The Sister-in-Law: An absolutely gripping summer thriller for 2021, Pamela Crane [reading eggs books .txt] 📗

What sin could a throw-pillow-loving, gluten-free homemaker possibly have committed that she couldn’t come back from? I wanted to Heimlich the details out of her, but her mouth was clamped shut. Conversation closed.

‘Did you ever confront the woman he was cheating with?’

‘No, I was too shaken up at the time, and honestly, if I ever did meet her again I’d probably kill her. So it’s for the best I never got the chance.’ She pushed her chair out and stood, balling up the used tissues and grabbing the neck of the now empty wine bottle.

‘I had no idea you had been through so much. And then, after all that, losing your husband …’

‘I lost him a year ago, Candace. I had been trying to save a marriage that was already dead. When I found out he was at that hotel with another woman – when I really knew it – I couldn’t bear to see Ben or my kids or my mother or Lane. I was humiliated and broken. I spent the rest of that night crying in my car wondering why I had lost him. Wondering what I could have done to prevent him from cheating. You know what conclusion I came to? Nothing. I couldn’t have done a damn thing differently.’

‘And that’s on him, not on you. You didn’t force him to cheat.’

‘No, but I pushed him away. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I made his life a living hell, just as he did to me.’ She shrugged, walking toward the kitchen. ‘In that way I suppose we were perfect for each other.’

I didn’t know what to say, how to console her.

She paused, her back toward me. ‘I’m sorry I’m so protective of Lane.’ When she turned to face me, her cheeks were wet with tears.

‘I understand that.’

‘And I know it’s not right of me. I judged you wrongly from the moment I met you, and I’m sorry. I can’t seem to let my brother go, and I don’t know why.’ The tears came fluidly now, and I rushed to her side.

‘Hey, I get it, okay? You don’t need to apologize anymore. And you don’t need to cry over it.’ Emotions made me uncomfortable. Maybe it was because my father never allowed me to have them.

‘It’s just … I love him more than I love myself,’ she sniffled, ‘and I’ll do whatever it takes to make him happy. But I’m sad over what that has turned me into.’

As Harper tossed the bottle in the recycling bin, I returned to the dining room to pick up the paper she had left on the table, not meaning to read it as I carried it to the kitchen. I paused in the doorway, my eyes glued to the letters and words in front of me. A last message from Ben to Harper:

My darling Harper,

You saw this coming, didn’t you? You knew one day you’d walk into our home and find me like this, taken by my own hand. You had to, after all the suffering. All the secrets. All the pain …

And I wondered why the police hadn’t seen this yet.

Chapter 29

Harper

Now that I was starting to sober up, I could feel the regret. Why on earth did I open up to Candace? God only knew what she thought of me after discovering that my husband had cheated on me, so I had stalked him, and now he was conveniently dead. I might as well have confessed to murder.

It was too late to take it all back, or plead drunken rambling. Note to self: Never drink a whole bottle of wine alone. In my defense, the alcohol had done most of the talking, and some of the conversational details were a little vague. I wasn’t one hundred percent sure about what I had said or left unsaid, but as snippets of the conversation pieced together in my head, the big picture was concerning. I had said too much.

I checked the time. Candace was down for her afternoon nap, and Lane was working at the hospital until dinnertime. I still had a couple hours before the kids were due home from school, so I grabbed my keys and headed to the car. I couldn’t stand another minute in this house. I stood beside the car, aiming my key fob at the moving target as the world tilted back and forth. Damn, maybe I wasn’t as sober as I thought. My first attempt at unlocking the car failed as I hit the lock button on my fob, then the alarm.

‘Come. On!’

As the alarm blasted throughout the neighborhood, I punched every button on the fob until it shut off. In the haze of slippery thoughts I knew this was a bad decision. A terrible decision to drive. Don’t drink and drive. I’d heard the slogan repeatedly since I was a teenager. But right now, in this moment, I didn’t care about anything, because chances were high I was going to be arrested soon anyway. Might as well go out with a bang.

It took four tries for me to properly insert the key into the ignition. Then two tries to successfully back out of the driveway. It took so much focus I strained my eyes, igniting a headache. The stretch of street before me was wobbly and blurred, so I leaned forward in my seat, nearly pressing my face to the windshield. As I turned onto the main street, a police cruiser pulled up behind me at the stoplight.

‘Crap!’ I shouted to the dead air. How long had he been following me?

Concentrate, I reminded myself. Just drive normally. Except that the street was swimming and swaying and making it hard to drive normally. Turn right. Blinker on. Green light. Slowly hit the gas. It was like being sixteen, learning how to drive for the first time, with my mother screaming directions at me from the passenger seat: