A second ticked by, then another.
“That’s it?” I asked, and gave him a little smile I hoped looked contrite.
“Congratulations,” he said, and I could be wrong, but he sounded sincere. “That’s a good sum of money. Enough to start over.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry about that.”
He shrugged. “I suppose you’re going back to the city?”
“No, actually. I figured I’d stay here. For a while. For Laura’s last months, you know?”
“Yeah, I’m so sorry to hear that.”
I remained silent for a few more moments that felt very long.
“Steph, do you think it’s true?” he asked out of the blue.
“What’s true?”
“What Michelle said. That my whole family is cursed.”
I forced a little laugh. “Of course not. There’s no such thing as curses. And honestly, Frank may be a piece of work, but you seem just fine to me.”
Luc winced. I felt bad for saying that thing about his father. “My whole life is a mess, though,” he said. “It’s totally fucked.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It is. Cath and I are getting a divorce.” He held up his hand. “Please, spare me the I-told-you-so. I’ve had more than enough time to think about it and to blame myself.”
“It’s a divorce, Luc. It’s not the end of the world, not like it’s the 1960s or something. Besides, Cath is a psycho, so if anything, it’s a step in the right direction.”
His attempt at a smile looked pained. “Yeah, well, we had a huge fight, and she admitted that she put GHB in my drink. On prom night,” he added. As if that was necessary.
I took a few moments to let the revelation sink in. The hot day felt chillier somehow.
“So, in sum, the whole thing was based on lies from start to finish,” he said with a grimace. “Isn’t that fun?”
“Luc,” I started to say.
“Nah. You know why I’d started dating her after you left in the first place? Not because I liked her. I never liked her. But she said she was going to press charges against you, and for a while there, she was really going to do it. I had to talk her out of it. What it took was getting her into bed.” He shrugged. “I never heard a peep from you after you left. I figured it must mean you were happy in your new life. I didn’t want her to ruin it for you.”
After that, he got into his truck and drove away. I got into the Honda to wait for Laura. By the time she finally got back, I’d almost had time to dry my tears.
It took a few more weeks to receive the inheritance in question, which amounted to a heap of documents we had to sign at the same notary’s office.
Just as we were about to leave, there turned out to be something else. Something, the notary said, intended for me specifically.
The notary handed me a thick A4 envelope, blank except for a sticker with my name printed on it in all caps: STEPHANIE O’MALLEY. It also had one of those wax seals on it. I waited until we got home to break the seal and open the envelope.
Out came a neat stack of densely printed pages.
The moment I read the first sentence, dread prickled at the back of my neck. I knew I had to forget about everything else and keep reading until I read all of it.
I sat down in the same old kitchen chair in which I’d faced Frank a couple of months ago and continued reading.
PIERRE BERGMANN: THE CONFESSION
The winter of 1969 had been a cold and snowy one for Marly. Heaps of snow all but buried the town. Come spring, the snowmelt ran into the river, causing it to overflow from its banks.
No one knew anything about things like global warming back then, at least not in Marly, and even those who did know didn’t think about it. No one really saw this as a sign of things to come. These were things that happened every once in a while, that’s all, like dry spells or storms or other natural disasters. In a farming community, you learn to roll with the punches, and so we all did.
It was just a shame about the cabins.
It seems like it all started going downhill in 1969. But looking back, that spring was many years in the making. It was always meant to happen as it did—it had to be only a matter of time.
Sophie was different when we first met and got married. It was a long time before the rumors reached their peak and she officially became an outcast, long before she started wearing shapeless shifts and stopped brushing her hair and before people called her Fat Sophie, first behind her back and then eventually to her face.
Later, people would say she had dark powers, that she cast some kind of spell or added something to my food that clouded my judgment and made me fall in love with her. I always thought they simply struggled to understand how the son of a wealthy landowner came to marry what they saw as a grimy orphan from the bad side of town. Back then, you couldn’t aspire to transcend such things—they were immutable, they just were, and you couldn’t do a thing about it. So it had to be witchcraft because to admit otherwise would upend the social order as we knew it. Maybe she did have powers. Maybe she did add something to my food. In any event, my infatuation with her felt like a spell, a hypnotic trance, a veil over my eyes. I say that because it went away as suddenly as it arrived, and by then it was too late.
And anyway, I told myself, that’s just how it is. I’d hardly be the only one in town in a loveless marriage, and I still had it better than most. Back then, we still shared the bed, at least occasionally. We had two beautiful sons.
When they were small, Gaetan Fortier and I built the first two cabins. We chose the spot by the river surrounded by trees, so tranquil you hardly knew you were in a small wooded oasis in the middle of farmland. It seemed like a good place to come to in the summer, to sit around a bonfire, to watch the stars through the tree branches. We built the two cabins side by side: the larger one for me and Sophie and the two boys, the smaller one for Fortier and his wife and the child that would surely be on the way any day now.
Other people in town decided to follow in our footsteps, and soon a whole smattering of cabins sprung up in the woods, of varying size and quality. But those bonfire evenings and fishing trips never really materialized, just like that child of the Fortiers who kept not appearing. And for both us and the Fortiers, it was the same story every year: Surely next summer, we’d tell ourselves. We’ll have the time and the motivation and a little more luck. But then the next summer would roll around, and nothing kept happening. It became clear that something was wrong with the Fortiers, with him or with her or with both, and Fortier began to accept the fact that the long-awaited heir was never going to materialize. To think that he used to feel sorry for me, stuck with Fat Sophie, and I felt a grudging envy of him, with his beautiful wife with her wasp waist and fashionable dresses. Now my two sons became a living reminder for both of us of the things we didn’t have. The way Marie looked at the children, it broke your heart.
But what can you do?
