betrayal of all—a daughter born from their affair.

And the photo of me, West, and Ezra holding up our wood carvings—West and I stare out at the camera with the same crystal-blue eyes. That’s what Willa meant the first day I saw her when she said I had my dad’s eyes.

The cigar box—it’s not Ezra’s shrine to me. It was his dad’s shrine to his daughter. My mother would have given him those photos, that poem, the lock of hair. Items to remember me by when we weren’t at Avril Island, to mark my growth through the years, times he missed out on.

“June.” Ezra reaches out and takes my arm. “Are you okay?”

I pull away. A wave of thick nausea rises up. I rush from the room, making it to the bathroom just in time to empty my stomach, the bourbon burning on its way back out.