The Moment of Truth

“Remember that New Year’s party we went to at the Montford mansion the year I turned twenty-one?”

He’d been there with a blonde whose name he couldn’t remember—someone he’d brought home from Harvard to show his father he was his own man. Another woman he’d treated kindly but had callously used for his own end. Michelle had had a date, too—a pompous ass a few years older than them who’d looked down his nose at all the alumni from their elite high school. Forty-eight of the fifty kids he’d graduated with had been there. And many from Michelle’s class, two years behind his, had attended, as well.

“A bunch of us got drunk and my date threw up on the porch steps,” Josh continued, sparing himself nothing—telling her something she already knew. “Thank goodness it was the back porch steps and Bart liked us enough to get it cleaned up before anyone found out.”

Bart—his maternal grandfather’s live-in help. A man who’d run the Montford city estate since before Josh had been born.

Josh had escaped besmirching the Montford name that time. But he hadn’t learned his lesson.

Michelle’s head tipped forward, and with his fingers around her chin as he’d been shown, Josh righted her. And rubbed her cheek.

On some level, he told himself, she had to know that he was there. That she was surrounded by tenderness. By anything and everything money could provide.

She had to know that the only thing she’d wanted—his attention—was hers.

“One day when Sam Montford was away from the mansion on business, his wife and baby went out and found a lynch mob waiting for them on the front steps outside their home,” he said, looking out in the distance, to the harbor seventeen stories down and about a mile over from them. Unlike his shame of ten years ago, that long-ago event had taken place on the front porch—not the back.

“The mob killed them both,” he said evenly, hardly feeling anything at all. Just like Michelle. They were alike in that way. Dead to any kind of real living. “Hard to picture Boston’s elite in any kind of a mob, isn’t it?” he said. “But things were more primitive then. People took matters into their own hands. And didn’t stand calmly by when others tried to change the rules by which they lived.”

Michelle’s gaze was turned on him and his breath caught in his throat. Until he remembered that he’d repositioned her head.

“But to kill a woman and an innocent baby...”

If only Michelle would recover, even a little bit, if he could talk to her, find out what she’d been thinking the night she’d nearly drunk herself to death, to know for sure that he’d been the reason she’d consumed such a dangerous level of alcohol the night of their prewedding party.

He hadn’t loved her. Her heart was breaking.

And he’d been too self-absorbed to notice that anything was wrong.

Alcohol poisoning, loss of oxygen and a careless fiancé had all contributed to Michelle’s predicament. He’d been the only one who could have saved her.

“When his wife and baby were killed, Sam Montford left town,” he blurted. “He took up residence with an Indian tribe out west. And later, after marrying the daughter of a missionary he met on the reservation, he founded a little town in the middle of the Arizona desert.”

It had just been in the past couple of years that his mother had developed an interest in genealogy, helped along by the readily available resources on the internet. That research infused her with the need to get to know her distant relatives—relatives she’d heard about but never met. Being able to look them up, learn details of their lives, made them seem real to her, although she hadn’t contacted any of them yet. The two branches of the family had not been in touch since old Sam Montford left Boston. After his sojourn with the Indians, he’d founded Shelter Valley. But he’d never reconnected with the Boston part of his family.

While researching her family tree, Josh’s mom had discovered the names of cousins several times removed, as well as birth dates, marriages and deaths. The need to meet them intensified.

And because Josh had agreed to make his home there, she’d finally given her blessing to his plan to move away—at least for a while—rather than travel for an extended period until the news of Michelle’s tragedy and his subsequent broken engagement died down a bit. “It’s a town that welcomes losers,” he added.

Not quite what his mother had said. She had framed it as a town that would welcome him.

Because she thought he was going to arrive in town a Montford. Or even a Redmond. She thought he’d been in touch with the newfound—and long-estranged—branch of her family. He’d never told her so. It was just what she’d have done—and expected him to do.