He quickly shakes his head. “No, June. My mother didn’t go into any details about what actually happened. Just that they knew the truth, whatever that was. Your mom apparently had a gun and said she’d kill them both before she’d be blackmailed. That it would be for the best anyway, since they knew too much. That she could call it self-defense. My mother was mostly afraid of me being left as an orphan, so she tried to backtrack, apologize, and say they wouldn’t do it, they’d keep the secrets, but your mother didn’t believe them anymore. She thought West had turned on her. My mother apparently became desperate, sure April was going to kill them both. So she lunged at April and got the gun away somehow. She knew, though, that if she hurt April, then both she and my father would go to jail, and again I’d be left on my own.” He pauses to take another drink of water.

“This sounds like some kind of bad movie,” I can’t help but interject.

“And I’m not even done yet,” he says. “That night that my mother thought I was a priest, she told me that she shot and killed my father. Thinking it was her only way out alive or free from jail time. She said that she and April buried him on Avril Island.”

“My god, Ezra, that’s crazy. How did you not tell me this?”

“My mother’s thinking was that if both she and April had secrets, then neither of them would betray the other. They made a deal that April would leave and never come back and my mother would protect the secrets of Avril Island. She said she did it all for her boy. So that I wouldn’t lose her as my mother. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to believe it. I convinced myself that it was just dementia talking, but you found his body, just like she said.”

We both sit in silence as this new truth sinks in. My head is throbbing with the realization that my mother and Willa, two women who were enemies, ended up bound together in their lies and crimes. My mother spent her life running from here and Willa spent hers slowly going mad because of what they’d done. The night it happened must have been when my mother asked Suzanne Swann to lie to the police, just in case West’s death came back on her somehow. Unfortunately, it all makes sense now.

Ezra gets up from the couch and goes over to a cabinet. He takes out a bottle of bourbon and pours us both some. I gratefully take the glass when he hands it to me. It’s not even noon yet, but the things we’re dealing with are beyond the parameters of time.