Lies of Omission by Lori Seiderman
“I was trying to protect you.”
“I was trying to protect the brooches.”
Lies of Omission in The Celtic Brooch Series
Therefore, to one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him it is sin.
(James 4:17)
SPOILER ALERT: This essay covers all books in the series. If you haven’t read all of them, then wait to read this after you finish THE SUNSTONE BROOCH.
In THE SUNSTONE BROOCH, James Cullen Fraser states that in his family “lies of omission are just as bad as lies of commission.”
The members of the MacKlenna Clan are good people but lies pervade their narratives. Lying is not an option for them. They have to lie. They are children of the Keeper and he is anointed to protect the brooches. They must save the world from the illuminati while they wait to receive more and more brooches so they can open the door and receive the knowledge they need. In order to do this, they travel to the past as each new brooch is received and lie over and over to the people they meet there. There is no choice, what are they supposed to say to Thomas Jefferson or Teddy Roosevelt? “Hello, I’m from the twenty-first century and I’d love to discuss philosophy and literature with you?” So, trips to the past are filled with scattered lies of commission, desperate attempts to keep track of the lies, and unbelievable stories and explanations that lead characters from the past to suspicion and awkward questions.
Lying causes emotional and intellectual conflicts within the Clan. Family members resist lying morally. In THE AMBER BROOCH, Olivia Kelly self-righteously exclaims, “We already know our moral code is in the process of shattering…Our integrity is shot to hell. We’re all a bunch of liars and trying to rationalize it is a waste of energy.” (417)
Connor O’Grady, who is in love with her and has just spent three days committing a lie of omission in order to protect her and the brooches, responds, “What would you have us do? Give the stones to the government and be done with them? Sink them in the middle of the ocean? Bury them under the melting icecap? We didn’t ask for this. Kenzie didn’t ask to be dropped into the middle of an air raid or be tortured by the British Secret Service. Charlotte didn’t deserve to be threatened by General Sherman. We were singled out to bear this burden. And if our code of ethics is corrupted because of it, then so be it. I’m sorry I lied to you, Olivia. I’m sorry I had to lie to you.” (417) This kind of interaction is not unusual within the family. It is the lie of omission that hangs like a black cloud over the relationships between the members of the Clan.
Lies of omission regularly emerge when Clan members find that a woman has received a brooch and been whisked away to the past. A team from the MacKlenna Corporation (MacCorp) is put together and three or four people research to discover where the woman has gone. They prepare for the journey, go to the past, and look for her to help her face her challenges and come home.
When they meet her, the lies of omission become necessary. The brooches always have purposes for their recipients and the clan members who have come to rescue them must let the processes play themselves out. So, there is only so much they can tell their new “cousins.”
In THE TOPAZ BROOCH, after weeks of omitting the truth from conversation after conversation, Penny finally learns what MacCorp thinks is the purpose of the brooches when they tell her brooches lead people to their soulmates and that Jean is not her soulmate, but Rick is. She can barely believe it when she receives this news. Sometimes, in these information rich novels, omission is an accident rather than a purposeful lie. Again, in Topaz, the longest of the eleven novels, Penny is blindsided by the knowledge that there is a familial connection between she and Tommy:
“It’s been an honor.” Tommy saluted them.
“We want to hear great things about you. So do good.” Rick returned the salute. “Carry on, soldier.”
As they moved away from Tommy, Penny said, “That was so nice, I think he’ll spend it wisely, don’t you?”
“I just hope it fixes the future.”
“What do you mean?”
Rick’s voice was low and carefully measured. “You don’t know who his descendants are, do you? No one told you.” His lips pressed into a flat, thin line. “I fucked up. I’m sorry. It was my responsibility, and I forgot.”
She focused on his face and his words, and her gut churned. She wasn’t going to like this at all. “You. Forgot. What?”
“Rick threw a glance over his shoulder toward Tommy. “He’s um… He’s your seven-times-great-grandfather.”
She looked at him with blatant disbelief. “My grandfather?”
“Seven-times-great-grandfather.”
“And you forgot?”
He shrugged. “It’s not like we’ve had extra time to chit-chat over coffee.”
“You’re right, Penny. I don’t have an excuse. It fell through the cracks, but it wasn’t intentional.”
“So, you knew all about him before you came back for me?” (499)
Penny and Rick are two characters who get caught up in lies of omission about their personal feelings throughout their story. They are both damaged people, traumatized by war, violence, rape, and loss so recognizing, expressing, and trusting their emotions are great acts of courage for them. Their emotional fear leads them to lies of omission until they are able to build trust in each other and feel safe enough to open their hearts.
Love and trust are also major themes in the first book in the series, THE RUBY BROOCH. Kit MacKlenna takes the ruby and travels back to the Oregon trail in 1852 and tells many lies. But, the foundation of her journey, is one large lie of omission. She is traveling in search of her birth parents but along the way she meets and falls in love with Cullen Montgomery, the man she came to find but neglected to tell that she had traveled to the past to ask for his help. Finally, she admits:
“It’s why I’m here.”
“Who’d ye come to see?”
“The Murrays.”
“I’m sorry they’re dead, lass.”
She hooded her eyes. “I knew they would be.”
“Ye came here to find dead people?” Cullen’s jaw dropped. “Ye knew of me before we met? Why didna ye tell me?”
“Tell you what? That I came back in time to meet you, so you’d take me to South Pass to find a wagon train full of dead people? What would you have done?”
“I might have been able to stop what happened.”
“No, you would’ve gotten yourself killed.” (197)
Kit’s revelation does not hurt Cullen; he understands why she couldn’t tell him why she was there with him and forgives her lie of omission. But there is a much more painful and destructive lie of omission that he must face the day before, committed by his best friend Braham, that he may never be able to forgive.
Cullen, in terrible pain over a rift between he and Kit because of his commitment to another woman, and Braham, leave the wagon train for a night to get away for a while and camp and talk privately. During this discussion, Cullen admits to Braham that Kit is a time traveler from the 21st century looking for her family. He wants her to stay with him:
“If she finds what she’s looking for, will she go back to her century?”
Cullen sat still for an unmeasured time. Finally he said, “I canna stop her.”
“She canna leave.”
He shook his head, sighing. “If I’ve learned one thing about the woman, she can do damn near anything she wants.”
“Ye have to convince her to stay.”
Cullen looked regretful. “Until I settle things with Abigail…”
Braham hung his head. “I’ve got something to tell ye, Cul.”
Cullen stared, holding his cup inches from his mouth, waiting.
“She’s dead.”
“Who’s dead?”
“Abigail”—Braham gulped—“died this past spring. She fell off her horse.” He braced for the punch he expected Cullen to throw. A punch he well deserved.
Cullen jumped to his feet, spilling his whisky. “How do ye know?”
“I got a letter.”
“From whom?”
“There was a telegram from Mr. Phillips with the letter from my father.”
“The letter ye got at Fort Laramie?” Cullen balled his hands into fists and stepped toward Braham. “Ye’ve known since then, and ye didna tell me.” His voice grated past his throat. He punched the air.
“How could ye keep that from me?”
Being hit with a two-handed broadsword wouldn’t have hurt Braham any more than the pain he saw in his friend’s face. “I was wrong.” (185)
At the end of their conflict, the two lawyers philosophize about lies of omission, “Ye shouldna have lied to me, Braham.” He dragged his hands down his face covered with whiskers and lined with sleep.
“I didna lie to ye.”
Cullen pumped his fist at him. “Withholding the truth isna as bad as lying because yer motives werena malicious. Is that it?”
“We dinna need to debate the criminalization of acts of omission.” (185)
Kit also knows what it feels like to be lied to, by omission with good intentions underscoring the lies. Her adoptive father Sean VI kept massive amounts of information from her about her identity, the brooch, her background, the search for her true identity, her adoptive mother’s origins, and all the plans he made for her life without talking to her about them. THE RUBY BROOCH is filled with lies and it takes time to build forgiveness and trust again after the lies are revealed.
In THE RUBY BROOCH, when Braham sees how much his lie of omission has hurt his best friend Cullen, he promises to make it up to him one day, anyway he can. The way he does so, writing a letter to bring Kit back to Cullen, leads him to his Civil War identity Major Michael Abraham “Braham” McCabe in the Sapphire Brooch. The most important lie of omission in THE SAPPHIRE BROOCH is directed at Braham and encompasses the information about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. When Braham comes to the future with Charlotte Mallory with a bullet in his abdomen, she and her brother Jack vow to keep major historical events from him so that he can return to his time without knowledge that can change the future. This proves to be an impossible task though:
Before he reached the door, he stopped. “There’s a newspaper clipping in here dated April 1965. It’s for a memorial service to pray over the hundredth anniversary of the death of Abraham Lin—” Braham stopped reading and glanced up, ashen-faced. “If April 1965 was the one hundredth year,” he rasped, “it means Lincoln died in April of 1865.” Braham’s hands shook so hard the laminated clipping tapped against the book’s cover. “What killed him? This doesn’t say.” His voice was an anguished whisper.
Charlotte’s panic hoarsened her voice. “We can’t tell you.”
Braham pounded his fist on the edge of a table, rattling the lamp and glass candy dish. “What the hell do ye mean, you can’t tell me? Lincoln’s dead, and ye can’t tell me what happened?” He scanned the titles in the bookcase. “Ye’ve got hundreds of books here. One of them will tell me what I want to know.”
Braham grabbed a book from the bookcase. “Abraham Lincoln: The War Years Volume IV by Carl Sandburg. This will tell me.” He glared at Charlotte and continued in a steely voice, “Ye’ve known all along he might be dead by the time I got back. Yet ye never said a word. Why?”
Charlotte had the sensation of losing a patient on the operating table, knowing there was nothing she could do to salvage the situation. “Life is full of uncertainties. None of us knows what the future holds. You can’t come here, soak up what’s happened in the past hundred and fifty years, then take the knowledge back to your time and manipulate history. I won’t be responsible for it happening.”
“Damn it. Ye should have let me die.”
Something in his voice and the way he looked at her made her heart knock against her ribs. “I couldn’t. Lincoln recruited me to save your life.” (103)
Braham has his own lie of omission directed toward Charlotte, an eye for an eye you might say. He knows about time travel in advance of his own trip to the future and does not tell her. He knows where he can get another brooch and does not tell her. He knows how to get back to the past and does not tell her. As we learned in THE RUBY BROOCH, Braham is a master of the lie of omission. Both Charlotte and Braham believe their motives are righteous and feel empowered to enact them. Charlotte brings Braham to the Lincoln Memorial and his emotional reaction to it is a ripping of his heart and mind. Braham risks driving a car, that he doesn’t know how to drive, five hundred miles to reach Elliott Fraser and the ruby brooch so that he can go back and save Abraham Lincoln. He keeps this agenda, another lie of omission, from Elliott, so that Elliott will not stop him from going back to 1865. He simply tells Elliott that he is a spy for Lincoln and has time-sensitive information for him and must return as soon as possible.
There are many minor lies of omission and major and minor lies of commission in THE SAPPHIRE BROOCH. As Cullen asks Braham during Jack’s conspiracy trial, “Are we cheating?” The answer, throughout the novel, is yes, of course, but we must, we are compelled to do so. They are commanded by the power of the brooches to do good in the world and as Connor O’Grady says, “if our code of ethics is corrupted, then, so be it.”
What they learn, in many of the novels, but especially in THE SAPPHIRE BROOCH, is that they can’t change history in major ways. They can make little changes, but they really can’t alter history. So, Braham cannot save Lincoln and he is emotionally and psychologically destroyed by it. His internal destruction is the main reason he must separate from Charlotte. It breaks her heart but she understands he must take time to heal and build a life for himself. She will wait for him, knowing he may never come, but she will love him, raise his son, and belong to him for the rest of her life.
As he lives in the 1800’s and rebuilds his life: lawyer, state Senator, financier, lover, future governor, future president, top five wealthiest men in the country, he always lives within his own lie of omission. He lies to himself, tells himself that he is happy, tells himself that he wants to marry Melissa while maintaining a relationship with his mistress, tells himself that he wants to be governor of California, and on and on. But all that he really wants is to go to Charlotte. He loves her deeply and passionately. He has to fight for her because the only support he has for his plan to go to her is from Kit. Cullen does not support him when he tells him his plan. He has to fight for his acceptance. But, when he goes to her, he escapes his self-imposed lie of omission and finds freedom in her love and in her arms and with his son.
Braham tried to change history but in THE PEARL BROOCH Sophia Orsini changes the Western world because she believes the pearl has joined her and Thomas as soulmates. In THE PEARL BROOCH there are two versions of history. The one based on Sophia’s lie of omission, keeping the fact that she is a time traveler from Thomas, leads to her marriage to him. Sophia and Thomas become one of the most famous couples in history:
“So I really do marry him.” Having confirmation of the marriage was…what? Surprising? Shocking? Exciting? A tingling sensation raced down her spine all the way to her toes and back up again. Mrs. Thomas Jefferson, First Lady Sophia Jefferson. Please welcome the First Lady…
It was a little bit of all three, but mostly exciting. “Why do you think my marriage changed History or will change history?”
“We don’t know whether it did. We only know that if not for your brooch, you wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t play a part in Jefferson’s story.” (509)
Thomas and Sophia changed the United Stated in profound ways. They even prevented the War of 1812, which is ironic since in THE TOPAZ BROOCH, Sophia gets involved in the Battle of New Orleans with Andrew Jackson. Sophia and Thomas accomplish great things politically, socially, and, for Sophia, artistically.
As Matt says to Sophia, “Very little attention is given to his first wife, or even Cosway. But volumes have been written containing your sketches and anecdotes about your love affair and marriage. It’s listed as one of the ten great romances that shaped the world, like Ferdinand and Isabella.”
Sophia’s response to this is, “Being half of a perfect romance isn’t for me.”
Matt says, “As long as you stay here, that’s what you will become.” (511)
Sophia and Matt examine the changes that will be made if Sophia lives her lie of omission and marries Thomas. Sophia decides that all the changes are positive and she will stay and marry him. She will live with her lie of omission.
Sadly, Sophia cannot follow her plan to live her lie. When she and Thomas visit Mallory Plantation on the way to their wedding, her pearl brooch heats up. Sophia panics. She doesn’t want to go back and lose Thomas. But she must go back. When she resists, Mr. MacKlenna, a guardian who should have sent her home in the beginning, insists that she tell Thomas the truth. She knows that without her lie as a shield, all will be lost: He’d never again believe another word she said. Their relationship would never be the same. He would never be the same. He’d look at her with contempt, and it would break her heart.
Once Sophia tells Thomas the truth, he sends her away in a heart-wrenching scene:
“Thomas wiped tears away with the heels of his hands. ‘Sophia, I love you.’ He made a move toward her again, but both Mr. MacKlenna and Mr. Digby held him back. They left her standing alone on the bank of the James River, silhouetted by the moon. Then came deep baritone voices chanting in Gaelic: ‘Chan ann le tim no aite a bbios sinn a’ tombais an’ goal ach’s ann le neart anama.”
Sophia has committed more lies of omission and misused the brooches more than anyone else in the clan. The members of the council have removed her from their group and are displeased with her.
In THE TOPAZ BROOCH: Erik leaned back against the wall, sighing. “Sophia’s gifts are different. She cannot be on the Council. Her grandfather Digby was a Guardian. Through the years, he had to give away three of his brooches, but he held on to one, intending for his granddaughter to take on his responsibility as a Guardian, but he died before he could do it. The brooch was left with his wife to give to Sophia, and when she died, there was no Guardian for the pearl. Sophia could not be both the beneficiary and a Guardian.” (727)
When asked what the Council would have done if Sophia had had a Guardian, Erik said, “We would have sent Sophia home. And a Guardian would not have allowed her to travel five times for pleasure.” (727) Sophia returns to her own time, landing in her studio in Florence, devastated and heart-broken.
Sophia mourns and suffers for weeks and weeks after her loss of Thomas. Kenzie Wallis-Manning suffers for three hours, but she suffers intensely. All I can say is, David is lucky she was already in love with him before he made his long and painful confession. Lies of Omission form the entire narrative of THE EMERALD BROOCH. Kenzie lies, Jack Mallory lies, David McBain lies, all during the week in England the week before D-Day, June 6, 1944. As is usual with the Celtic Brooch series, Kenzie’s lie of omission is hiding the fact that she comes from the future. Jack’s lie of omission is the same as Kenzie’s. But David’s lie of omission is very bad:
“We should have taken them back to the future tonight and ended this. From what Molly said, Kenzie hasn’t mentioned any family members other than a brother stationed in Anzio, of all places. It’s possible her grandfather isn’t even on her radar.”
“Kenzie asked me if I spoke Gaelic and where I was from.”
“I couldn’t lie. She’d see right through me.”
Jack threw up his hands and collapsed into the nearest chair. “Damn. Since she’s lying to everyone she meets, for sure she’d notice if someone lied to her. Is that what you’re saying?” (178)
David’s refusal to tell Kenzie who he really is and where he is from, his lie of omission, almost gets her killed and does get her tortured by the British Secret Service in the Cage:
“Instead of introducing yourself with a bottle of champagne, why didn’t you tell me who you really were?
“I should have.”
She couldn’t bear to look at him and refused to acknowledge the anguish in his expression. “I went through hell when I was captured, and it could have been avoided so easily. Do you know what they did to me?” She pierced him a look as ferocious as her anger “Do you?”
“I saw the bites and the semen,” he said, very quietly. “I was afraid ye’d been raped until the doctor examined ye and said ye weren’t.”
“I was strapped to a table naked. They covered my face with a towel and poured water in my nose until I thought I was going to drown. They did it over and over again, demanding to know who I was. Then they fondled me and sucked and bit my breasts and nipples. They bit me. And I threw up on myself.” (470)
David learns his lesson the hard way and after that whenever clan members go back for a rescue, they tell the new cousin who they are immediately. Things go more smoothly after that.
In THE AMBER BROOCH, Amber Kelly is discovered by her new cousins, the rescue team from the 21st century, Rick, Kenzie, and David. They tell her who they are right away:
Signals? Downshift? Styled hair? Was it possible he was from the future, too? She couldn’t come right out and ask. Instead, she thrust her hands to her hips. “Who are you? Did Daniel Grant send you to harass me?”
“Don’t know him.”
“He’s a Pinkerton agent. I thought you all hung out together, or something.”
He laughed again. “You think I’m a Pinkerton man?”
“Aren’t you? You look like one. You look like a cop.”
“Nope. Just a Marine. Name’s Rick O’Grady.”
“O’Grady? Irish, huh? Why does that name sound familiar?”
“You might have heard your sister mention the name. My brother, Connor, has been working with her real estate agency for about a year.”
“I don’t understand,” she said. “You’re a Marine, not a Pinkerton. You know my sister.” Her voice wobbled. Then she abruptly sat up and glared at him. “Did you travel through a wormhole, too?” (192)
Of course, Amber is relying on lies of omission too. Even as she falls in love with Daniel Grant, there is so much she can’t tell him. She can’t tell him she’s from the 21st century, she can’t tell him about her real education, she won’t tell him or anyone how sick she is, and she can’t answer his endless questions. Many of her lies are lies of commission but she hates to lie. She tries not to lie and resists it in any way she can. She prefers lies of omission because they don’t seem as sinful or hateful to her. She especially hates lying to Daniel:
“Didn’t ye study under Dr. Marsh?”
A chill settled over her, and she pulled the covers around her shoulders. How many lies ago was that? A sense of foreboding screamed at her. “Not exactly. I might have exaggerated my resume for the judge.”
Daniel’s fingers wrapped around the intricately carved bedpost, clenching it until his knuckles stood out like white stones. “I wonder how many other exaggerations I’ll find”—his voice pierced her disclaimer—“when I, as ye say, drill down?” His mouth tightened, flattening into a firm line, and his smoldering gaze locked on her immobile until he turned on his heel. Millie jumped off the bed and followed Daniel as he stormed from the room. The door closed with finality and a protesting creak. (379)
She worries about losing Daniel so she asks Rick to help her:
“…straighten him out if you can. I don’t want him leaving town thinking I lied to him.”
“But you have.”
“Not about anything important.”
“Nothing important? Like you’re from another century isn’t important. Like you’re not one of the country’s top ten mining lawyers. Like you’re not independently wealthy. What’s more important than who you are?”
“My beliefs, values, and ideals that make up the essence of who I am.”
“That’s crap. What I Believe, what I value are more important than my status or wealth or what century I’m from. That’s the person I want Daniel to see.”
“And believe in,” Rick said. “I get that. But when a guy catches a girl in one lie, he knows he’s only scratched the surface.”
She rolled over onto her side. “Thanks for the pep talk, O’Grady. Remind me not to initiate another relationship conversation with you. Turn out the lights on your way out?” (380)
Amber is deeply in love with Daniel and loves his son Noah too but she is drowning in lies of omission and commission and doesn’t know what to do. When she decides to tell him the truth, finally, her heart gives out and Rick has to take her back to the 21st century to Charlotte Mallory in Richmond, Virginia for immediate medical care. Even in the future, Rick has to lie about the mission to rescue Amber, “Rick never thought he’d have to lie about the adventure once he came home. Was there no end to it?” (518)
When Daniel comes to the future to be with Amber, he visits her in the Cardiac Care Unit before her open heart surgery. She tries to apologize for all the lies, “I’m so sorry I lied to you. I wanted to tell you the truth.”
Daniel didn’t want to hear apologies. He wanted to kiss her. Hold her. Love her. Keep her safe. “I don’t care what happened or why. I only care about ye and doing whatever we have to do to get ye well again. I love ye, Amber.” (619)
Daniel absolves Amber of her lies and her heart and soul are free to love him without the burden of the guilt she has felt for so long over her lies of omission and commission.
One of the more complicated novels in the Celtic Brooch series is titled THE THREE BROOCHES. It is complex because it includes all of the characters in the Macklenna clan, both adults and children. Jack sneaks off to San Francisco from the Montgomery Winery where the family has gathered for a reunion in 1881 and meets who he believes to be his soulmate, Carolina Rose Arees.For most of the time that Jack spends with Carolina Rose, he is honest about his feelings and he really only lies when he absolutely has to do so.
Of course, he must commit the lie of omission regarding his origins in the 21st century, as all time travelers must do. He tells a few lies of commission to Carolina Rose and some men who want information about him, but other than that, he is more honest than usual.
Braham, not surprisingly, commits an act of betrayal through a lie of omission, which is common for him as he has done in THE RUBY BROOCH and THE SAPPHIRE BROOCH. He lies to JL and separates her from Kevin without letting her say goodbye even though he has had a chance for a passionate goodbye with Charlotte:
“There’s something I need to tell ye. I should have told ye before we left the winery, but I didn’t think ye’d go with me if ye knew the truth. Since I needed yer help, I kept quiet.”
“Oh, God. I don’t think I want to hear this.” She turned to face him. “If I don’t know what I’m facing, I can’t find solutions. Spit it out.”
“As you know, Charlotte has three very sick patients. I…uh…I told her if there was a life-threatening emergency before we got back, that she was to take—”
“—them home?” JL finished for him. “Everyone? Home? Like, to the future? Without us?” She pointed first to Braham and then to herself. “Tell me that’s not what you’re saying.”
“That’s what I’m saying, but—” (291)
JL reacts very strongly to this betrayal:
She couldn’t believe she’d been tricked into this. The fact that she’d been lied to hurt almost as much as the possibility of being separated from Kevin and stuck in the nineteenth century. If that’s how this family treated each other, she didn’t want any part of it. Then the cooler side of her brain picked up the argument. If the family didn’t love each other so much, they wouldn’t go to this extreme.
“Urggg. You shouldn’t have lied to me.”
“I didn’t lie. I just didn’t give ye all the information.”
“I think that’s called a sin of misdirection, or at least a sin of some kind.”
“Omission. It’s a sin of omission.”
“Whatever. Omission, misdirection, blatant lie, it’s all the same. You tricked me.” (292)
Braham doesn’t show any remorse, though. He tells her she’s a big girl and to get over it. As usual, he is the king of lies of omission. Later though, when Jack wants to keep information about the Confederate Gold from her, Braham refuses. He says that he’s already betrayed JL once and won’t do it again, she’s a good partner. So, once she proves herself to him, he believes she deserves his honesty. Once he trusts her, he feels he can tell her the truth.
Sometimes, lies of omission are about a lack of trust and this concept is important in THE LAST MACKLENNA. Elliott Fraser and Meredith Montgomery, the patriarch and matriarch of the MacKlenna clan, meet and fall in love in this novel. They fall in love with each other fairly quickly but lack trust so deeply that their entire early relationship is based on lies of omission.
Every time Meredith tries to get to know Elliott and asks questions about Kit, Kevin, Elliott’s mother, even Elliott himself, he cuts her off. He won’t tell her anything. He won’t let her in. But she isn’t any different. She waits quite a while until she tells Elliott about her former breast cancer and mastectomy. But she omits the information that she has just been diagnosed with cancer in the other breast and has to have another mastectomy. They both rely on lies of omission and the lies keep them at a distance from each other.
When Meredith finds out she is pregnant and finally tells Elliott about the cancer and also about the baby, the lies of omission fly away and trust emerges, “I won’t leave ye. Ye won’t go through this alone. All I ask is that ye listen to the doctors, trust that I’ll help ye, and believe we can conquer this disease.” (380)
Once they open up to each other and the lies of omission disappear, they are able to make the ultimate commitment:
“Since we’re all gathered, I thought I’d make this an even more special moment. Not to detract from Cailean’s debut, but to add to it.” He turned and faced Meredith, knelt down on one knee, and took her hand in his.
An audible gasp went through the gathering.
“I have loved ye,” Elliott said, “since the day I met ye. Today, I pledge to love and protect ye through sickness and in health as long as we both shall live. Will ye marry me?”
She went weak-kneed and dropped to the floor beside him.
“Marry?”
“Me,” he said.
She placed her hand on her belly. “Are you asking because of the baby?”
“I’m asking because ye are the love of my life, and I want to spend the rest of my days with ye.” He slipped an Edwardian style, oval-cut, solitaire diamond ring on Meredith’s finger.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
He smiled. “It belonged to my mother.”
Meredith started crying. “When I think of you, I’ll always have a smile on my face. I love you.”
“Is that a yes?” Elliott’s voice was soft, hesitant, and he knew she could see fear in his eyes.
She cupped his cheek. “Aye, my wee sweetheart.” (444)
Once Elliott and Meredith get to the proposal, there are no more lies, no more prevarications, only the truth between them.
In THE BROKEN BROOCH, Kevin and JL fall in love instantly. There are no lies of omission or lies of commission between them. But, with other characters in the novel, all bets are off. The driving force of the plot of the narrative is the lie of omission between JL and her brother (son) Austin. She hasn’t told him that she is divorced from her husband Ryan or that she is his mother. Therefore, when he walks in on JL and Kevin in a compromising position, everything falls apart:
Here was the man who could give her back her lost youth. The man who could make her feel young and loved. She snuggled in his arms, and her heart was profoundly touched.
“My God, JL What are you doing?”
Her eyes shot open to see Austin standing in the doorway.
Kevin looked over his shoulder. “God dammit, Austin. Get out and close the door. We’ll meet you downstairs in a minute.”
JL dropped to the floor and stood on wobbly legs, grabbing the throw at the end of the bed. How was she going to explain this? “It’s not what it looks like,” she said.
“I can’t believe you’d cheat on Ryan. How could you?”
“I’m not cheating on Ryan.”
“Well, you could’ve fooled me. Screwing another man is cheating in the book I was raised with.” Austin turned away from them and rammed his fist into the wall, punching a hole in the drywall. Then he ran out of the room. The crumbling, crunching sound of a wrecking ball followed his clomping down the stairs.
JL snatched up her clothes and dressed on the run. “Austin, wait. Wait, please. Let me explain.” (102)
This revelation leads to Austin’s kidnapping and a search of the cave, an explosion injuring and killing members of the SWAT team, and the entire family’s kidnapping making JL a hero as she risks her life to rescue them.
The other lies of omission are revealed by James Cullen. He eavesdrops on his parents’ conversation and learns things that he immediately tells Kevin, hurting him deeply without feelings or compassion. He reveals many lies of omission to Kevin: the fact that Elliott is Kevin’s biological father, Elliott has prostate cancer, JL is Austin’s mother, JL has a brooch.
When Kevin demands that James Cullen stop talking, he won’t, he just keeps saying these things over and over. Kevin get’s angrier and angrier and JC still won’t stop talking. He has no filter and no sense of how his words affect other people, “Kevin yanked James Cullen by the arm and stood the boy in front of him. ‘Your dad might think you’ve used good judgment today, but the jury is still out as far as I’m concerned. Your mouth is out of control. You have no filter. If my influence is responsible for that, I’m sorry, but it’s time we both learned to keep our damn mouths shut. Capisce?”
Elliott has been committing a lie of omission in his relationship with Kevin for almost twenty years. Only time will see how this revelation will impact Kevin’s psychological well-being.
Finally, the other important lie of omission in this novel is the one between JL and Austin. Austin learns that JL is his mother and that Chris Dalton, power forward for the Golden State Warriors is his father.
Chris Dalton is also a victim of JL’s lie of omission, and as a result, has missed the first 17 years of his son’s life, “It had never occurred to her that Chris had thought of her after the night they shared. Maybe he deserved more consideration than she had given him.
‘Chris, thank you. And the answer to your unspoken question is, yes.’ His eyes flashed from her to Austin, then back to her, and he smiled. “I’ll be in touch.” (327)
Austin is excited that Chris wants to get to know him and all lies of omission are dealt with and gone.
Finally, there are quite a few lies of omission in THE DIAMOND BROOCH but only one that really connects to the purpose of the brooch and leads Jack and Amy to their eventual roles as soulmates. But, it’s not easy and it takes a long time.
For much of the novel, Jack and Amy must pretend to be engaged in order to protect Amy’s reputation in 1909 in case she decides to come back after she goes to the 21st century to handle her affairs.
Jack’s lie of omission is about a terrible loss of love when Carolina Rose died in his arms in 1881 in San Francisco. When Jack acts out his “pretend proposal” to Amy, his lie of omission is the proposal that would really have been for Carolina Rose:
“What are we doing here?”
“Patience, sweetheart.” He studied the area. “There,” he said, pointing. He pulled Amy over to a park bench shaded by a clump of trees.
And that’s when it hit her. “Are you going to make a pretend proposal?”
“Shhh,” he said. “I’ll never do this for real, so I want to do it right.”
He dropped to one knee, pulled a small box from his pocket, and opened it. Amy gasped and swayed slightly. The ring—an emerald cut sapphire surrounded by diamonds—was the reverse of a ring that had haunted her dreams for more than a decade, a ring she had never seen in a store or magazine or on anyone’s finger.
Jack took her hand, slid the ring on her finger, and regarded her with a heart-melting gaze, the clear blue of his eyes in stark contrast to the sky bruised with a brewing storm.
“I can’t imagine my life without you in it, without your smile to grace my mornings, without your sigh to still my nights. I long for the sound of home that pours unbidden from your voice, and the silky touch of your lips against mine. We are two behind one vision, one flesh, one bone, one heart. Make me the happiest man in the world. Say yes, and be my bride today and always.” (279)
Eventually, Amy realizes that Jack has been committing another lie of omission and confronts him with it. It clears the air between them, temporarily, but eventually they will become soulmates, the stone won’t rush it, they both need time:
“Save the denials. Look, I like you. I have fun with you. You’re a great guy, and one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met. But we’re not on the same path. I love my life here. I want to stay, but I’m going home to clear Joe. I don’t know if I’ll come back or not. If I don’t, Joe and I will get married in a few months. I’ll have a couple of kids who’ll play Little League baseball, and I’ll get to coach them. There are so many roads we can take in our lives, and they all have potholes. The best we can hope for is to have a life partner who knows where the holes are and how to fix them. Joe knows mine. I know his. The hole you’re carrying, Jack, is deep, but not impossible to fix…if you’ll allow those closest to you to help.” (310)
One last lie of omission between Jack and Amy doesn’t seem that serious but to Amy it is: “You’re missing a big playoff weekend.”
Amy glanced up from the bundle in Charlotte’s arms to make eye contact. “Yes, I am. But I’m glad to have a break. Do you follow baseball?”
“My son is playing Little League, so I’m getting back into it.”
“Back into it?” Amy asked.
Charlotte switched the baby to her other breast seamlessly, leaving Amy awed. “I went to as many of Jack’s games as I could,” Charlotte said.
“Little League and Babe Ruth, I guess. Those are fun games to watch.”
“Those and his games at the University of Virginia.”
Amy was stunned. “He played at UVA?”
“Star pitcher for four years. Then he was a first-round draft pick.”
Amy wasn’t just stunned, she was flabbergasted. “Jack Mallory was a first-round draft pick?”
“By the Yankees,” Charlotte said. (552)
This piece of information thrills Amy. It’s her dream come true. It puts the seal on her belief that she and Jack are soulmates. The question is why didn’t Jack tell Amy about his baseball career. This lie of omission seems to be innocent, or as innocent as any lie can be, because it seems that Jack just wanted her to love him for himself, not baseball. But he gave her a special proposal that he knew she would remember forever with the ring of her dreams:
He kissed her on the mouth, and the crowd went wild. He pointed to the grass outside the pitcher’s circle. “Stand right there.” After a quick signal to the catcher, he regained the hill. Then he pushed off the pitcher’s slab with his right foot and drove at the plate, right into the groove, with startling power. His follow-through ended in a light skip, and he finished on his toes, throwing a perfect strike.
The fans jumped to their feet, rocking the stadium as if he’d won the game with a single pitch. But she wasn’t happy. She punched her hands to her hips. This was all a ploy, but why? He doffed his cap and dropped his glove.
And while she was barely holding on to her composure, Jack knelt on one knee. From his back pocket, Jack pulled out a small box and opened it, revealing a dazzling emerald cut diamond surrounded by sapphires. The ring was the reverse of the one he gave her before.
“Today, our love is new and frantic, tomorrow old and sure. Be my wife, Amy. Marry me, and make me the happiest Yankees’ fan on the planet.”
After two beautiful proposals—one in Central Park and a champagne toast after they made love—Jack went for an uncharacteristically dumb proposal.
And the crowd loved it. “Say yes! Say yes! Say yes!”
She held out her hand, nodding.
“Is that a yes?” he asked.
“Yes! That’s a yes.” (592)
Everything between Amy and Jack, Kevin and JL, and the MacKlenna clan is resolved, at least temporarily. Kevin and JL have a beautiful Italian Catholic wedding that means everything to her family. Kevin takes the Fraser name after a long emotional process of healing with Elliott which leads them to accepting each other as father and son. And Amy and Jack begin to plan a huge Southern wedding that eventually is completed in between THE AMBER BROOCH and THE PEARL BROOCH, but not seen on the page. Perhaps the best part of THE DIAMOND BROOCH Brooch is the talent contest between teams of the clan with beautiful music. Singing becomes a tradition in the family.
And, as Elliot says to his family in his nightly ritual, “may God hold them in the palm of his hand.”
out of curiosity, who is Mark? I couldn’t find him referenced in any list of characters though he was mentioned in the Sunstone Brooch? Will we see him in a later book? or is he an already known character going by another name? I very much enjoy your books and am really enjoying the Sunstone Brooch now.
I’m so glad you’re enjoying THE SUNSTONE. Mark was first mentioned in THE TOPAZ BROOCH. He was Penny Malone’s boyfriend at West Point, and he is Tavis’s brother. Yes, we will see him in a future book.
Hello Katherine, I may have this in the wrong area as I’m not too great with the technology anymore.. (I used to use it a lot when I worked at the OSOC here in Colo. Springs- but after health issues I’ve been on disability for quite a long while.) You’re soooo lucky to have your family near! Mine are all grown , married and my grandkids in other states. And yes, with the covid issue its been hard to see any of them. I bless the day I found your books! I’m alone alot and they are so extremely well… Read more »
Hi Liz, thank you for your note. I have to admit my pandemic Goldendoodle has kept me from working twelve hours a day. This book is taking a little bit longer to write, but it should be out in late June. Thanks for being such a great fan! Blessings, Kathy