She let out a shuddering breath. "I haven't done anything but my best." Picking up her briefcase, she turned stiffly and walked to the door.
"I'm sorry. Christ, Kate." With his lumbering stride, Marty caught up with her. "What a mess, what a disaster." He started huffing when she took the stairs down to the main level. "I couldn't turn them around."
She stopped, ignoring the pain in her stomach, the throbbing in her head. "Do you believe me? Marty, do you believe me?"
She saw the flicker of doubt in his earnest, myopic eyes before he answered. "I know there's an explanation." He touched her gently on the shoulder.
"It's all right." She made herself push through the glass doors on the lobby level, walk outside.
"Kate, if there's anything I can do for you, any way I can help…" He trailed off lamely, standing by the door as she all but ran to her car.
"Nothing," she said to herself. "There's just nothing."
* * * * *
At the last minute she stopped herself from running to Templeton House. To Laura, to Annie, to anyone who would fold her in comforting arms and take her side. She swung her car to the side of the road rather than up the steep, winding drive. She got out and walked to the cliffs.
She could stand alone, she promised herself. She had had shocks, survived tragedies before. She'd lost her parents, and there was nothing more devastating than that.
There had been boys she'd dreamed over in high school who had never dreamed back. She'd gotten over it. Her first lover, in college, had grown bored with her, broken her heart and moved on. She hadn't crumbled.
Once, years before, she had fantasized about finding Seraphina's dowry all alone, of bearing it proudly home to her aunt and uncle. She had learned to live without that triumph.
She was afraid. She was so afraid.
Like father, like daughter. Oh, dear God, would it come out now? Would it all come out? And how much more damning then? What would this do to the people who loved her, who had had such hopes for her?
What was it people said? Blood will tell. Had she done something, made some ridiculous mistake? Christ, how could she think clearly now when her life had been turned upside down and shattered at her feet?
She had to wrap her arms tight around her body against the spring breeze, which now seemed frigid.
She'd committed no crime, she reminded herself. She'd done nothing wrong. All she'd done was lose a job. Just a job.
It had nothing to do with the past, nothing to do with blood, nothing to do with where she had come from.
With a whimper, she eased down onto a rock. Who was she trying to fool? Somehow it had to do with everything. How could it not? She'd lost what she had taught herself to value most next to family. Success and reputation.
Now she was exactly what she'd always been afraid she was. A failure.
How could she face them, any of them, with the fact that she'd been fired, was under suspicion of embezzling? That she had, as she always advised her clients not to, put all of her eggs in one basket, only to see it smashed.
But she would have to face them. She had to tell her family before someone else did. Oh, and someone would. It wouldn't take long. She didn't have the luxury of digging a hole and hiding in it. Everything she was and did was attached to the Templetons.
What would her aunt and uncle think? They would have to see the parallel. If they doubted her… She could stand anything, anything at all except their doubt and disappointment.
She reached in her pocket, chewed viciously on a Tums, and wished for a bottle of aspirin—or some of the handy tranqs Margo had once used. To think she'd once been so disdainful of those little crutches. To think she had once considered Seraphina a fool and a coward for choosing to leap rather than stay and face her loss.
She looked out to sea, then rose and walked closer to the edge. The rocks below were mean. That was what she'd always liked best about them, those jagged, unforgiving spears standing up defiantly to the constant, violent crash of water.
She had to be like the rocks now, she thought. She had to stand and face whatever happened next.
Her father hadn't been strong. He hadn't stood, he hadn't faced it. And now, in some twisted way, she was paying the price.
Byron studied her from the side of the road. He'd seen her car whiz past as he was leaving Josh's house. He wasn't sure what impulse had pushed him to follow her, still wasn't sure what was making him stay.
There was something about the way she looked, standing there at the edge of the cliff, so alone. It made him nervous, and a little annoyed. That vulnerability again, he supposed, a quiet neediness that called to his protective side.
He wouldn't have pegged her as the type to walk the cliffs or stare out to sea.