Val shook off the memory and said, “I mean . . . it’s almost like Camille was two people. Or . . . something.”

“A split personality?” Slade asked, but she shook her head.

“No, not really. I’ve heard that people have public lives and personal lives and private lives. Everyone sees the public life, the family and close friends are part of the personal life, and then there’s the secret life, the one no one but you knows about. Camille’s secret life, that’s what I’m talking about.”

“Someone knew about it,” Slade pointed out, walking closer to her, touching her on the shoulder in a way that was intimate and caring—a bridge between them.

“Yeah, someone did.” Whoever she was sleeping with surely did, the man Cammie had referred to only as “Beloved.” Whoever the hell he was. Frank O’Toole? Or the unknown guy who had impregnated her.

If only Cammie had confided in her. Told Val about the other lover.

Maybe she thought the kid was fathered by Frank.

Sighing, Val studied her parents’ inscription. Gene and Nadine, names that rhymed. A joke between them. Her father had sworn that if she and Camille hadn’t already been named, he would have called her Valdine and Camille would have been Camdeen. He’d winked as he’d said it, and Val had rolled her eyes.

They’d been good parents. Gene, a welder who worked for the railroad and Nadine a substitute teacher for the public schools, though they’d enrolled their daughters in St. Timothy’s.

“Doesn’t hurt to get a little religion with your ABCs now, does it?” Gene had said, usually over a long-necked bottle of beer in front of the television.

But the two had shared a look, and Val had overheard an argument once. She’d been hurrying down the hall, almost at the head of the stairs, and her parents’ voices slipped through the bedroom door that hadn’t been quite closed.

“You can’t get behind with the tuition!” Nadine had whispered harshly. Tiny and thin to the point of being bony, she was a strong woman whose convictions were matched only by her faith.

“We’re not. It was a screwup. I took care of it.” A dozen years older, Gene Renard was a foot taller than his wife, his hair in gray tufts around a significant bald spot, the smell of tobacco and smoke forever clinging to him.

At her mother’s words, Val had stopped, her hand on the newel post, her gaze riveted to the crack between the door and the jamb. From her vantage point, she saw her mother’s full-length mirror and the reflection of her father stepping out of his dirty work jumpsuit.

She had nearly turned away but couldn’t. “Look, Gene, I promised Mary, okay? Private school. Catholic. So we can’t mess this up.”