Clayton nodded. “Schaefer claimed he would have been there sooner. But you and Rigo took the road up to the house. He had to give both you and Rigo some distance, or risk being caught. The road up to the castle is a long, clear view. If you or Rigo turned, you would have seen him on it, so he had to stay back and wait until both of you were all the way to the top of the bluff. His account of what happened is probably our best account of how long it was between when Kehoe first knocked you unconscious and when he dragged you out to the drop-off. It sounds as if Schaefer almost didn’t make it in time to stop Kehoe.”
She thought of all the times Dylan had warned her about Thad. She shut her eyelids, suddenly feeling very tired.
THE agents left at about seven that night. Maybe it was her pain medication, but she found herself in the strangest state of mind. She wasn’t quite sure if she was half-asleep or awake, but her ruminations had a nightmarish quality. For half an hour, she just lay there, thinking . . . reworking the tapestry of her life.
The thread she worried and picked over the most was Dylan.
Was he feeling regretful that there was a chance she wasn’t Alan Durand’s biological daughter? And if that were true—if she in fact wasn’t Alan’s daughter, only Lynn’s—how did that affect the trust document and Dylan’s powers as CEO of Durand? It wasn’t that she thought he was only interested in her potential power or money. It wasn’t that at all. She loved Dylan. So much. It was just that Lynn’s journals and Kehoe’s confessions would drastically alter how he’d considered his life . . . his preoccupation with finding her. He must be struggling with some major re-envisioning of his past as well.
What if he was re-envisioning his relationship with her?
She felt cut wide open, vulnerable to anxiety and doubt. She thought repeatedly about Sidney Gate’s worries about Dylan’s preoccupation with finding Addie Durand, and how he’d sacrificed his own dreams to lessen the burden of his guilt.
When she heard a light knock at her door, her heart leapt with anxious anticipation.
“Come in,” she called, assuming Dylan had returned. She was eager to see him, despite her dark turn of mind. Or perhaps because of it. Dylan’s presence always had a way of scattering her doubts.
“Thad,” she said when he walked into the room. “I thought—”
“That I was arrested by Jim Sheridan? I was. But it wasn’t a serious charge. I’m out on bail.”
She stared at him, and he stared back. He had a black eye, a bandage on his left temple and a cut, swollen lip.
“Kehoe knocked me out down by the bluff in order to chase you,” he said, touching the bandage briefly.
It’d taken him a second or two to gather himself before he spoke. Alice knew he’d been put off by her appearance.
“That son of a bitch packs a wicked right hook,” Thad continued uneasily.
“Not news to me, unfortunately.” she murmured wryly. “You look horrible, but at least you look better than me.”
He shook his head, clearly speechless over her light handling of the situation of her condition.
“This is the part where you’re supposed to say, ‘You don’t look that bad, Alice.’ Don’t worry. Dylan gave me a mirror. I know I look like something out of The Walking Dead.”
Thad’s eyes shone with emotion. Alice felt a little regretful at her flippancy.
“Fall told me that the doctor thinks you’ll be fine. I just hadn’t expected,” Thad gestured helplessly at her face. “I’m so sorry, Alice.”
“For thinking Kehoe was so ace?” she wondered sarcastically.
“For everything. To think, he did this to you. To think . . . this is what he intended all along.”
“I don’t know if it was all along. When he first contracted your services,” she said with a frown, “he didn’t realize I had any connection to Addie Durand. He was just curious and suspicious because of Dylan’s interest in me. Once he did figure it out, he wanted to do worse than this,” she said, pointing at her face.
Thad sunk into the chair by her bed as if his legs had just given out on him. “I’m the one who ultimately confirmed it for him.”
“Confirmed what?”
“That you were Addie Durand,” Thad said. His stark regret was obvious. “That’s what Sheridan should have arrested me for. I mentioned it to Kehoe before I understood fully what it meant: what I overheard you saying in the hallway the night of the Alumni Dinner about Addie Durand,” he said, his manner that of a penitent man making a painful confession.
“For what it’s worth, Kehoe already suspected I was Addie by that time, anyway. Why else would he plan to get into the castle? When you told him what you heard at the Alumni Dinner, it was probably just a confirmation, and maybe not even the first one for him. Kehoe understood quite a few more things than you did when he started pushing you around his chess board.”
“As his pawn.” Alice didn’t disagree. “He understood how much I’d want to please my dad. So much so that I blindly helped a mad man almost kill the woman I—”
Alice realized she’d flinched, and that’s why he’d abruptly halted. For several seconds, they just stared at each other.
“I know that given everything, you must think I was lying about how I felt about you. But I wasn’t, Alice,” he said gruffly.