Chapter 10
Chapter 10
Every visit Jaime made to FCI Petersburg, the prison where Dad was incarcerated, went the same way: arrive early to allow for the crowds at security. Leave his belt and cell phone in the car. Wonder again at how many locked doors he had to go through and how cold the place was.
Then Jaime would wait at a cafeteria table, trying not to think about how the scene felt like a middle school lunchroom but sadder. About how everyone sitting around the room was trying so hard to look hopeful, but not managing it. About all the kids—the kids were the worst part.
The first time he’d gone to see his father at the Georgina County lockup, he’d been a kid too. But at eighteen, Jaime had been old enough to know what was happening, and why it was happening. The toothless baby perched on its mom’s hip across from Jaime, the one who was smiling at him so hard, almost willing him to smile back—that baby didn’t have the slightest clue. All it knew was that this place was dark and it echoed and no one here smiled.
So Jaime managed to crack a grin, and the baby broke into a wide peal of laughter, a sound that couldn’t have been more out of place. A rainbow in hell would’ve been more likely.
Kids made sense to Jaime. Unlike, say, Scarlett.
Jaime had gotten into his car this morning unsure of whether he’d still find her when he got back home. Scarlett was spooked, that much was certain. But by what, Jaime couldn’t begin to say.
For all that they’d been working together for three weeks now, he had no idea what made her tick. He’d gotten a handle on the character they were writing, but the fictional Emily wasn’t the real Scarlett. For one thing, Emily did what he told her to.
The weirdest part was that as Scarlett had hollered at him yesterday, Jaime had the strongest sense that she didn’t know what she’d been doing either. She’d been trying to provoke him, and he’d fallen straight into her trap. Why she’d wanted him to, though, he had no idea.
Before Jaime could figure it out, Dad sat down on the bench across from him.
Dad hadn’t appeared in The Devouring Sun until episode seven. Your dad is the shark in Jaws , Nate had joked once, and that wasn’t wrong. Except rather than being terrifying, Jaime thought his father had seemed smaller, sadder, on screen. Great harm can be done by the most ordinary people for the most mundane reasons: that was what Jaime had been trying to say in the show.
In real life, he also came across as diminished. They didn’t wear orange here, so Dad had on what looked like beige scrubs with a long-sleeved blue T-shirt underneath. For a dizzying second, Jaime could almost pretend they weren’t sitting in a prison. That the last seventeen years hadn’t passed.
Dad had been everything back then, the sun at the center of the Croft family universe—and a good-sized star in the town of Musgrove. He’d coached all of Jaime’s sports teams, which meant that every kid knew him. When the Croft family went to dinner, he would’ve treated at least one family member of every person in the restaurant. He was a fixture on the links at the Georgina Country Club and a member of the Masonic lodge.
Everyone knew him. Everyone liked him. And it was only later that Jaime realized how those facts had made everything else possible. That maybe Dad had cultivated all those relationships in order to cover up whatever else he’d been up to.
The gravity of the entire system changed in an instant when Dad had been arrested. It was a wonder they hadn’t all crashed into each other, but that was why Jaime had had to step up. Jaime plugging the hole had been the only way to maintain the order of things.
“James! It’s good to see you.”
Dad was the only person who called Jaime James . He thought the nickname made his son sound like a kid. But Dad wasn’t around anymore to correct folks, so his son had become Jaime to everyone—except in this place. It was like a Bizarro World prison nickname.
“How have you been, Dad?”
“I can’t complain.”
That was what he’d always said. They might as well have been golfing or fishing on Ricky Southerland’s boat. Can’t complain about prison—ha.
These visits still made Jaime ache . While he had gotten better at being a kid to an inmate over the years—he ran a family support group, in point of fact—after his fight with Scarlett, he was feeling as fragile as a molting chicken, all puffy and exposed and embarrassed. All he had left in the tank was chitchat.
“They feeding you okay?”
“Fine, it’s fine. Mom and Ev were busy?”
“Yup. They send their regrets, but they’ll be here next week.”
As long as Dad had enough visiting points, his family could come by on Fridays, the weekends, and federal holidays. Mom tried to make it to Petersburg at least twice a month. This was one of only a handful of visiting days Jaime had made that Mom had ever missed.
She’d set the tone from the first one: they were all going to go, as much as they could. They were going to stay a family through this. As shocking and embarrassing as it was, the real embarrassment would be for them to fall apart, and she wasn’t going to let them.
Dad nodded and folded his hands together on the tabletop. “So you working on something new?” He was obviously not going to let Jaime ask an hour’s worth of questions about what Dad had gotten up to in the yard and how his work in the prison laundry was going before sneaking off.
One of them had accepted the permanency of this situation—and it wasn’t Jaime.
“Yeah, I’m doing a series about ... chess.”
“Chess? Like the kind played by that girl, Scarlett what’s-her-name?”
“Exactly like that. It’s an adaptation of her memoir. Scarlett’s in Musgrove, working on it with me.”
Dad’s brows arched.
Yesterday, Scarlett hadn’t been wrong, exactly. Jaime had kept their teenage relationship a secret, but he’d taken his cues from her. She’d ignored Jaime at school and made other plans the night of prom. In his defense, high school labels were insufficient for whatever he and Scarlett had shared. They hadn’t “gone steady”—this hadn’t been Grease . It had been a heady mix of lust and potential that kept shape-shifting before Jaime could define it.
For all that Scarlett had never let him know her, Jaime had always believed down to the quick of his fingernails that they were meant to be. Meant to be something , at any rate. Something permanent and life altering.
That was why he’d insisted on introducing her to his family, despite her protests. Dad had always liked Scarlett, had always teased her and shot Jaime looks like This girl is a hoot . Mom had not, but she would’ve come around.
No, Jaime’s discretion hadn’t come out of a desire to hide Scarlett. It had been far more complicated than that. But even still, Dad had always peppered Jaime with questions about whether Scarlett was really just his friend, whether he was sharing the full truth.
Which was goddamn ironic, when it came down to it.
“Sounds interesting,” Dad said at last.
“It’s going to be great. Very different from The Devouring Sun .” Which was the goal. The success of Jaime’s first project worried him a bit. What if people thought he could only make gritty, low-budget autobiographical stuff? He was determined to do something different, to show people he had range. If he and Scarlett ever managed to finish writing the thing, he was confident Queen’s Kiss would help him do just that.
“Well, that’s good,” Dad said. “You were ready to start something new.”
Jaime wasn’t quite sure what they were talking about now: the show, or whatever Dad assumed it meant in terms of Jaime and Scarlett’s relationship.
“Yeah, it’s coming along.” Or it would be, if Scarlett would tell him what the hell was going on and if they could work through it together.
“So what are you reading?” Dad asked.
“A new oral history of D-day.”
“Oh, is it good?”
It was fine, but Jaime hadn’t picked it up to enjoy it. He’d picked it up so he could tell Dad about it.
Dad’s incarceration had shrunk their relationship down to the size of a pen cap, but if a pen cap was what he got, then Jaime was going to hold on to it tight. Because his dad might be a felon who’d fucked up in any number of ways, but he was also the only father Jaime would ever get.
You didn’t get to pick your family any more than you got to pick where you were born. All you could pick was how you related to them.
Jaime’s dad was more flawed than most, but that only meant Jaime had to be better to balance the scales. That obligation had defined the last seventeen years of his life. Making amends for Dad’s transgressions was Jaime’s core philosophy.
“I’ll see you in a few weeks, James,” Dad said when Jaime finally got up to go half an hour later.
His dad gave him a hug, the kind that starts grabby and then goes self-conscious and embarrassed. Visitors were only allowed to touch inmates briefly at the beginning and end of visits, and Dad often only went for the closing hug. As if he wanted to ration those moments and make them even more precious than they already were.
Jaime wrapped his arms fast around his dad’s back. “I love you.” As always, Jaime’s words were a promise that, despite everything, he still wanted his father in his life.
“Love you.” And Dad’s response was an apology for everything.
Maybe there were crimes so great you never finished making up for them. Maybe what Dad had done fit the bill.
Jaime had tortured himself with those kinds of thoughts at first, and the only thing that had ended the spiral was the realization it wasn’t Jaime’s job to decide. He wasn’t the judge here, wasn’t the jury. He was the son. And so his job was to hold his family together and to tell his dad’s story. As a warning, as a witness, and as a way of paying restitution.
Jaime knew he’d made his own mistakes in not realizing what his father had been up to, not being able to stop all that harm. That was exactly why he always strove to be competent and in control. He never wanted to miss anything that important ever again. He had no excuse for being ignorant now.
As Jaime drove home, he turned his thoughts to Scarlett and the odds that she would still be there. And whether he wanted her to be.
His thoughts chased each other like squirrels for hours. It was only once he’d pulled into the driveway and saw her rental car—sitting exactly where it had been when he’d left—that he realized if she’d gone, he would’ve been crushed.
There were no two ways about it. This was going to end with his heart in pieces. All he could try to do was to delay the pain as long as possible.
Scarlett researched flights and started packing her bag. But she hadn’t done any laundry in a few days, and thanks to Jaime’s fondness of long midday walks—hikes, more like it—most of her bras and panties were gross.
Most of the options had been night flights out of Dulles, and a glance at the clock revealed she had time for a load of laundry. That was just her being practical. No one wanted to carry a bunch of dirty underwear back up the East Coast.
But also, laundry would take a good ninety minutes, which would keep her from doing anything impulsive. Scarlett wasn’t going to do a Cinderella dash away from Jaime’s place, leaving a pile of lace and satin panties behind.
The thought did make her chuckle, though.
While the washer was going, Scarlett spent an embarrassing amount of time standing in the living room staring at the spot where, until a few hours earlier, Jaime’s car had been parked. He’d left without a word, but then again, she was the one who’d flounced off last night. And she’d stayed holed up in her room this morning, not creeping out to the kitchen with its sweet, sweet supply of caffeine until she’d heard him go.
Wherever Jaime had headed off to—the grocery store, his mom’s house, a strip club—he really ought to be back by now.
Scarlett hadn’t meant what she’d said. Well, she didn’t know if she meant it. She meant it, and she didn’t mean it. It was the Schrodinger’s cat of emotions.
There ought to be someone you could call to determine such things, like an Am-I-the-Asshole hotline.
Or a friend.
This was what people asked their friends, wasn’t it? Dammit, she really ought to have made some of those along the way. She’d simply never imagined she would need someone to tell her if she’d been too much of a jerk or not enough of a jerk.
Scarlett picked up her phone and opened her group chat with Martina and Kit. This question was more personal than weighing the merits of the Benko Gambit, but Scarlett really needed a ruling here, preferably from someone whose opinions she respected.
Feeling foolish, Scarlett dialed Kit. Talking it out would be awful, but Scarlett couldn’t bring herself to write it down. Seeing the words would make her feel like an even bigger ass.
Kit answered on the second ring. They were an early riser. They’d probably already been for a long morning walk and played ten or fifteen games of blitz chess online.
“How are things going?” Kit said by way of a greeting. “Did you get the care package?”
Scarlett had never in her life received a care package, so when a box had arrived filled with bagels and a cardigan, she’d felt dizzy and confused.
At the very least, Virginians were apparently under the false impression that bagels were dense bread. Scarlett could live without real bagels, of course, but life was certainly better with real bagels.
“I did, thank you. I’m sending you some goat-milk soap in exchange.” Scarlett had enough of the stuff to bathe an army.
“Sweet,” Kit replied. “I saw the sweater at Beacon’s Closet, and I knew you had to have it. It looked like something a writer would wear.”
If there was one thing Scarlett was good at besides chess, it was dressing for impact. Once she’d had enough money to go shopping without too much stress, she’d realized that fashion was an entire other way to communicate with people. It remained astonishing to her that so many of the men in chess wore the same old interchangeable outfits. Did they not understand the right tie, the right accessory, could communicate volumes?
Oh well. Once again they proved how small minded they were.
Despite the fact the sweater Kit had sent looked as if a cat might’ve attacked it at some point, it had been soft and warm. In fact ...
Scarlett dug the cardi out of the pile waiting for her to pack into her suitcase and held the phone against her ear with her shoulder as she struggled into the sweater.
“You prepping for Norway Chess?” Kit asked.
Scarlett ought to be. “No. But I need some advice ... the personal kind. I need to know what to do.”
Criminy, this was awkward.
“Sure, fire away.” Kit didn’t seem put out in the least.
“You would do that?”
“Of course. We’re friends.”
They were? Well, hot damn.
Scarlett opened her mouth to say I picked a fight, and I want you to tell me that it’s okay to come back to New York rather than apologizing. But even more, she wanted Kit to arrive at that conclusion on their own. So Scarlett had to start at the beginning.
“The thing is, Jaime and I have ... a complicated past.”
“As in?”
“We may have dated.” Scarlett had rejected that word with Jaime, but it was the simplest thing she could say to Kit to convey what had happened.
“Did he take you to prom? Was there a mortifying corsage incident?” Kit teased. They thought this was hilarious —which, if the situation were reversed, Scarlett probably would too.
“No. We were more like each other’s ... dirty secret.”
“Nice. But that was decades ago. Why is it complicated now? Unless it was a much bigger deal than dating .”
“It wasn’t a big deal.” What a lie. Scarlett had to stop doing that. “But, I mean, maybe it felt like a massive, world-ending deal at the time. If you’ve ever met a teenager, you know Romeo and Juliet is realistic.”
“You two decimated a town—is that what you’re saying?”
“Pretty much.” Scarlett squeezed her eyes closed until she saw spots. “Does this surprise you?”
“Not at all. I’ve never seen you in a relationship”—no one had—“but you never do things small.”
No, Scarlett didn’t. “Yeah, that’s me. I just—Kit, I wrecked this man, and then I skipped off to play chess without a backward glance.”
“A tale as old as time.”
Scarlett had to laugh. This whole baring-your-soul-to-friends thing, it wasn’t half bad.
“And after you split him like kindling, you granted him the rights to your book and are staying in his house. Am I missing anything?” Kit asked.
So many things. Jaime’s confession that he wasn’t over her. What Scarlett had done directly before leaving Musgrove seventeen years ago.
But Scarlett tacked on only the most important bit: “Last night, I may have picked a fight with him and said I was going back to New York.”
“Why?”
Scarlett was tempted to pitch forward onto the bed and howl. “I don’t ... I don’t really know.”
“At times like these, my therapist often asks, ‘Don’t know, or don’t want to say?’”
“Your therapist sounds awful.”
“Tell me about it.”
Scarlett twisted a lock of hair between her fingers. “I don’t want to say.”
Kit was wisely silent for a long time. A long, long time.
Then in a tiny voice, Scarlett admitted the truth. “I wanted him to throw me out. Because being here with him, it’s really nice.”
But it wasn’t only the routine or even being with Jaime. It was seeing Evelyn regularly and running into Emery and finding out that a local book club had read Queen’s Kiss . Even Mrs. Croft hadn’t been mean to her, come to think of it.
For all that Scarlett had thought she hated Musgrove, the reality of the place wasn’t half bad.
“So, I guess, my question is whether I should leave or not.”
Rather than answering that, Kit lobbed another question. “Do you still like him?”
The words should’ve sounded impossibly silly, but everything about this situation had pitched Scarlett back into the headspace of being a teenager, so actually, Kit’s question was perfect.
Did Scarlett like Jaime? Did she feel anything as tame as like where he was concerned?
When too long passed before Scarlett answered, Kit threw out a few more ideas. “Or maybe you despise him. Or maybe you do this with everyone.”
It was the last one. It had to be the last one. “Are you suggesting that I’m difficult?”
“I’m not suggesting anything. I’m flat-out saying it: you’re really difficult.” It helped that when Kit said it, it sounded like a compliment.
Scarlett wanted to believe she was difficult in the way chess was difficult. She was worth studying, worth investing your time in, because she wasn’t easy to figure out and to master, like checkers, or a game of simple chance, like Candy Land.
No, she was freaking chess : the game that taught you philosophy and analysis and tactics and strategy and history. The game of kings, and the one that peasants could challenge them at.
Or maybe Scarlett was a problem that could be solved by a computer and was now hopelessly outmoded.
“Fair.”
“You said you need to know what to do?”
“Yeah. So my main options are staying or going,” Scarlett helpfully summarized.
“What’s the case for going?”
“I don’t have to apologize, for one. And I’m not good at this. I don’t know what I’m doing here.” Other than dipping her toes into water she had no intention of diving into.
“And why would you stay?”
“It’s my book. If I’m here, I have more editorial control.” Certainly that was what Violet would say. Not to mention Scarlett was contractually obligated to help write these scripts. Jaime probably wouldn’t make a stink, but he would be entitled to if he wanted.
But Scarlett didn’t give a hoot about contracts. Instead, some part of her worried that Jaime was right and leaving would be cowardly.
“And it would be ... mature to stick it out.”
Jaime had accused her of running away when things got hard, which wasn’t untrue. Scarlett ran toward hard things, sometimes. She’d memorized literally thousands of chess diagrams. During a match, she sometimes imagined dozens of scenarios before making a play. Even now, rather than quitting the sport, she was trying to fix it.
But other times, she didn’t have enough fight in her. Or she worried that fighting and losing was a higher price than she was willing to pay.
Seventeen years ago, when she’d gone to Tokyo, she’d been chasing a dream, sure. But she also hadn’t wanted to tell Jaime what she’d done. Hadn’t wanted to see the light dim in his eyes when he’d looked at her.
“Those are solid reasons. But what’s the big one?” Kit seemed to have sensed what Scarlett wasn’t saying.
The work they were doing was challenging; it was also rewarding. But the truth was that Scarlett liked eating with Jaime every night, and she’d even come around on those godforsaken time-outs in nature.
It was more than the routine he’d imposed, though. It was the way she and Jaime knew each other and how, because of all that history, they seemed to be growing together. Scarlett felt as if she were stretching for the first time in a long while. All through her muscles she could feel the sweet ache that could only be satisfied by more . The wound and the cure, both at once.
“He’s nice to me, he takes care of me, and I like it.”
“That asshole ,” Kit said, with faux intensity.
“Kit, I’m serious.”
They chuckled. “I know you are, but it doesn’t sound like you need advice. It sounds like you know exactly what you want to do.”
“Arg.” Scarlett bashed her head into the pillow several times. “I was hoping you were going to talk me out of it.”
“Then you need to make a better case for leaving. You know I only respond to facts.”
Scarlett wished she were that way, but it was well documented that her emotions, when they flared, got her in trouble. When she analyzed her blunders, the matches she should’ve won and had bungled instead, it almost always came down to moments when she’d let her heart and her gut run the show.
Her entire life, Scarlett had been at war with herself. The battle lines were between the rational part of her that had mastered the Pirc Defense and the volcanic push-pull of her feelings. This was just the latest skirmish.
“You aren’t worried that if I give in now and stay, I might stay forever?” Scarlett asked.
“Nope. Because I know you aren’t going to run away to a small town and become a trad wife and bake bread every day for forever.”
If Kit had eaten the sourdough bread with honey butter Jaime got at the farmers’ market, they would mock less. “No, it’s not about the place—”
It’s about him.
The realization hit Scarlett like a dead satellite, falling out of its orbit and smacking into the earth.
“Oh shit,” she said.
“Shit,” Kit agreed.
And there it was: the core truth of this that Scarlett hadn’t wanted to see, but which was as undeniable as the sunset streaking out over the mountain behind her. She was every bit as drawn to Jaime as she ever had been. Musgrove felt right because it had Jaime in it.
That was why she’d talked herself into giving him the rights, and how she’d finagled herself into writing the scripts with him. This had been inevitable from the moment he’d shown up in her lobby.
She realized that last night, when he’d said he hadn’t gotten over her, she’d wanted to bolt because she’d never gotten over him either.
“So what are you going to do about it?” Kit asked.
Well, that was as tricky as knowing what to do when you faced a critical decision in a match. With chess, she would evaluate her opponent’s position, try to understand what he was aiming for, and consider all the ways she could counter—but how did you counter when it was your heart, and not your king, that was in jeopardy?
“I dunno. I mean, I said I was going to go back to New York.” Running away had always been a solid gambit.
“And so you think you have to leave now?”
“I did sort of block myself in.”
“No you didn’t. Just don’t leave. Pretend that conversation never happened, and it will be like that time when you lost in Reykjavík and you acted like it never happened rather than unpacking it with us.”
Oof, that had been a hard one. “That loss still pisses me off so much.”
“Babe, everyone knows that.”
“It completely undermined my argument for the open league, and I don’t think to this day that I’ve regained the ground I lost, and I—”
“I really do understand.”
Kit had been fighting PAWN for longer than Scarlett had. So few people understood chess at the level they both did and understood what buttheads the folks who made up PAWN were. Scarlett was incredibly grateful to have Kit as a sounding board.
“Right. Wow, I feel bad about dumping on you like this.”
“Emotional dumping can be your signature move,” Kit told her.
“And here, I always thought that was the Queen’s Kiss,” Scarlett deadpanned.
The Queen’s Kiss was one of the most devastating forms of checkmate. It was when you landed your queen squarely in front of your opponent’s king, but they couldn’t take it—because if they did, then their king would immediately be taken by another piece of yours. It was an absolute power play, and Scarlett adored delivering it.
Kit snorted. “Nah, it’s being simultaneously messy and brilliant.”
“I just feel guilty about getting my emotional bile all over your hands.”
“Martina and I love you, even with all your drama. Especially with all your drama. In other words, we are soaked—totally soaked—in the same emotional bile.”
That made ... a lot of sense. Even if all of this was unfamiliar, it was nice.
Once Scarlett figured out what the heck was going on with Jaime, she was going to have to digest the fact that Kit and Martina were apparently her friends. Which meant that she was going to have to learn how to be a friend back.
Apparently, it involved care packages and listening. She could probably do that.
“We should all shower more.”
“That’s really just a recipe for a better life. Have you ever had a disappointing shower?”
“ Tons. ” But those had been back in Scarlett’s childhood, before she’d known that the water didn’t have to come out like a lukewarm tinkle.
It was the little things, really. Once you knew good water pressure, you’d do anything not to go back. That alone was enough to drive Scarlett toward chess dominance.
“Forget showers—you have bigger fish to fry.”
“Such as the fact that I like this man?”
“Yup. And I doubt running away is going to take care of that one.”
Scarlett knew this to be true. If she hadn’t gotten over Jaime in seventeen years, she wasn’t going to get over Jaime. Some scars you carried for life.
“I really should leave,” she said softly.
“But you won’t,” Kit replied, because they truly knew Scarlett.
Because Scarlett and Kit truly were friends.
“Thanks, Kit.”
“Anytime.”
So Scarlett put her clothing away in the small dresser, zipped up her suitcases, and returned them to the closet, which felt, ridiculously, more final than making up her mind to stay had been.
It should have been scary, but it wasn’t. Now she just had to get right with it.
Scarlett left her room for the kitchen, and by the time Jaime returned, she’d put together a tuna noodle casserole and slid it into the oven.
It was her turn to feed him for a change.
“So I see you’re not in New York,” he said, by way of greeting.
Scarlett couldn’t bring herself to make eye contact with him. She was worried that he would see something—everything—in her gaze.
“You see right,” she admitted, training her attention out the window.
“Are you staying?” he asked.
I shouldn’t—because I’ve realized how vulnerable I am here. But even if she were brave enough to say those words, and she wasn’t, they wouldn’t be true. And he cared about truth.
She’d admitted how far into this she was today, but if she were willing to examine herself more, she was certain she would’ve figured out the same thing on the very day he’d walked into her lobby.
For a supposedly smart woman, Scarlett could be really stupid sometimes.
“I am,” she answered him. And then on a deep breath, she turned her eyes to him. “I’m sorry for melting down yesterday.”
Now that she’d let herself admit that she hadn’t gotten over Jaime, that she was still as attracted to him now as she’d been in high school, her eyes were devouring the sight of him. The scruff on his chin. The curl of his hair. The shape of his hands, set on his hips.
Speaking of hips, his jeans—worn down by work, not by a tailor—were perfectly molded to them. Lucky jeans.
“You wanna talk about what prompted it?”
“Nope.” Not now, and probably not ever. Going down that path would only hurt them both.
“Okay,” he said, accepting this.
Scarlett needed to come up with a new plan of attack to match the new circumstances in which they found themselves. But for the first time in memory, she had nothing—which scared the ever-loving crap out of her.