54. Otis
Isat around the dinner table with my sisters, full of my mom’s meat loaf and that happy feeling I always got around my family. I’d hardly seen them since I got out of jail, and even though my mom wasn’t the type to send me guilt-texts, I’d missed my sisters and my parents.
Plus I needed to talk to my sisters. Alone.
“So Daisy really is, like, your friend?” my littlest sister Mia asked. She was twelve — almost twelve years younger than me — and I’d always been extra protective of her because I remembered clearly the day she’d been born and my dad putting her in my arms at the hospital. She’d been so small and helpless. It was the first time I’d felt like I would do anything for someone.
“Yeah,” I said, trying not to think about fucking Daisy at the Velvet Rope with Wolf. “She’s my friend.”
“That’s weird,” Grace, my other sister, said. They had matching blond hair, although Mia never bothered with hers while Grace’s, fifteen now, was always smooth and styled. “After what you did, I mean.”
“Grace!” my dad said, putting down the cake my mom had baked for the occasion. “That’s enough.”
His brown hair was starting to go gray, but he ran and kayaked and stuff. He still looked young and healthy.
“It’s fine,” I said. “It’s true.”
“How’s the house coming?” My mom’s hair was going gray too, but hers was blond, so the gray just kind of blended in. She had soft brown eyes, calm and watchful, like the deer Wolf and Jace and I would see when we used to play in the forest around the Blades’ compound as kids.
We’d talked about my family while we ate dinner — my mom’s job as a computer engineer and my dad’s as an environmental consultant, Mia and Grace and their grades at the end of the school year school, their friends — so I wasn’t surprised the convo was turning to me.
I had good parents. They cared about me, about what I was up to.
“It’s good.” We hadn’t had much time to work on the house over the past few weeks, but with four of us tackling jobs, even just part-time, it was coming along. “The third floor’s done. Now we’re working on the second floor while Daisy does the first floor. The kitchen and the pool are the next big jobs.”
“How will you manage without a kitchen?” Except for desserts, my dad was the cook in the family. Living without a kitchen probably seemed impossible to him.
“There’s a smaller kitchen on the third floor,” I said. “We can use that while they work on the main one.”
“Is Daisy going to live there?” Mia asked. “When it’s done and you and Wolf and Jace move out I mean?”
It was something I tried not to think about. Not Daisy living at the house after it was done but Daisy living at the house without us after it was done. It gave me a funny feeling in my chest, heavy, like it was hard to breathe.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably.”
I didn’t know what Daisy had planned for the house yet — I wasn’t sure she knew — but I did know she didn’t want to sell it.
“It’s a big place for one person,” my dad said.
I nodded because my throat felt kind of tight.
“Speaking of big places,” my mom said, “the new Cantwell resort is going to be a monster.”
We talked about the new hotel and spa over dessert, then I helped my sisters with the dishes. It was nice, like when we’d been kids except they didn’t seem annoying now that we didn’t live together. I’d missed them when I’d been in prison. All the things that had bugged the fuck out of me when I’d been around them all the time were the same things I’d missed the most, even the way they argued nonstop about everything from borrowed clothes to laundry left in the dryer to things that had happened at school in the years when they’d overlapped in elementary and middle school.
“So hey,” I said when we were done loading the dishwasher, wiping the counters, and sweeping the floor, “I need to talk to you.”
“To us?” Mia asked.
I nodded. “Alone.”
Grace’s brown eyes went wide. “Why?”
“I’ll tell you in a sec. Just don’t make a big deal about it to Mom and Dad. Tell them you want to show me something if they ask.”
We wandered through the dining and living rooms, passing my parents, who were on the sofa talking about a contractor they’d hired to clear trees in the backyard.
“Where are you three headed?” my mom asked with a smile.
“I’m going to show Otis my science project,” Mia said.
She was a really good liar.
“It’s brilliant,” my dad said. “She came up with the idea herself too. Won first place at the end-of-year science fair.”
We headed up the stairs to the second floor. It was weird to pass my old bedroom. I’d been a senior in high school when Wolf, Jace, and I had gone to the police station to confess to killing Blake. Now I was a man, and I wondered if everyone felt weird about their childhood bedroom or if it was just me because I hadn’t had time to get used to the idea of not living in it anymore.
“We can talk in my room,” Mia said. “In case Mom and Dad come up. And I should show you the science project, in case they ask what you think.”
Damn. I was going to have to keep an eye on her.
I felt like an intruder stepping into the explosion of pink in her room. After the soaring ceilings and heavy oversized antique furniture at Daisy’s house, the average-size bedroom felt small, the twin-size canopy bed like something out of a dollhouse.
Mia flopped back on her bed.
Grace perched on the edge. She looked funny, like maybe she was scared? “What’s up?”
I took a deep breath. “I have to ask you something important, except I can’t tell you everything, so you’re just going to have to trust me, okay?”
“Trust you?” Grace looked skeptical, and considering the fact that her older brother was a convicted murderer and was now asking her to trust him, I couldn’t really blame her.
“I know,” I said. “It’s a weird thing to ask, but I’m asking.”
“Okayyyyy,” Grace said.
Mia grinned. “We trust you!”
Grace shot her a look but I had no idea what it meant.
“Think you can get Mom and Dad to take you to the lake house early?” We always went to the lake house the third week of July, and my parents had kept up the tradition with Grace and Mia while I’d been in prison.
“That’s not for two weeks,” Mia said.
“I know, but do you think you can get them to move up the trip?”
I wanted my family — and especially my sisters — out of Blackwell Falls while we dealt with Calvin. Charles Hammond was a powerful man, and I didn’t want to risk retribution against my family if he started to suspect Wolf, Jace, and I had something to do with Calvin going AWOL.
Plus, we were still planning to take Daisy’s dad down, even if we couldn’t actually kill him. Eventually, he’d figure out he had a target on his back, and I didn’t want him to put one on the backs of my little sisters, especially when his specialty seemed to be trafficking girls.
Grace looked at me with narrowed eyes. “Why?”
“That’s the part I need you to trust me about. I can’t tell you, I just need you to do it.” I hated asking them to lie to our parents, but if I told my parents they needed to leave town for their own safety — for the safety of my sisters — they wouldn’t go until they’d gotten the whole truth out of me.
Then they’d really be in danger.
“You want us to get Mom and Dad to move up the lake house trip without giving us a reason?” Grace asked.
“Yeah.”
“Are you going back to prison?” Grace asked.
I had to admit, that got me. It was one thing that I’d been sent to prison with Wolf and Jace, but one thing I learned while I was there was that no one went to prison alone. All the families who filed in for visiting day — and the ones who didn’t — they were being punished too, except they hadn’t done anything to deserve it.
My sisters — my family — had suffered because of me, because of what I’d done. It wasn’t fair, and the last thing I wanted to do was put them through more of that shit.
“No,” I said, because I absolutely did not intend to go back to prison. Ever. “There are just some bad things going down in Blackwell Falls right now. I don’t want you guys around it.”
Grace considered that. “I don’t think we could get them to move up the trip even if we wanted to.”
“We can make something up!” Mia seemed way too excited about the challenge.
Grace looked down at her. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. We could tell them Meredith invited you to her beach house the third week in July.”
I didn’t know who Meredith was, but I was used to my sisters talking in shorthand only they seemed to understand.
“But they didn’t,” Grace said. “Don’t you think Mom and Dad will find that out eventually?”
Mia rolled her eyes. “You can just tell them the Batemans had to cancel at the last minute.” Oh yeah, Mia was trouble with a capital T. “We’ll think of something.”
Grace looked up at me. “You’re sure you’re not in trouble?”
“I’m sure,” I said. “This is about you guys, not me, and it’s just in case.”
Grace was definitely skeptical. “In case what?”
I thought about the question, about how to answer it without scaring them or giving too much away. “In case the bad things going down get out of hand.”
It wasn’t a lie.
“We’ll do it.” Mia looked at Grace. “Right, Grace?”
Grace sighed. “Fine. Right.”
I nodded, relieved. The last time I’d gotten mixed up in something, it had all happened so fast I hadn’t had time to prepare my family. One day I’d been their son, living at home and going to high school, and the next I’d been splashed all over the front page of the Blackwell Bulletin, a confessed murderer going away for manslaughter.
I couldn’t tell them everything. Not yet.
But I could get them out of the way of the coming shit storm.