Page 33 of This is Why We Lied

“Rough day?”

Mercy didn’t have to turn around to know who’d asked the question. Her aunt’s voice hadn’t changed in the last thirteen years. It made a cruel kind of sense that Delilah had chosen now to come out of the shadows.

Mercy asked, “What do you want, you dried up old—”

“Cunt?” Delilah sat across from her. “Maybe I’ve got the depth, but certainly not the warmth.”

Mercy stared at her aunt. Time had done nothing to alter Papa’s older sister. She still looked like exactly what she was: an old hippie who made soap in her garage. Her long gray hair was braided down to her ass. She wore a simple cotton shift that could’ve been made from a flour sack. Her hands were calloused and scarred from soap making. There was a deep gouge in her bicep that had healed like a piece of wadded up burlap.

Her face was still kind. That was the hard part. Mercy couldn’t reconcile the Delilah she’d grown up loving with the monster she’d ended up hating. Which was basically how Mercy felt about everybody in her life right now.

Except for Jon.

Delilah said, “It’s startling when you think about the valiant stories that have been passed down about this old place. As if the entire area wasn’t a staging ground for genocide. Did you know that the original fish camp was built by a Confederate soldier who went AWOL after the Battle of Chickamauga?”

Mercy didn’t know the AWOL part, but she knew the place was founded after the Civil War. Family history had it that the first Cecil McAlpine was a conscientious objector who’d fled up to the mountains with an escaped lady’s maid.

“Forget the romantic rigamarole,” Delilah said. “That whole Lost Widow story is a steaming pile of horse shit. Captain Cecil brought an enslaved woman up here with him. The idiot thought they were in love. She saw it more as kidnapping and rape. She slit his throat in the middle of the night and ran off with all the family silver. He almost died. But you know McAlpines are hard to kill.”

Mercy knew that last part for sure. “Do you think telling me that my ancestors were disgusting human beings is going to shock me into selling? You know I’ve met my father, right?”

“Oh, I have.” Delilah pointed to the rough patch of skin on her bicep. “This wasn’t from a riding accident. Your father swung an ax at me when I told him that I wanted to run the lodge. I hit the ground so hard that it broke my jaw.”

Mercy bit her lip to keep from reacting. She was intimately familiar with that bit of truth. She had been hiding in the old barn behind the paddock when the attack had happened. Mercy had never told anyone what she’d witnessed. Not even Dave.

“Cecil put me in the hospital for a week. Lost part of the muscle in my arm. They had to wire my jaw shut. Hartshorne didn’t bother trying to take a statement. I couldn’t talk for two months.” Delilah’s words were brutal, but her smile was soft. “Go ahead and make the joke, Mercy. I know you want to.”

Mercy swallowed the lump in her throat. “What’s the point of this? Are you telling me to walk away like you did, before I get hurt?”

Delilah acknowledged the truth with another smile. “It’s a lot of money.”

Mercy felt her stomach fill with acid again. She was so damn tired of fighting. “What do you want, Dee?”

Delilah touched the side of her own face. “I see your scar healed better than mine.”

Mercy looked away. Her own scar was still an open wound. It was carved into her soul like the name that was carved into that gravestone down at the cemetery.

Gabriella.

Delilah asked, “Why do you think your father left me out of the family meeting?”

Mercy was too exhausted for puzzles. “I don’t know.”

“Mercy, think about the question. You were always the smartest one up here. At least after I left.”

It was her lilting tone that cut into Mercy—so soothing, so familiar. They’d been close before everything went to shit. As a child, Mercy would stay with Delilah during the summers. Delilah would send her letters and postcards from her travels. She was the first person Mercy had told she was pregnant. She was the only person who was with Mercy when Jon was born. Mercy had been handcuffed to the hospital bed because she was under arrest. Delilah had helped her cradle Jon to her bare chest so that she could nurse him.

And then she had tried to take him away for ever.

Mercy said, “You tried to steal my son from me.”

“I won’t apologize for what happened. I was doing what I thought was best for Jon.”

“Taking him away from his mother.”

“You were in and out of jail, in and out of rehab, then that awful thing happened with Gabbie. They barely managed to sew your face back together. You could’ve just as easily ended up dead yourself.”

“Dave was—”