Jane leapt to her feet. “Well it doesn’t matter if you’re sure or not, Sarah, does it? What matters is that I fucked up and when I realized I’d fucked up, I dealt with it as quickly as I could, and Gerald is safely at home and everyone is fine and I’d like to put the entire unfortunate incident behind me.”

Sarah’s mouth was actually twitching, and when she spoke, her lips were drawn so tightly, they were white. “Don’t you dare use that filthy language around me! Who do you think you’re talking to, Miss Cody? Why don’t you go take a look at yourself, all dirty and disheveled! You disgust me!”

Everything that Sarah had said to her over the past seven years had slid off the surface of Jane’s defenses. She’d chalked all of it up to a sick rivalry for Thomas’s affection. But these words knocked the wind out of her. She felt unsteady on her feet and was afraid she was going to cry. “You’ve never liked me,” she said softly, a reminder to herself, as much as to Sarah, that this wasn’t about whatever she imagined had happened this afternoon. It wasn’t about Dale because she couldn’t know anything about that, whatever she suspected.

“I’m the mother-in-law in the barn. I’m not allowed to have an opinion. But I told my daughter the first time I met you, I called her right up on the phone and I said, ‘That woman is never going to make my Thomas happy.’”

Jane could feel tears rolling down her face, but she wasn’t about to reach up and brush them away. Now Sarah looked like Gerald, like Gerald and Thomas. Sarah and Gerald and Thomas, a trinity. And she was the outsider. She’d always been the outsider and maybe that was why she’d started up this ridiculous affair with Dale, because she wanted to feel like she belonged somewhere. “Thomas has been happy,” she said. Her voice was weak, as if she were the old woman. “He’s been happy with me, and he’s been happy with Gerald, and he loves this house. That might be hard for you to accept, but it’s true.”

It was true. It was undeniably true. She had made Thomas happy. She’d made him forget the woman who’d left him, and she’d given him a son whom he adored. She had made a home for him. She’d even taken in Sarah, made room for her nemesis in her own household. What more did she want, blood?