False Pretenses - Kathy Herman [63]
“Let me guess,” Pierce said sarcastically. “Violet and Pierre Benoit?”
Zoe nodded. “They had one child, a surviving daughter, Zoe, who was my age. I saved the newspaper article and decided to change my name to Zoe Benoit and say that my parents had died in a house fire. That way I never had to acknowledge my real parents or my upbringing.”
“But you told me all kinds of stories about your happy childhood days.”
Zoe’s eyes turned to pools, and tears trickled down her face. “I made them up. I almost believed those stories after a while. I wanted it to be true.”
Pierce bit his lip and wouldn’t look at her. “I don’t get it. Why are you telling me this now—five years into the marriage? Why didn’t you just let me live with my illusion. Why, Zoe? Nothing can ever be the same now! You’re a liar and a criminal! What am I supposed to do with that? Tell me! Because I don’t know!”
“Pierce, please don’t yell.” Zoe covered her head the way she used to do when her father was about to hit her.
“Oh, spare me the drama,” he said. “Who are you? Do I even know the real you? Sieger? Were you just going to lie to our kids about being Cajun? Make up names and dates of births and deaths for grandparents, too? Were you just going to hope and pray we never pursued our family tree? How far were you willing to go?”
Zoe reached over to the nightstand, plucked a Kleenex from the box, and blew her nose. “There’s more.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I would never have had the courage to tell you the truth. But something’s come up in the past couple weeks. I started to receive anonymous notes with just five words: I know what you did. I thought for sure someone figured out I stole the ring and wanted hush money not to go to Adele with the information. That’s when I decided to go to Adele and confess everything. So I made up the story about my friend Annabelle dying. I needed a reason to leave town that day so I could drive to Alexandria and face Mrs. Woodmore.”
“So you lied to me about that, too?”
“I’m sorry, Pierce. I just wanted to fix things. I hated lying to you again, but I kept thinking it would be the last time.”
Pierce threw his hands in the air. “Why stop when you’re so good at it? I never suspected a thing. I prayed for your safety while you were driving down the bayou in that tropical storm, for heaven’s sake. How can I trust anything you say?”
“I don’t blame you for being mad. Or for wondering if you can trust what I say. But this is the gospel truth. Why would I hurt you like this and risk our marriage by telling a lie?”
“What happened when you went to see Mrs. Woodmore?”
Zoe told him everything that had happened the day she went to Adele and confessed to stealing the ring, how Adele agreed to let her pay back the thirty thousand dollars, and how the notes became threatening after that, leading up to tonight’s meeting with Angus Shapiro—or whatever his real name was.
“So what does he want, Zoe? I assume you told him you confessed everything to Adele about the ring?”
Zoe started to cry. “He doesn’t know anything about Adele or the ring. He was looking for Zoe Benoit, the daughter of Pierre and Violet Benoit, who died in a house fire in Texas.”
“Did you tell him you’re not that person?”
“He didn’t believe me. He said my parents were involved in trafficking heroine and that they owed him a hundred thousand dollars when they died. He thinks I’m their daughter, Zoe, and that I skipped out with the inheritance money so I wouldn’t have to pay their debts.”
“So he wants a hundred thousand dollars from you? How can he just march into your life and make this demand without any proof you’re the daughter he’s looking for?”
“Pierce, please don’t yell. This is hard enough.”
“Maybe I want to yell! How in world did Shapiro even find you?”
“He was in Lafayette on business and read the feature story they did on Zoe B’s. He put two and two together and figured I must be the Zoe Benoit he’d been looking for all