Chapter 4
Camille finally asked to speak.
I let her.
Not alone.
Cora stayed with Lily in the adjoining room.
Adrian stayed too.
I wanted siblings unable to revise separately.
Camille looked smaller without her engagement ring catching the light.
I had removed nothing from her.
She removed it herself.
Good instinct.
“You found Lily that night.”
“Yes.”
“Alive.”
“Yes.”
“And called Adrian.”
“Yes.”
“Not me.”
She began crying.
“No.”
“Why?”
“She hated me.”
There.
Not fear for Lily.
Not first.
Herself.
Camille explained the accident.
No murder.
No push.
Lily ran from the lake terrace after arguing with her.
A storm had started.
She slipped near the lower dock and fell into the water.
A groundskeeper found her downstream against reeds and pulled her out.
By the time Camille reached her, Lily was awake but confused.
Camille panicked.
Because earlier that evening she had told Lily:
“Your father will choose me eventually.”
My blood cooled.
Lily had threatened to tell me.
Then accident.
Then opportunity.
Camille convinced herself I would blame her.
Maybe I would have.
Maybe not.
That uncertainty became justification.
She moved Lily to Margaret’s house for “one night.”
Then another.
When Lily’s memory improved, she began asking for me.
That should have ended everything.
Instead Camille lied.
“She asked why you weren’t coming.”
My voice barely worked.
“What did you say?”
Camille covered her face.
“That you were too hurt.”
Not enough.
“What exactly?”
Her silence answered.
I forced it.
“Camille.”
She whispered:
“I told her seeing her reminded you of her mother.”
My late wife.
Lily’s mother.
Dead four years before.
I felt sick.
Camille had told a grieving child that her father stayed away because she resembled another person he had lost.
Lily did not merely believe I stopped searching.
She believed her face hurt me too much to love her properly.
I looked at Camille.
“You didn’t hide my daughter in a house.”
May you like
My voice dropped.
“You hid me from her.”
