Chapter 21 That’s Progress – Seven
THAT’S PROGRESS
SEVEN
It's been a long time since anything kept me up at night, but Ro seems to be the exception.
I know she's got this, but it still fucks me up that by midday tomorrow she'll be breathing the same air as the man responsible for the downfall of my family.
I drag my tired ass to the kitchen, planning to grab a snack and wait for at least dawn before I text Ro to check in.
But as I near the end of the hall and the kitchen, I hear the scrape of cutlery against a plate.
I can't quite see him in the dark, but I can feel Atty's presence as clearly as I can hear him.
"What are you doing up?"
He doesn't answer, but I think I hear him chewing.
"Were you in the gym again?"
He still doesn't answer.
"Wait, what are you doing here? I thought you were on the night shift at the laundromat."
There's a heavy gulp, and when he speaks, it sounds like it's around a mouthful of something. "Called Eli to sub in."
"Dude, you sound like shit. Have you slept?"
I open the fridge for a Gatorade and almost drop the thing when the light reveals him leaning over the kitchen island.
"Whoa…"
He's in his sweaty gym clothes, but he's not munching a protein bar before his shower. Atticus leans over the half of Eli's birthday cake we didn't finish, eating it straight off the fucking cake plate with a fork, and from the look of things, he's already worked his way through a pound of it.
I close the fridge and flick on the light beneath the cabinets, approaching him like someone might approach a bomb they mean to diffuse.
"Atty?"
He stuffs another bite of chocolate cake into his mouth, getting some crumbs in his stubble as he stares off distantly.
"Atticus," I try again, not liking how my stomach is already pooling with dread. "What the hell happened?"
"That woman," he says around the mouthful of cake, gesturing pointedly with his fork in a way that makes the next bite fall from its prongs. He stabs the cake again, shoveling an even bigger bite onto it. "She's going to be the death of me, man."
My skin pricks. "What are you talking about?"
He sags into his seat and drops the fork, finally looking at me. His eyes are red, bloodshot, and squinted. If I didn't know any better, I'd say he's been crying, but I have never in my life seen Atticus cry. Not once.
"She blew up her fucking car, Sev." He gestures violently with his hands. "Drove it right off an unfinished bypass."
An immeasurable sense of dread and fear fills me in an instant. Fear unlike any I've felt since I was a child. Fear I didn't know I was even capable of anymore.
"What?" The single word is a whisper of a thing, and if he doesn't keep talking, I will shake the answers out of him. "Atticus, what?"
I shove his arm harder than I mean to. "Atticus!"
"Fuck, man." He recoils to glare at me. "She's fine."
I deflate and throw two shaky hands through my hair, inhaling deep through my nose.
"Maybe lead with that next time, bro."
But I'm still not following. Atticus picks the fork back up, but doesn't get himself another bite, pushing crumbs around with the prongs as he stews in his vat of anxious rage.
"Tell me what happened?"
"She found the tracker I put on her car is what happened."
I frown. "Did she not know it was there?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because I didn't fucking tell her."
"Why not?"
He looks at me like I'm the idiot here. "I don't know, Sev, because I put trackers on all our cars, my Mercedes included."
I twist the cap off my Gatorade and take a swallow. "All right, but she made it pretty clear she didn't want to be tracked any more than necessary. You could have mentioned it."
"Yeah, well, I forgot, okay?"
I shake my head at him. We both know that isn't true. Atticus doesn't forget shit.
"Fuck, man, fine, maybe I didn't forget, but if I'd told her about it she probably would've made me remove that one, too. She doesn't get how dangerous this is."
He stabs the cake with his fork, breaking off a mammoth bite and stuffing it in his mouth. I grimace as he speaks around the mouthful like some kind of heathen savage I don't even recognize. "So damn reckless."
"Something doesn't add up."
I watch him closely. See the tell in the knot between his brows and the tension in his shoulders. He's feeling guilty.
"We all have our moments, but she wouldn't go this far unless…"
He swallows audibly.
"Atty…you lied to her, didn't you?"
His eye twitches and I sigh.
"She asked me if there were any other trackers," he admits. "Made me swear there wasn't."
I nod, sighing. That's what I thought.
It's insane what she did, but this is a lesson Atty needed to learn and I think Ro might be the teacher neither me nor Eli could ever be for him.
Atticus must know now that if he'd explained the necessity of the device to her, she probably would've allowed it—so I don't harp on it. Instead my focus narrows on the rest of the facts.
"So, wait a sec, you're telling me that she somehow found your tracker, right?"
He grunts.
"And then drove her car off a bypass?"
His throat moves as he swallows. "Insane, right?"
Something flutters in my chest as I picture her behind the wheel, racing to the edge of the unfinished road. Did she drive it and jump out at the last second? Or would she have used a cinder block?
I'm willing to bet the seven-figure contents of my bank account that she was behind that wheel until the very last second.
God, I'm hard thinking about it.
"What's that look on your face?" Atticus asks, his cheekbones flaring around another mouthful as he chews.
I rub at the goosebumps on the back of my neck and smirk, leaning against the counter. "Just…sounds like something I would do."
Atty is not impressed by this revelation. He drops the fork again and shoves the cake away from him.
"Yeah," he agrees in a harsh tone. "It is. As if I need another you to deal with. One is more than enough."
I'm still smirking, and I think it's only making him more angry as he gets up and takes the remaining cake, walking it to the garbage to dump the whole thing into the bag before throwing his fork in the sink.
"Do you have any idea how many hours I've spent making this look like something else?
" he bitches, viciously scrubbing the fork in the sink under a stream of steaming water.
"How many arms I had to twist? Hmm? How much blackmail I needed to dig up to get the deputy in Boone on board with the story?
Not to fucking mention all the red-light footage that needed to be corrupted because I was forced to take off after her ass when I saw where she was headed. "
I'm not really listening, I'm still imagining how good it must've felt when my girl drove that car up the ramp, knowing how much it was going to piss Atty off.
It does sound like it made a lot of work for him, and to be fair, the risk of drawing suspicion is also a concern.
I mean, I feel for the guy, I do. And it was reckless. Maybe it's wrong, but…
I'm proud of her.
"…and how will it look to Ambrose's people?" I tune back in to what he's saying. "Even with a cover story, I couldn't make the whole incident disappear."
"Make it look like her car was stolen in some kind of college prank gone wrong—"
"Yeah, of course that's the story," he interrupts. "But I shouldn't have had to invent one in the first place. It was stupid and it was careless and it could have ruined the entire plan. She could've ruined the entire plan."
I make a face and Atty shuts off the water to glare at me.
"What?" he barks.
I give an only slightly apologetic shrug. "Well, you did lie to her."
"So you're saying this is my fault."
"Mmmm." I mean… "Yeah, man. She took it to the extreme, but it sort of is."
I wait for the inevitable explosion, bracing for it, but it doesn't come.
Atticus turns to lean against the countertop, gripping it between his hands. His head falls heavy with a sigh.
"I know, man."
His voice is so low, I'm not sure if I've heard him right. Surely Atticus did not just admit that he was in the wrong?
I'm…I'm…I'm fucking speechless.
He hisses out a breath. "I can't seem to get anything right with her.
I was finally making some progress and then I shot myself in the foot.
But she's like—like this solid wall of resistance.
" He gestures with his hands, not looking at me as he speaks.
"And no matter how much I fight against it, it's not even dented. "
I purse my lips, not sure if he wants my input here or not, but I figure I should give it to him anyway. "Maybe…stop fighting the wall?"
He drops his hand and looks at me like I've said the dumbest thing he's ever heard.
"You know," I push on. "Like, have some trust in the wall? Be honest with the wall. Be nice to the wall."
"Could you stop referring to Aurora like she's an inanimate object?"
I lift my hands up. "Hey, man, it's your analogy, not mine."
For a long moment, there's silence in the kitchen, and then his throat bobs.
"Is she ever going to forgive me?"
My chest pangs for him. "For this or for the, uh, other incident?"
He sags.
"There was a moment tonight," he almost whispers, like the words are meant only for himself. "Where I thought she went off the edge of that bypass."
His voice cracks on the last word, and something in my chest cracks with it.
This isn’t the Atticus I know. This is an older version that’s been hiding underneath all that control and cold calculation for years.
It’s good to see him again.
“I don’t think I’ve ever felt so…”
I flinch at the gut-twisting anxiety I know he must've felt. Even if I'm not sure Atticus knows how to love her the way Ro needs to be loved, I know he does care for her.
I haven't seen him this fucked up since Flo died.
He ate half a cake.
The man's practically a walking train wreck.
"But she didn't," I offer. "Which means there's still time for you to make it right."
His nose wrinkles at the idea, but he'd better get used to it if he wants any sort of relationship with her.
"I'm going to hit the rowing machine."
He pushes off from the counter and leaves the crumbs on the counter in a very not Daddicus move.
"Didn't you just come from the gym?"
He stops and turns. "So?"
"You should get a few hours of rest. We're going to need you sharp tomorrow."
"Do I not look sharp?"
"That's not what I—"
"Just thirty minutes," he argues. "I'm fine, Sev. Leave it."
"All right, man."
He shakes his head as he starts down the hall.
"But I think this is a good thing," I call after him. "She didn't just, like, shut you out. She actually did something, you know. She wanted to get even instead of pretending you don't exist."
He ignores me and keeps walking, so I shout louder after him.
"I know you don't see it, but that's progress!"