“No, of course not.” Her voice dripped with sarcasm. “Because you loved her, right? Clare, that is, not whoever your fucking piece of side ass was?” She was on a runaway collision with the truth now. She couldn’t even feel the brakes.

“You want to know the truth, Simon? How do I know Clare didn’t kill herself over you? Because she never fucking loved you in the first place. Not the first day she met you, not the second she saw you in that crappy bar in Brooklyn, not the day she moved in with you, not the moment she fucking married you, not even on the day she stood on this goddamn beach and blew her own heart out of her chest. So that’s how I know, for sure, that even if she had been handed an envelope filled with pictures of you fucking Lauren Andrews, it wouldn’t have made one damn bit of difference to her!”

Eileen stood up, grabbed the empty bottle from the sand, pulled her arm back, and flung it as far as she could into the approaching surf before storming through the loose sand to the stairs leading back up the cliff to her sister’s mansion above.

Her bare foot had barely touched the third stair when she felt a tight grip on her forearm. “Eileen!” Simon said. “Stop.”

Still seething, but already realizing it wasn’t Simon she was enraged with but her own husband, she turned and faced him.

“What are you talking about?” he begged her. “Please,” he sobbed. “Please talk to me. I feel like I’m losing my mind. What do you mean—she never loved me?”

Simon stared up at her, waiting for some answers.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said all that. A lot of that was not even about you, or Clare. I’m sorry, Simon.”

“But what you said, about how she felt…what about that?”

She considered lying to him, or rather, allowing him to continue to believe whatever it was he had always believed about her sister and the relationship he had with her. It might have been kinder—except now Simon also believed that it was possible that Clare would ever take her own life because of something he had done. Whatever he had done, no matter how many women Simon slept with—Eileen knew Simon didn’t deserve to lug around the degree of guilt he was so obviously floundering under.

“Let’s go upstairs,” she said, pulling her arm from his desperate grasp. “Let’s talk up at the house.”

“But you know something? You think you know why she did it?” he questioned her as they climbed the stairs together.