“I’m sorry,” Lane said in a falsely reasonable tone. “What did you say?”

“Edward didn’t kill his father.”

“You shouldn’t—Max, you shouldn’t throw around something like that.”

“It’s the truth.” He turned his head and looked at his handsome-as-sin brother. “You and I and Gin are William Baldwine’s children. Edward is not.”

“How did you—I don’t understand.” Lane’s expression vacillated between shock and oh-hell-no. “No, Mother is—she’s only ever been with him.”

“No, she hasn’t.”

“Max, I need you to get serious—”

“Right before I left Charlemont, I came home late at night. Gin was out somewhere. You were in Virginia. Edward was traveling on business. Amelia was sleeping over at a friend’s house.” He pictured the scene like it was yesterday. “I snuck in the back because I was high and looking for food, and I was really fucking quiet in the kitchen. I mean, if I’d woken Miss Aurora up? She’d have killed me.”

He made a pair of fists and dug his knuckles into his watering eyes. “So, yeah, I creeped around and when I was done eating, I went out front to the main staircase because my room’s right at the top of it.”

Lane nodded. “And the staff stairs go directly over Miss Aurora’s bed.”

“I’d have been busted.” Max took a deep breath. “I heard their voices as I came up to the second floor. They were down the hall outside of Mother’s room—she was yelling at him for having been out with another woman. And then Father . . .”

“What?”

Max cursed. “He said she had no right to comment. That they both knew Edward wasn’t his—that he’d known it all along, and if she didn’t shut up about what he was doing, he was going to tell Edward.”

“Oh, my God.” Lane closed his lids. “Oh . . . shit.”

“She got really quiet. And then she started crying. He just turned away really fast and disappeared into his own suite. I didn’t know then whether he’d seen me or not—and I’ve always been afraid of him. So I ran out of the house and slept by the pool. I kept expecting him to come find me and . . . I don’t know, he was capable of anything, right? But the next morning, he went to work like nothing had happened. I sat in the pool house for a long time, thinking about him at his desk, ordering people around in the business center. I couldn’t stay. Not knowing what I did. Leaving was the only way—so I packed up what I could stuff into a duffel bag and took one of the Mercedes. I drove over the river into Indiana, and I didn’t know where I was going—eventually I sold the car for, like, twenty grand in St. Louis and lived off the money. I just wanted to get as far away as I could from this family.”

“Does Edward know?” Lane blurted as if he were speaking to himself.

“That’s why I came back. I decided I had to tell him. I mean, the guilt. All that shit he did for us when we were kids? He was protecting us from someone who was all but a stranger to him. I couldn’t deal with it anymore—so I called him and we met that day. But when I was sitting across from him, I lost my nerve. He looked so bad, so . . . worn out. And the limping and the scars—it was so much worse than I had seen in the papers.”

“So you knew about the kidnapping.”

“Who doesn’t—it was all over the news.”

“Edward thinks Father set it all up.” Lane rubbed his face. “If what you overheard is true . . . maybe that’s why Father wanted him dead.”

“And why Father was so hard on him for all those years. It wasn’t his son, but he had to pretend like the kid was—meanwhile, Edward was a living, breathing fuck you to him, every day, year after year.”

“Edward doesn’t know, then?”

Max shrugged. “If he does, it isn’t from me. And you’re right, I am a coward. I just . . . I couldn’t do it. So after he and I talked about absolutely nothing, we went our separate ways, and I kept on moving through town. But then Father died . . . so I came back to Easterly. For reasons I’m still not real clear on.”

Lane’s eyes were direct. “You gotta be honest with me. Were you involved in the murder?”

Max met that stare right on. “No, I wasn’t. I saw the report on the local news when the body was found. That’s as close as I am to it, and I will swear to this on anything you want me to.”

“Maybe Edward did do it after all.”

“I don’t know.”

Lane turned back to the windshield and got very still in his seat. “I’m sorry I accused you.”

“Don’t be. I don’t care—and I can see why you’d think it was me.”

After a long moment, Lane murmured, “So who is Edward’s father?”

“I don’t know. And I don’t know how to ask something like that of Mother.”

“Edward has a right to know.”

“Does it really matter anymore? Besides, trust me, recasting an entire family is not a party. It’s like . . . everything you know to be true is suddenly wrong. It makes your head go bad. I mean, are any of us related? Father only talked about Edward not being his, but what about the rest of us?”

“I can’t believe this.”

The pair of them sat there, side by side in the Rolls, for so long that Lane cut the engine and put down the windows . . . and eventually, the dawn’s glow appeared behind the BBQ joint. And still they stayed put. It wasn’t until the first of the commuters began to hit the road into town that his brother restarted the engine and they headed off to Easterly in silence.

From time to time, over the intervening three years since Max had heard what he had, he had wondered how he would feel if he came clean. If he told . . . anyone . . . in his family what he knew. He had imagined there would be relief—but also even more guilt, because in unburdening himself, he would be infecting others with the ugly truth.

To his surprise, he felt nothing.

Maybe it was the booze.

As he and his brother traveled down River Road, they followed the curves of the Ohio’s shoreline, and he wondered exactly where Edward had taken their father out and dumped him into the water, still alive but incapacitated. Where had the deed been done? How had Edward chosen the spot? Had he been worried about being caught?

“Are you going to tell Edward?” Max said as Easterly’s hill came into view.

Behind the house, the sun was rising, peach and pink rays flowing around the mansion’s grand contours as if the Bradford family’s great house had to be deferred to.

“I think you should.” Lane glanced over. “And I’ll go with you when you do.”

“No,” Max said. “I’m leaving. And before you tell me I can’t—”

“I’m not going to stop you.” Lane shook his head. “I’ll remind you, though, that Edward is still our brother. He’s still our family. Mother is the connection—actually, Mother has always been the thing, hasn’t she. She’s the Bradford.”

“I don’t care about either one of them.” Max crossed his arms over his chest. “I wish you well, but Charlemont and Easterly—and this whole family—are a waste of my time. And they’re a waste of yours. You need to take that good woman you got and put all this shit in the rearview.” He looked over the river to Indiana, to the wide-open highway, to more of a future far, far away from the name Bradford. “Trust me, it’s a better life out there. Way better.”

EIGHTEEN

Later that morning, Lizzie pried the keys to a riding mower out of Gary McAdams’s extremely disapproving and reluctant hands and went to town on the front lawn.

Indeed, the prospect of making neat, clipped lanes all over the acres of grass that ran from Easterly’s grand entrance all the way down the mountain to the gates on River Road made her OCD side tingle with happiness—and no, she did not care that it was “hotter’n blazes out,” as the head groundsman had put it.

Unfortunately, her enthusiasm proved less enduring than the heat.