Playing With Fire Read Free Page B

photo of him and my mother, taken on the day they brought me home as a newborn. It’s the sole image of my mother that Val allows in her house. She tolerates it only because I appear in it, too.
    I stand to examine the faces in the photo. “I look just like her. I never realized how much.”
    “Yes, you do look like her, and what a beauty she was. Whenever Camilla walked into the room, heads would turn. Your dad got one eyeful, and fell head over heels in love. My poor brother never had a chance.”
    “Did you hate her all that much?”
    “Hate her?” Val thinks about this. “No, I wouldn’t say that. Certainly, not at first. Like everyone else who ever met her, I was completely sucked in by Camilla’s charm. I’ve never met any other woman who had it all, the way she did. Beauty, brains, talent. And oh, what a sense of style.”
    I give a regretful laugh. “
That
I certainly didn’t inherit.”
    “Oh, honey. You inherited the best of both your parents. You got Camilla’s looks and musical talent and you got your dad’s generous heart. You were the best thing that ever happened to Mike. I’m just sorry he had to fall in love with
her
first, before you could come into the world. But hell, everyone else fell in love with her. She had that way of sucking you right into her force field.”
    I think of my daughter and how easily she enchanted Dr. Cherry. At three years old, she already knows how to charm everyone she meets. That’s a gift I never had, but Lily was born with it.
    I set my parents’ photo back on the shelf and turn to Val. “What really happened to my brother?”
    My question makes her stiffen and she looks away; clearly it’s something she doesn’t want to talk about. I’ve always known there was something more to the story, something far darker and more disturbing than I’ve been told, and I’ve avoided pressing the matter. Until now.
    “Val?” I ask.
    “You know what happened,” she says. “I told you as soon as I felt you were old enough to understand.”
    “But you didn’t tell me the details.”
    “Nobody wants to hear the details.”
    “Now I need to.” I glance toward the bedroom where my daughter, my darling daughter, is sleeping. “I need to know if Lily’s anything like her.”
    “Stop, Julia. You are going down the wrong path if you think Lily bears
any
resemblance to Camilla.”
    “All these years, I’ve heard only bits and pieces about what happened to my brother. But I always sensed there was more to the story, things you didn’t want to say.”
    “The whole story won’t make it any easier to understand. Even thirty years later, I still don’t understand why she did it.”
    “What exactly
did
she do?”
    Val considers the question for a moment. “After it happened—when it finally went to court—the psychiatrists called it postpartum depression. That’s what your father believed, too. It’s what he
wanted
to believe, and he was so relieved when they didn’t send her to prison. Fortunately for her, they sent her to that hospital instead.”
    “Where they let her die of appendicitis. That doesn’t sound so fortunate to me.”
    Val is still not looking at me. The silence grows so thick between us that it will turn solid if I don’t cut through it now. “What aren’t you telling me?” I ask quietly.
    “I’m sorry, Julia. You’re right, I haven’t been entirely honest. Not about that, at least.”
    “About what?”
    “How your mother died.”
    “I thought it was a ruptured appendix. That’s what you and Dad always said, that it happened two years after she was sent there.”
    “It
was
two years later, but it wasn’t from a ruptured appendix.” Val sighs. “I didn’t want to tell you this, but you say you want the truth. Your mother died from an ectopic pregnancy.”
    “A
pregnancy
? But she was a prisoner in a mental ward.”
    “Exactly. Camilla never named the father, and we never found out who he was. After she died, when they cleaned