“And you knew this all along?” Pain edged every word she uttered.
“Yes.” The single word made her shudder. He started to reach for her, but his hand stopped halfway, clearly sensing his touch would not be welcome. “It wasn’t my choice to keep you in the dark. Not once I got to know you, once I understood that you hadn’t been deliberately staying away.”
“Deliberately? What are you talking about?”
“We always thought you knew she was still alive.”
“But I told you the truth ages ago.”
“I know that, and from that time forward I begged Lorenzo to let you see her—maybe not visit her, but at least see her—but he was adamant.” Finn dropped his head again.
“Why not let me visit her?”
“You have to understand, Tamsyn. After my father died, my mother couldn’t cope with what she saw as her failure to be a good farm wife, to be a good mother. I wasn’t allowed to see her for months, but when I did I was a reminder of all that she’d failed at. After my visit, she was so ashamed of herself that she stopped eating, stopped getting out of bed—until eventually she stopped living.
“I did that to her. I know what it feels like to be the catalyst for something so awful it was beyond my comprehension at the time. Seeing you? Well, if Ellen had recognized you, given how traumatic her departure from Australia was—leaving you and Ethan behind—and how it’s colored her entire life since, who knows what would have happened? If she had recognized you it might have only caused her more pain, more guilt, more regret. It could have driven her to her death sooner.
“I didn’t want you to go through what I went through. I didn’t want you to feel the same guilt, to have to live with that all your life.”
Tamsyn pushed up from the chair and moved over to the bottle of brandy on the bureau against the opposite wall. She sloshed another generous measure into the glass and sipped it slowly before responding.
“So that’s why you didn’t want her to see me. But you never told me that, never explained. You just kept me from being able to see her. That wasn’t your decision to make.”
“No, it wasn’t. The decision to keep you away from Ellen was Lorenzo’s. Mine was in agreeing with him for, I believed, all the right reasons. Believe me, Tamsyn, you wouldn’t have wanted to remember Ellen the way she was before she died. She wouldn’t have wanted you to see her like that.”
“I’ll never know now, will I? And you’ll have to forgive me,” she said, sarcasm beginning to color her voice an unpleasant shade, “if I find it difficult to believe you when you say you did any of this for me. From day one you lied to me. Tell me, was our affair a deliberate choice on your part? Did you set out to seduce me to distract me from finding her? Was everything we did together, everything we shared, all based on a lie?”
Finn locked gazes with her and she saw the damning truth reflected back at her.
“In the beginning, yes. But not later, Tamsyn. Definitely not later.”
It didn’t matter to her now. His intent from the outset was clear. The lies aside, the hurt aside, he’d just confirmed to her that she was worth nothing—just as her father had done, just as Trent had done. Without another word, she carefully placed her glass back on the bureau, picked up her handbag and walked out.
Twenty-Two
“You love her, don’t you?”
Finn shot a look of surprise at Alexis, pausing in his task of handling the details to bring Ellen’s body home to rest. He couldn’t lie to her, not this girl who’d grown into a beautiful young woman—one he regarded as a sister.
“Yes,” he answered simply, then folded the papers they’d completed and pushed them back into an envelope before handing the envelope to her to return to the undertaker.
“Then what are you still doing here?”
“What?”
“Go after her. I can cope with this, Finn. We’ve been expecting it a long time. I know Papa is beside himself with grief—despite the evidence in front of him he couldn’t let her go, couldn’t believe that one day she wouldn’t get well again. I did my grieving for the mother we both remember a long time ago. I’m sad now, but I know she’s finally at rest. It’s been a long time coming. Too long.”
Finn’s throat choked up. She was right, on all counts. She didn’t need his help for this. And he had to get back to Tamsyn. He hadn’t had the heart to try to stop her when she’d left him today. He knew he’d done a number on her—had betrayed the fragile trust he’d painstakingly rebuilt on the backbone of a very shaky start. But he owed it to her to go after her. To apologize, to convince her—