“Yes, I do.”
Ruth’s voice softened.
“She called me from a gas station outside Savannah.”
Amber’s mouth opened.
“She said she was sitting in her car and could not decide whether seeing you would make things better or worse.”
Marcus looked at Amber.
“You knew?”
“No.”
Ruth believed that.
Loretta had told Ruth she never approached the venue.
She turned around and drove home.
“She didn’t come inside,” Ruth said.
Amber’s eyes filled anyway.
“She knew?”
“Yes.”
Amber looked away.
For the first time since dinner began, Ruth felt sympathy arrive without having to force it.
Amber had lied.
Cruelly.
Repeatedly.
But beneath the lies sat a younger woman who had been hit by her mother, had lost money she trusted her mother to protect, and had learned that severing a relationship was easier to explain if death did the severing for her.
That did not excuse the years that followed.
It explained the beginning.
Marcus lowered his voice.
“Why did you give her thirty-eight thousand now?”
Amber took a long breath.
“Because she told me why she took the money.”
Ruth’s hands went still.
“What did she say?”
Amber looked at her.
“She said my brother was in trouble.”
Ruth frowned.
“Anthony?”
Amber nodded.
Ruth remembered him.
Older than Amber by six years.
Charismatic.
Restless.
Always borrowing.
He had disappeared from the family’s life before Amber finished high school.
