My Wicked Half-Sister (Someone Else's Fairytale #4)

One - A Failed Test

I braced myself for this conversation to get awkward, but Beth was at ease. She'd been the one to reach out to me, showing up at my wedding with a gift and a shy smile. I did wonder, though, what it was like for her, spending time with her father's love child.

Victor nodded. "So the affair was a surprise and he was very suddenly afraid that your father might leave your mother."

"Yeah," said Beth. "And he had a lot to lose if that happened. Mom was always high, so if we'd been left with just her..." She let her voice trail off. "Unless there's anything else here, we should move along to the house we grew up in before sundown."

I was eager to get away from this playground. While I appreciated how thorough Victor was being, we hadn't gained much by visiting this location. Beth's old house made more sense.

*

Twenty minutes later, we were parked across the street from a mansion that, along with hundreds of others, had been built in the '90s housing boom. It had pinkish stucco and a pretentious fountain out front. I couldn't really criticize it for being ostentatious though, not even with its floodlights illuminating its façade. My house dwarfed it.

"So," said Beth from the back seat, where she and Victor were sitting. "Chris grew up as a sheltered prince. He was pretty oblivious to all of my parents' marital problems."

"Would you mind sharing those?" Victor asked. His hand, gripping a stylus, was poised above his tablet.

"Sure. My parents got married after Chris happened—Dad's always had issues with contraception. He was finishing dental school, and Mom was an undergraduate who didn't finish her degree."

I knew very little about my biological father, despite the fact that my mother had been the other woman in his marriage for ten years.

"Their marriage was about as successful as you'd expect for two people who felt like they had to be married," said Beth. "Our dad always put a lot of pressure on himself to make a lot of money. Or at least look like he made a lot of money. My mother loves her shopping trips, and when our dad was with Chloe's mom, my mom always tried to outdo her in getting expensive gifts from our dad."

A twinge of guilt made me squirm, but it was only a twinge. After all, I had been a bystander to these issues.

"Chris didn't pick up on any of that. The constant screaming fights, our mom always being doped up on Valium, and her repeated threats to divorce our dad... Somehow that all went over his head."

"But Chloe's existence finally clued him in?" asked Victor.

"Yeah. He found out about her parentage through one of our parents' fights."

"Oh, really?" I twisted around as best I could in my seat to look her in the eye.

There was a twinkle in her eye. This conversation didn't seem to upset her at all. "Yeah. My mom was yelling at Dad about how she didn't want your mom to bring you to work anymore, since it was pretty obvious who your father was."

My mother had started out as Dr. Winters's high school work-study intern and, after getting pregnant by him at seventeen, stayed on to work as his secretary. I'd often wondered whether she had brought me to work because she'd really had to or because she was passive-aggressive.

Victor was jotting more notes down. "Okay, so Chloe's parentage was a major bombshell that blew up all of a sudden... But murder of a child? I know you say it's like the boyfriend-killing-the-girlfriend's-kid dynamic, but your brother doesn't seem to have the history of abuse that sets a guy up for that kind of violence. Child murder by a non-parent or step-parent is rare, you know?"