About Last Night

“The law firm found someone who could act quickly and discreetly,” Winston said. “Our attorneys understand the gravity of the situation. Unlike you.”

“Cath is not a ‘situatio

n.’ ”

“She’s worse than that. She’s a bloody gold digger.” Winston entered the room and tossed a fat envelope toward Nev’s lap. “See for yourself.”

The envelope missed the target, hitting his thigh and sliding to the floor. Nev didn’t move to pick it up. It would unleash plagues.

Unfortunately, the refusal didn’t buy him any time. Winston would tell him whatever the pages revealed.

“Cath doesn’t want money,” he said, confident in the truth of the statement.

“No? She certainly doesn’t have any. No savings in the bank. Hardly a penny to her name.”

“Being poor isn’t a sin.”

“No, but being a liar is.”

“She’s not a liar.”

He’d brought her here and made her lie to his family, but everything else that had passed between them told him she was scrupulously honest. Secretive, but honest.

“She lied about having an arts degree. She never finished university.” Winston made the announcement casually. Nev didn’t flinch. Cath had told his family she’d attended a prestigious art school in Chicago, but she’d never said so to him privately. She’d never spoken of her education at all.

It was one of hundreds of things he didn’t know about her.

Mother played devil’s advocate. “That may be true, Winston, but it hardly warrants all this drama.”

“There’s more.” Winston’s voice betrayed the rush it gave him to bear bad tidings. “She’s a criminal. She comes from a well-known Mafia family in Chicago. Her first husband”—he looked at Nev with ill-disguised glee—“is serving twenty years on racketeering charges.”

Her first husband. The baby’s father, then. She hadn’t told him she’d been married. He’d simply assumed she hadn’t. He’d thought he knew her well enough to guess what her life contained, to fill in the cracks between her stories with his intuition about her.

He’d been wrong. Cath had been married to another man. His Cath. The fact lodged in his throat, solid and sour. She’d pledged her love to someone. Worn his ring. Carried his child. Some slick Italian criminal from the States. A stranger he couldn’t even imagine.

She wouldn’t do the same for him. Wouldn’t wear his ring—not really. She hadn’t even trusted him enough to tell him she’d had a husband.

He was a fool.

“You’ve nothing to say to that, Neville?” Winston asked. “No matter. There’s more. This woman you’re so obsessed with? This schemer you’ve made your wife? She’s a felon. She’s been arrested for arson.”

It would’ve given him enormous satisfaction to tell his brother to shove off, that Cath couldn’t possibly have committed a crime. Not without his knowing of it. But she had a lit match branded into the skin of her lower back.

“What do you know about all this?” Richard asked him. His tone said, Tell me it’s not true.

It was true. It had to be. Cath had married a criminal. She’d committed a felony. Hadn’t she told him she’d made mistakes? If Cath had gone astray, she’d have done it properly. No childish errors for his Cath. Only catastrophes. Only disastrous mishaps she clutched tightly to herself, though he’d courted her and coddled her and loved her every way he knew how for more than a month, hoping she’d loosen her grip on them.

Winston flapped a dismissive hand in his direction. “He doesn’t know anything. He’s let himself be blindsided by a cheap tart for the sake of the promotion, and now we’ll all have to cope with the fallout.”

“Winston!” His father’s voice thundered, his face red with emotion. Nev had never seen him so angry. “That’s enough! You’ll apologize to your brother for slandering his wife, or you’ll leave this house immediately.”

It ought to be you, he thought. You should be the one defending her. But he couldn’t seem to break free of the part he always played in these scenes. Mother pulled the strings. Winston acted as her right-hand man. Father normally remained above the fray. Nev’s role was to go along.

This time, he knew, his complaisance constituted a betrayal of Cath. It would be nobler if she’d betrayed him first, but the truth was she hadn’t even done that. She didn’t care enough to betray him.

He’d been a bloody hopeless fool, thinking every day that passed brought them closer, that he’d managed to pick the lock that protected her heart and it was only a matter of hours before she gave it over to him.

It would never happen. She’d told him next to nothing. In the twisted algebra of her psyche, he was an insignificant variable. Not worthy of her confidence. Not worthy of her love.