Page 18 of Father Knows Best (A Family Affair #1)

“You went to bed around, I don’t know, nine o’clock,” I remind him, knowing that he won’t remember or have heard any of what’s going to come next. “She wanted to go out. At first, she wanted me to call the nanny so we could go downtown together, to the bar.”

“Was she an alcoholic?” he asks, his voice steady, his chest rising and falling as if he’s just taken a run. Avery presses her palm to the center of his sternum. She brings her glass up, and he does the same, and together, they take a drink.

When his eyes settle on me again, I answer him.

“Yes.” I glance at Avery and back to Sutton.

“I didn’t want to. I wanted to stay home.

As soon as she knew I wouldn’t come, she left.

Without me with her, I knew where she was going and exactly who she wanted to go see.

” This is the part that I regret. Sometimes I wonder, if I had left her for the things she did to me, would she have changed?

Could I have saved her? Was it my responsibility to save her and did I fail us both?

The thoughts I have. It took me years to really get to sleep at night.

“What do you mean?” he asks, and the confusion on his face, though painful, is more tolerable than what I know is coming next.

“She was seeing him.” Four words that only Ford had heard me say until now.

“Barry Allen?” Sutton asks, saying his name aloud to me for the first time ever. I’m sure he’s spoken it tons of times, but it’s the first time I’m hearing him acknowledge that he has without a doubt read all about what happened.

I nod. “Yes. I had first met him in Los Angeles. Then he and his wife moved to San Francisco and it was completely random that Barry and Margot bumped into each other. Then we went on a double date.” Nothing is blurry about this at all, but it feels malevolent to rehash details that make no difference now.

The story can be told without every stone being unturned.

“It’s fuzzy here,” I lie, forgoing the details of how Margot simply asked Barry for his number right there in front of me and Josie, because she wanted it at the perfume counter, but had forgot.

That’s how she was. When she wanted something, she made it a game.

Teased, blamed the booze, seduced, all of it.

I always took her back, despite not believing any of her bullshit, because I loved her so fucking much.

“But they started seeing each other, your mom and Barry. She didn’t hide it. She never really bothered hiding it. She’d say she was gonna go have some fun, and she’d come back hours, sometimes days later.”

Sutton shakes his head. “I don’t remember that. I don’t remember her like that.”

“You wouldn’t,” I say calmly, sinking back into the chair. “This is nice,” I look at Avery, and she smiles. “Thank you, I had it reupholstered last fall.”

“I suspected.”

“Hey,” Sutton snaps, impatient. Avery, though, she’s the one who engaged in side conversation and I see what she’s doing.

She’s pacing him, making Sutton sit with his impatience and wait.

It’s control, soft and invisible, and I’m not even sure she knows she has it, or is doing it. But it’s sexy as hell.

“You wouldn’t remember her like that because you had no idea, Sutton.

You were coddled and shielded, purposely.

She was very good at being a mother, she was great at being great for you.

” He didn’t know how complex she was because he never got the opportunity.

And he’ll never know what he’s missing out on, and neither will she.

Sutton sucks in a breath, pausing for a moment in thought before saying, “I remember the smell. When she kissed me at night. The smell of alcohol on her breath.”

A burning, aching, all-consuming knot of pain clogs my throat, and my body yearns to go to my child, to pull him into my arms and console him for the pain I allowed him to experience.

I knew she was an alcoholic. I didn’t want it to be true, but I knew that it was.

“I’m so sorry, son. I’ve failed you in so many ways.

And all I can say is that at the time, I thought I was preserving something for you.

A normal childhood with your mother there but…

I realize now I was so addicted to her that I kept her there.

Hurting you. Damaging you. I should have made her leave.

I should have done a lot of things differently. ”

“But you didn’t,” Sutton says, nearly stopping my heart. Almost making me sick. His voice is even keel, and his face is too.

“I didn’t.”

“You did what you thought was right,” he says, surprising me.

I pull my head up from where it was hanging between my shoulders. “I did.”

“So just… explain to me what that was.” He doesn’t sound angry and–I glance at Avery’s hand, still resting on Sutton’s thigh. Her ring shines beneath the lights, and so do her eyes.

“At the time, I just, I missed your mother so much that the idea of you hating her or knowing who she really was, it made me sick. I thought you thinking of me as a cheating asshole was easier to stomach, and potentially repairable. But the idea of you knowing the truth about your mom after you’d just lost her, I just, I couldn’t bear it.

” I shake my head, and split a glance between the two of them before fishing the USB drive from my pocket.

Sliding it across the small mirrored table, I sit back and nod to it.

“I have kept in touch with Josie Allen, who keeps in touch with Barry, through letters. She sends me his letters when she believes it could benefit us, and they’re there, digitally. ”

Sutton just shakes his head, wordlessly. Avery’s brows pull together as she curls her legs beneath her on the couch. “What happened that night? With Barry? Why did he kill her?”

I look at the USB drive, because letters from Barry to Josie in the year after he killed Margot is how I learned what I know now. And those letters are on that drive.

“He thought that Margot was going to leave me to be with him. He’d planned on leaving Josie, too,” I tell Avery and Sutton, though my eyes stay on the small, rectangular device on the table.

“That night she told him that she’d changed her mind.

She didn’t want to leave me, because she didn’t want to leave you. ”

Sutton finishes his wine and slides the glass onto the table, coming to rest at the edge of the couch cushion. Avery does the same. “Wait so, she actually was going to leave you?”

I blink down at the USB, seeing the handwritten and photocopied words all over again in my mind, feeling the pain radiate from my chest all over again.

Margot cheated a ton. Until Barry, though, she never wanted to leave me.

“Seeing those letters, to this day, I don’t know if she only told Barry she wanted to be with him to buy some breathing room or if she meant it.

All I know is that either way, she changed her mind because of you. She didn’t want to lose you, Sutton.”

Silence fills in the room around us, and I sink into it, comfortably, waiting for my son to process.

I’ve put it all out there, and this talk has gone as well as it could, thanks to Avery.

“You can have that and read every letter that Josie has sent me of his. I’m no longer trying to hide any of it from you. ”

He shakes his head. “The papers said you were a womanizer. That you cheated on her constantly, that Barry killed her because you were sleeping with Josie. You mean to tell me, you selected that narrative, for everyone who reads the papers or knew you to think that you were a man who cheated on your wife and got her, essentially, murdered because of it? I’m supposed to believe you fell on some sword for me? ”

Avery attempts to drop her arm around him, but he gets to his feet, so I do the same.

“Sutton,” Avery says softly, “he’s not?—”

“Is there anyone who can corroborate your story?” my son asks me. For a moment, I replay the evening, and then reconsider his question.

“Do you think I would come into your home and lie to you?” I ask him, my heart shattering into a million pieces when he pauses before he replies.

Avery steps between us, a palm into each of our chests. “Let’s just calm down, okay?”

“I’m calm,” Sutton retorts. “But forgive me if I need a moment to calibrate to the concept that I’ve had it wrong my whole life,” he says just as the grandfather clock chimes. It’s nine o’clock. I have a meeting tomorrow. I’ve said what I had to say.

“You can contact Josie Allen. You can go through those letters,” I say of the USB drive sitting idly by. “You can ask your uncle.”

I don’t bother seeking a goodbye handshake or hug, because that would be a fool’s errand. Instead, I take my wine glass to the sink, finding them in the kitchen when I turn around.

“I wanted your memory of her to remain intact, and you missed her so much that I thought if you knew the truth, it would destroy you. It was easier for me to be the villain out of pure selfishness. My heart was broken and so was yours–I couldn’t handle you knowing the truth about her after all of that, at such a young age.

I’m sorry. I am. Ford said all along I should have just told you but as I’ve said, I don’t think I was ready for the world to know how broken I was, how much she hurt me, what I tolerated.

I was ashamed and I just wanted my only son to come out of the darkness as well as he could.

” I look at Avery, finding a single tear gliding down her cheek.

“Thank you for facilitating this evening.”

I look up at my son, taller than me, smarter and stronger than me, too. “If you have any questions, I’m here. Thank you for listening.”

I slip past them, out the back door, into the night, sucking down as much fresh, cool air as possible. That was hard, but it’s done, and we’re all going to be better off for it, that much I know for sure.

I don’t want to be alone tonight, but over the years, I’ve learned that no matter who I’m with, since Margot has been dead, I’ve always been alone.