Ever After Read online

  “So? You got Hedricks’s card.”

  She was still standing in front of him and she turned the card over. Handwritten on the back was an address and a phone number.

  It took him a moment to realize what they were. The address was of the corporate apartment, the one used by out-of-town clients. He didn’t recognize the number.

  “If you call it, you’ll find that it’s your boss’s private cell number.”

  “How did you get this?”

  Shelly sat back down on the couch, looked at the candle, and didn’t answer him.

  But Braden had a lawyer’s brain and he figured it out. He’d seen the way Hedricks looked at Shelly when she was introduced. At the time, he’d felt nothing but pride. Later, the man had sent Braden away to do work and that’s when he must have done whatever caused Shelly to lose a button.

  “How did you get away?” Braden asked softly.

  “I told him no in a way that let him know I meant it,” she said. “I’ve had a lot of experience doing that.”

  All the anger left Braden and he fell back against the chair. “I’m really sorry.”

  “Good,” Shelly said. “Maybe you’ll remember that when you’re trying to get me sent to prison.”

  Braden winced because all day he’d worked to do just that. He’d spent a lot of time thinking about how he could persuade Hallie to press charges against her stepsister. “Why?” he asked.

  “Why did your boss see me as an easy mark? I don’t know.”

  The rain was slashing outside and the darkness of the room with the single candle made them seem isolated, just the two of them.

  “That’s not what I mean,” he said. “For all those years, I saw and heard what went on in the Hartley house, but it was all from one side. I’ve seen you do mean things to Hallie. You buried her toys. I saw you pour grape juice on her new dress. You bent the spokes on her bicycle. Why?”

  When Shelly looked up, there was something deep in her eyes, a kind of emptiness. “No one knows this, but I don’t know how to ride a bicycle. I used to watch you and Hallie riding together and my jealousy nearly devoured me.”

  “What did you have to be jealous of Hallie about?” He was incredulous.

  Shelly snorted in derision. “You want to hear the truth? The real truth?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  She took a moment before speaking. “No one seemed to understand that my mother was obsessed with using my looks to make money. How I looked was everything to her. While Hallie was liked. Loved even.” Shelly got up from the couch and began to pace.

  “I was jealous of Hallie from the second I went to live in her house. She had grandparents who adored her. They cared about her so much they grew food in the backyard. But my mother was dragging me around to auditions for everything she could find and I was lucky if I got a candy bar for dinner.”

  She stopped to glare at Braden, who was sitting there listening intently.

  “Mom didn’t bulldoze their garden to put in a swimming pool. She did it because she knew it would make the grandparents so angry that they’d leave. They were beginning to say things like ‘Oh, Ruby, let the child stay home. I made a nice butternut squash soup.’ I wanted to stay home. I was hoping that maybe they’d start liking me as well as Hallie.

  “Mom saw it all, so the garden had to go. And of course when the grandparents left, they wanted to take their beloved Hallie with them, but Mom said no. Hallie was free babysitting.”

  Shelly took a breath. “Yeah, I did rotten things to Hallie. I remember one day Mom was yelling at me because I couldn’t memorize lines from a Shakespeare play. Hallie was on her computer with her grandparents in Florida. They kept saying how they loved her and missed her and couldn’t wait to see her again. That night I went into Hallie’s room and poured Diet Coke on her keyboard.”

  Braden was watching her with interest.

  Shelly took a breath, her hands in fists at her side. “Then Mom and Dad died when I was still a minor. After that, I was at Perfect Hallie’s mercy. She quit college and took on lots of jobs so I wouldn’t be put in a foster home. All I heard was what a martyr Hallie was. While I was reviled. I was the one who’d caused poor, dear, sweet, lovable Hallie to have to give up her career.

  “So, yeah, I acted out. Between no longer being under my mother’s thumb and having to live with Saint Hallie, I went wild. I admit it.

  “The day after I graduated from high school, I told Hallie what I thought of her. I left with some no-good dirtbag just to make her angry. I went to L.A. and tried to get jobs in movies, but I wasn’t any good.”

  “So you returned home,” Braden said.

  “Yeah, I did, and people rushed to tell me every wonderful thing Hallie had done, then they asked me what I had achieved. And the answer to that was a big fat nothing.”

  She paused for a moment. “And then one night I was watching TV and Hallie was, of course, at work, and an express envelope was delivered. I put it on a chair and it fell down the side and I forgot about it. A couple of days later, when I saw the corner of it sticking up, I panicked. I thought Hallie would throw me out on the street. I only opened it to see how much trouble I’d be in for not giving it to her right away.”

  Shelly took a few breaths to calm herself down. “When I read that she’d inherited a house from a guy she’d never even met, I went crazy with anger. It was all so deeply unfair. Why did she get everything good in life?!

  “I didn’t think about what I did. I wrote Jared that I was Hallie and I had lots of degrees and I would gladly accept the house. It threw me when he told me some rich guy wanted me to do physical therapy on his son, but what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t back down, so I agreed to take him on as a client. Hallie’s such a do-gooder, I figured that once I was there I could get her to write me out a plan for how to work on the guy.

  “Most of all, I saw the whole thing as my once-in-a-lifetime chance to take another path. Just for a while I’d pretend to be Hallie, a person who never screwed up, who never got weak-kneed at the sight of a guy in black leather sitting on a big Harley. I’d have a highly respected career—and I’d be liked. Loved. Just like Hallie is.

  “But it all backfired and I may be sent to prison. Yet again, Hallie is the good one and I’m bad. But then she probably won’t prosecute me even after I tried to steal an entire house from her! What does it take to knock her off that holy cloud she lives on?!”

  Braden was staring at her. He’d never heard this many words from Shelly—and her anger had taken away his. “I think we should ignore the rain and get out of here.”

  “All right,” she said.

  When Braden tried the doorknob, it turned easily and outside the rain had stopped. He led the way to his car across grass that was quite dry and opened the door for Shelly. When he got in, he paused for a moment to look at her. Even though he’d known her since she was a kid, he was feeling that he didn’t know her at all. “Mind if we get carryout and go back to the house where I’ve been staying? I think we should talk more. All right?”

  “I’d like that,” Shelly said and smiled at him.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Hallie kept looking at Jamie as she worked on his knee. He was lying on the massage table and staring up at the arbor. Neither of them was speaking.

  But then last night they’d done a lot of talking. They’d ended up buying food at Bartlett’s, then driving back to the chapel. It was a quiet place and that’s what they needed.

  The building was beautiful in the fading light. They walked past it to sit on the sand by the water.

  Hallie was still feeling the effects of her confrontation with Shelly and she didn’t know if she was happy or sad about it. What happened now?

  Jamie sat down with his braced leg stretched out and he took care of the food while Hallie began to talk. He wanted to hear her side of her life. He didn’t tell her what he and Braden had spoken about.

  Hallie’s side of the story was softer than Braden’