Playing Dead_ A Novel of Suspense - Allison Brennan [7]
Why couldn’t you have just stayed away, Dad?
TWO
Tom O’Brien was grateful when Nelia didn’t say anything on the drive back to the motel. He needed the time to think.
He’d unintentionally manhandled Claire. Though she hid her fear well behind those suspicious blue eyes, he’d scared her.
He squeezed his eyes shut, the hot burn of unshed tears reminding him of everything he’d lost on that horrific day fifteen years ago.
“I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” Tom whispered. If Nelia heard him, she didn’t comment, her eyes focused on driving in morning commuter traffic, knuckles white as she gripped the steering wheel. He’d tell her everything—they had no secrets—but now, he had to regain control over his past, over his emotions.
Fifteen years was a long time, but when you lived day in and day out remembering every minute of the hour that destroyed your life, you didn’t forget a detail.
He remembered exactly what he had felt when Claire called him that day about Lydia and Taverton. Pain. Anger. And a deep, soul-shattering sadness that his marriage was, in fact, over.
But he’d never imagined Lydia dead.
* * *
It wasn’t the first time Lydia had cheated on him. Tom had learned of another affair five years before. That time she’d been screwing another cop. From his own division. He’d told Lydia he could forgive her if she promised never to stray again.
“If you don’t love me, tell me,” he’d said. Divorce was foreign to him—his parents had been happily married for forty years before his dad died—but he wouldn’t live in a loveless house. He wouldn’t keep her trapped just because they had a life together, a child together.
That first time, Lydia had cried and begged for Tom’s forgiveness. She’d met the cop at the hospital where she worked as an emergency-room nurse. It was the adrenaline of the moment, she claimed, she didn’t know why she had let it continue. Tom forgave her. Lydia had seemed so sincere.
But that horrible day, knowing she was in his bed with another man, the insidious self-loathing returned. That voice that said, “You’re a sucker. She cheated on you once, Tommy Boy, you knew she’d do it again.”
Was she fucking another cop? How many had there been? Had everyone been laughing at him behind his back? Poor Tom O’Brien, his wife was a whore.
He went to the house that day not only to confront her, but to see the truth for himself. That his wife had spat on their wedding vows again, that they meant nothing to her, that his forgiveness had meant nothing, that their eighteen years of marriage meant nothing.
Maybe if Tom was the only one who knew of Lydia’s infidelity, he could have lived the lie until Claire went off to college. Quietly gotten a divorce. But their fourteen-year-old daughter knew. Had known for weeks. It had all spilled out when Claire called him in tears.
“I’ve seen the car before, two months ago. I asked Mom who was at the house and she said just a friend, and then I saw her kissing a man at the park last month. Mom didn’t see me. I wanted to tell her to stop, but . . .” Claire’s voice trailed off. “I saw the same blue car then.”
Tom was ill with the thought that Claire had been living with this knowledge, that it hurt her.
“Mom brought him home today,” Claire sobbed into the phone to her dad.
“Why aren’t you in school?” he’d asked.
“Missy and I came home for lunch.”
He’d learned later that was a half-truth. Claire and Missy had come home during lunch, but had planned on cutting classes the rest of the day.
“Daddy, I hate her!”
Claire didn’t hate her mother. It had been a statement born of anger and frustration. Nor did Tom hate Lydia, but any love he’d had was a diminishing memory. Tom told Claire to stay at Missy’s house and he’d talk to her after he spoke to Lydia. “Don’t worry,” he’d said. “Everything is going to be fine.”
He didn’t believe it. Claire didn’t, either.
He parked his police-issue motorcycle down the street from their bungalow