Marissa’s eyes shot to JoEllen.
“I know it wasn’t true, and I shouldn’t have said the things I said to you.” She looked at Cody. “And I’m sorry for ever breaking your heart.”
“Lou, it’s fine. We’re past this.”
“But we aren’t.” She waved a hand around the room. “Look at us. Look how broken we still are.” She choked on a sob. “I wanted us all back together because somehow I thought that meant I didn’t have anything to be sorry for. Somehow if you would just be friends again, if we could all put things back to the way we were, that made all of my choices okay. Maggie wanted us put back together too, but she wanted it for the right reasons. See, she had a secret. She never held a grudge. She forgave quickly and completely. She said she didn’t want bitterness taking up space in her heart when she had so much love to give.” Louisa scoffed softly. “I was so naive.”
There was a long pause—a heart-wrenching silence in which nobody said a word, nobody shifted in their seat, nobody even seemed to breathe.
Louisa wished she could take it all back. It was futile—every attempt she’d made so far to repair what was broken had ended in disaster. Why would Maggie’s death change that?
She stood. “I need to get some air.” She was walking toward the door, anxious to be alone with her thoughts, when she heard her father clear his throat from behind her.
“Louisa.” His tone was commanding—always—but now it seemed filled with something other than control. It was filled with regret.
Was this when Warren Chambers finally came clean? Was this where he confessed to an affair with his best friend’s wife, who also happened to be the former best friend of his own wife? Louisa froze in place.
“Wait a minute.”
She turned and found her father standing. He wore a pair of khakis and a light-blue button-down, sleeves rolled to the elbows. He was tan and handsome, and she wanted to remember him in this moment, the moment before he broke everyone’s hearts. Because she had a feeling that after what he was about to say, she’d never look at him the same way again.
“Warren?” JoEllen gave his hand a tug, and he turned to her, tears pooling in his eyes.
“I’m sorry, Joey,” he said.
JoEllen’s face fell as if she knew what was coming—as if he were about to speak aloud her greatest fear, humiliating her in one single sentence.
“Don’t,” she said, her voice pleading.
He shook his head, then looked at Marissa. “I knew the moment I saw you today that it was time to stop running.”
Louisa’s heart clenched as if it had been slipped inside a vise that tightened a little more with every second that ticked by.
“Warren, please.” Louisa’s mother was crying, a horrifying desperation clear in her voice.
Louisa dared a glance at Cody, who looked on with a mix of confusion and fear. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe the truth would only make things worse.
“Dad—”
He held up a hand to silence her. “I’ve been living with this for over a decade, kitten. It’s time to get it out on the table.”
What if she didn’t want it on the table? What if she wanted to stuff it away in a cupboard? To make it disappear? Had she made yet another mistake with her outburst?
She scanned the room.
No. The truth was the only thing with the power to repair this brokenness. That was obvious to her now. It was also obvious that the truth was going to hurt.
She forced herself to look at her father, who’d paced the width of the waiting room twice and now stood in the empty space at the center of the chairs. HGTV hummed quietly in the background, and the sound of her mom’s crying was the only other noise in the room. Louisa glanced at Marissa, who, she realized, seemed as confused by her father’s behavior as everyone else.
“It was my fault,” her father whispered.
Again, nobody spoke.
She wanted to rush to Cody, to shield him from whatever it was her father was about to say—but as quickly as the thought entered her mind, she wondered who was going to shield her. This could be painful for all of them.
“What was your fault?” Cody finally asked.
Her father wouldn’t look at him. “Everything.”
Louisa felt her forehead pull into a deep frown. “What do you mean?”
Slowly her dad dragged his gaze from the floor to Marissa. “It was my fault you lost everything.”
What? It was his fault they had an affair? It was his fault he stole his best friend’s wife? That’s what he was supposed to say.
“When you came to me that day to ask me for money—”
“You said no,” Marissa interrupted. “You said you wouldn’t help.”
“I said I couldn’t help.” Her father’s eyes drew downward with the kind of regret that drained life from a person.
“I don’t understand,” Marissa said.
“Warren, what are you saying?” Even Louisa’s mom seemed confused.
Her father raked his hands over his thinning hair, looking exhausted by the thought of continuing.
Cody stood. “The money was for you.”
Her father spun toward him, panic-stricken.
“What do you mean?” Marissa stood now.
Louisa’s father held out his hands. “Let me explain.”
“Dad?”
“You lost the money playing poker.” Cody sounded like a person solving a puzzle—a puzzle that Louisa did not have all the pieces for.
“What are you talking about?” She turned to her father. “Dad, what is he talking about?”
“Ted Kauffmann told me you liked to bet big. You took risks. He said he’d seen you lose it all more than once—apparently that’s what made you so good at your job.”
Louisa didn’t understand. Ted Kauffmann? When had Cody spoken with Ted Kauffmann? And why hadn’t he told her?
“I had a problem,” her father said. “An addiction.”
Now Louisa’s mom was standing, and there was anger on her face. She’d braced herself—they both had—for the confession of an affair. This was something else entirely, something none of them had foreseen.
“I told myself, ‘No risk, no reward.’” Her father sighed. “But then I made some really big mistakes.”
Louisa tried to find sympathy for him, but none came.
“I convinced Maggie to give me a lot of money. I convinced her I was going to make her rich. She never cared about money, but she said she’d love to start a charity for kids or something someday, so she wrote me a check.”
“And you gambled it away?” Louisa couldn’t keep the disgust out of her voice.
Her father didn’t look at her. “And then some.”
“So you went to Dad for help,” Cody said.
“He found out about it,” her father said. “He said he’d bail me out under two conditions—that I got help for my problem and turned Maggie’s accounts over to someone else.”
Louisa looked at Cody, her mind spinning back to the paperwork they’d found among Maggie’s things. Daniel had made sure the old woman was taken care of. He’d even made sure that Louisa’s family was taken care of. Again, he’d made a huge sacrifice—one none of them deserved.