“So you told Evan first?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me,” Madaster ordered, and I realized he didn’t sound just eager. He was greedy. He relished this moment. “Evan first. How did he take it? Give me every detail.”
“He was devastated, of course,” Wes said. “It was just like you said. He was consumed with worry for Anna, frantic about how she would take the news.”
“The fool is in love with her. Maybe even more than she’s in love with him. He thought he could manipulate her for his plan, all while keeping her at a safe distance from me. Maybe Evan even thought he could keep Anna at a distance from himself while he carried out his revenge. But he couldn’t. She caught him, good and hard. And he never guessed the truth. He thinks of himself as a protector and savior of his wife, but he ended up being the one to plunge the knife into her.”
I realized I was fisting my hands so hard, I was digging my nails into my skin. I forced myself to unclench them.
“It was the same with when he was married to Elizabeth,” Madaster continued. “Always the knight in shining armor. He looks down his nose at me, he judges me, but he’s the one. It’s his interfering self-righteousness that is harming his wives. And now he knows it. Now, he’ll have to live with the fact that he’s hurt Anna—maybe irreparably—for his entire worthless life.”
I placed my hand on the door and started to push, but then Madaster said, “Now Anna.” He sounded like a kid fingering his Christmas gifts beneath the tree, savoring that first hedonistic rip of the paper. “How did she take the news that you gave her?”
“How do you think she took it?” Wes sounded angry now. I didn’t understand the part he was playing in all this.
“Just answer the question, you weak, useless addict. I don’t keep your secrets—or keep you supplied with morphine, or cover your gambling debts—in order to hear your worthless opinions.” He used the same tone as when he spoke so dismissively—so cruelly—to Ima. There was a pregnant pause, and I wondered if, unlike his nurse, Wes would stand up to Madaster.
“
Please tell me you didn’t take one look at her and go as spineless and moony-eyed as you used to do with Elizabeth,” Madaster said.
“I told her. You son of a bitch.”
Madaster laughed. “She’s gotten under your skin, hasn’t she? Just like Elizabeth? Well, she’s a Madaster. Many times over.” I heard the pride in his tone, and felt the ripples of revulsion just beneath my skin.
“You sicken me,” Wes said.
“The feeling is mutual,” Madaster boomed, sounding almost jovial. “But where would we be, without each other?”
“Cell mates?”
“We’ll both end up in our graves before that ever happens, me from this damn broken body, and you because your heart has stopped from a self-inflicted overdose of morphine. That or a bullet from my gun. Now stop your sniveling and tell me how Anna reacted when she heard the news.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you, but she didn’t say much at all.”
“She had to say something… react somehow, to news like that.”
“She thanked me for having the testing done and delivering the news.”
“That’s it? After you told her that her biological father was her husband? That is what you told her, isn’t it?”
“Yes, damn it. She seemed to be expecting it. Dreading it, but expecting it,” Wes said, under his breath. “I don’t understand how you knew.”
“How I knew?”
“That she’d leave. I thought your idea was stupid, because surely Evan and Anna would talk once they were together. Surely they’d realize I’d told them two different stories.”
“So she did leave? In a car? By herself?”
“Right after I told her,” Wes said uneasily. “I acted like I was going to my car, but I watched her, from behind some trees. She got into Evan’s car and drove away.”
My hand curled into a fist on the door. I stood there in the silence that followed, unable to breathe until I heard Madaster’s next words.
“It couldn’t have turned out better. I’ll bet that she left him for good,” Madaster said. “She may have Elizabeth’s looks, and maybe her strength, but she’s not like us—Elizabeth and me. Anna led a sheltered, boring little life. Naiveté practically drips off her. You say she had no reaction when you told her that Evan was her father? Impossible. She must have been horrified to the bone. Put into a state of shock. She got into that car and drove away for good, trust me.”
“But how did you know she would leave? What if she’d gone up to their hotel suite and realized I’d told them two separate results?”