Chapter 71: Buried Secret

Marianne sighed. "What I am about to tell you cannot leave this room."

Dorian immediately shook his head. "I cannot make that promise."

"You have to."

"I don’t make promises before I know what I’m promising."

"If you truly care about Naomi, you have to."

"Alright," Dorian said. "I promise."

The guarded woman who had been arguing with him disappeared a little. In her place was someone tired.

"My husband was a son of a bitch," she began. "A man with anger issues who loved me. Trust me, my husband loved me just not the conventional way. And I loved him, totally, selflessly. So I forgave him. Over and over again. He would apologize. Promise it would never happen again. He’d become the sweetest man in the world for a while, and then something would set him off."

Dorian knew the pattern. Anyone who had worked criminal law long enough knew the pattern. "I read the case file. I know about the abuse, which is why I was surprised this wasn’t categorized under self-defense."

"That was because I refused to admit to the abuse after I was arrested. I made my lawyer’s life difficult. I denied everything that would have helped me."

He remembered reading the file. A battered woman suddenly denying years of abuse after allegedly killing the man hurting her. He had assumed shame.

Now he looked at Marianne’s face and finally saw the missing piece. His stomach dropped.

"Because you didn’t kill your husband."

Marianne smiled faintly. "I see why they pay you the big bucks."

"Oh my God..."

Everything he had read rearranged itself. She had been protecting someone. Dorian already knew who.

"Naomi."

Marianne’s eyes filled. He dragged a hand over his face. Curiosity had officially killed the cat.

"Has she been living with that her whole life?"

Marianne swallowed. "She doesn’t remember. I had to drug her that night. It was like she was in a daze. You should have seen her. She was hysterical. She kept mumbling and mumbling, talking incoherently. She couldn’t stop shaking and talking."

Every image he had of Naomi collided with the one Marianne was describing. Talking whenever she got nervous.

Rambling when uncomfortable.

Now he understood there was something much darker underneath it.

"She was just protecting me." Marianne blinked rapidly, fighting tears. "She was a child. She shouldn’t have had to protect me from anything."

He genuinely didn’t know what to say. Marianne’s mouth trembled.

"We’d finally done it. We’d ruined our own daughter."

"I really put my foot in it this time," Dorian groaned. He leaned back in the chair and dragged both hands over his face.

This was exactly why Adrian had told him to turn the damn car around. He had been thirty minutes away from Bedford Hills, with absolutely no business coming here, and somehow curiosity had convinced him that a quick conversation with Naomi’s supposedly dead mother would be harmless.

Now he knew Naomi had shot her father. Dorian had officially investigated himself into a nightmare.

"You are right about one thing," she said eventually. "She deserves all the happiness she can get because we never gave her any." Marianne’s gaze dropped to the table. "And I cannot let her live the rest of her life with that dark cloud hanging over her head."

"So you choose to stay in here?" he asked. "And let her keep believing you died?"

"Yes."

"That makes absolutely no sense. You don’t even know whether she remembers."

"I pray every day that she doesn’t."

He leaned forward. "And if she does?"

"Then I hope she believes it was a nightmare. You chose to know this," Marianne said. "So the burden to keep this is on you too."

"Well, fuck me. I have to tell her. I have to."

"You promised."

"Granted, she will chop my head off for even coming here after expressly telling me to stay out of her business, but hell..." He stood, took two steps away, then came back because there was nowhere useful to pace. "I can’t keep this. How am I supposed to look at her and pretend I don’t know this?"

"You do exactly that."

"Oh, excellent. Very helpful."

"She doesn’t need to know."

"You don’t get to decide that."

"I’m her mother."

"her supposedly dead mother!"

Marianne gave him a warning look. Dorian dropped back into his chair.

"Sorry, but this is insane." He imagined walking into the townhouse that evening.

Knowing what he knew now. How the hell was he supposed to carry that without looking at her differently?

"You say you didn’t know her before you got married."

Dorian frowned at the abrupt change in subject. "No, I didn’t. What does that have to do with this?"

"How long have you been living together?"

He stared at her suspiciously. "Going on a month."

"A month?"

"Approximately."

"Isn’t that too short a time to already be in love with her?"

"What?! I’m not in love with Naomi. I care about her. Like I said—"

"You are a lawyer, Heathcliffe. You are supposed to see things other people miss. Things people reveal without realizing they’ve revealed them."

"What exactly is your point?"

"My point is, how can you miss that?"

"I didn’t miss anything. You are the one conjuring things."

"Now who is defensive?"

"I am not defending anything!" Dorian snapped.

Of course he cared about Naomi. That didn’t mean love. People could care about one another without being in love.

They had been living together for less than a month. He’d lived in the same house for years with women and didn’t fall in love with them.

"Why wont you admit how you feel?"

"I feel nothing!" Dorian yelled this time. "I feel nothing because I refuse to. I came here to see you so I could know what I am dealing with. I did not come here so you could psychoanalyze me."

Marianne looked almost amused. "You should have no problem keeping this to yourself then."

He slowly pointed at her. "Oh, I walked into that one, didn’t I? You..." He shook his head. "You are a sly woman."