Chapter Fifty
FIFTY
Hailey
Three minutes till midnight, Phoebe and I trek through the old cemetery in Victoria wearing woolen coats and laced boots.
Leaves crunch beneath our feet, and fog hangs low over lichen-covered headstones.
It’s eerily quiet, except for the hoot of an owl.
I’m unsurprised to see my best friend grinning like we’re at Disney World.
I’ve always loved how much Phoebe loves the strange and scary.
She makes me less afraid.
Her hand reaches out to mine, almost unconsciously, and I clasp her fingers as we hike farther off the path and the hill steepens. I place a protective hand on my round belly. She’s a kicker, in a hurry to meet the world, but it’s definitely not time yet.
December, she’ll be here.
I can make it two more months.
Olly says her restlessness is because of all the books we keep reading out loud. She senses the world is so much bigger than the cramped darkness she’s inside now. I already love her, as she fights to escape her confines. Like a princess in a tower.
I step over a root.
Phoebe touches the gold heart-shaped locket at her neck. “You think we’re the first here?” she whispers.
“I told them not to be late,” I whisper back. “I think we’re the ones cutting it close.”
She scoffs. “We’re early. Like by ten minutes.”
I raise my brown leather Tiffany Gondolo watch that Jake gifted me. He’d seen me admiring it online. “Late by like one minute.” I put the watch in her face.
She scoffs even louder. “Nonsense. All you have to do is spin that little knob on the side and we’re ten minutes early. Turn back time, Hails.”
“I’d rather not,” I say too deeply, my eyes flooding as they meet the depth of hers.
She squeezes my hand, and I squeeze back as she says, “Me either.”
In the very beginning, it might’ve just been two girls, Elizabeth and Addison, who likely went by other names. Just as likely their childhood friendship didn’t start over something so innocent—a shared snow cone on a hot summer day. Likely, that was just a story.
I’m satisfied letting theirs go, no longer plagued with needing every fragmented detail. Fiction or fact—their story has no bearing on ours anymore. We’ve been writing our own. Pens in our hands. Indelible ink that won’t be easily scrubbed away.
I know Phoebe has been tormented at the idea of our story mirroring our moms’, of history repeating itself, but she forgets one important thing.
In our beginning, there weren’t just two girls.
As we come into a clearing at the deepest part of the cemetery, the boys of our childhood turn around to greet us.
We are the last ones to arrive. “Just like old times,” Phoebe says to me, and we share a grin, remembering a long-ago job at a coed boarding school. Where we all snuck out into a graveyard and passed around a bottle of booze.
Only now, Oliver has an aluminum flask, and they’re no longer boys. They’re hardened, timeworn confidence men.
Rocky looks like he’s hating every moment of this, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Especially as Phoebe approaches him and he slides an arm around his wife.
I join the huddle, closing the circle as I slip beside Jake.
Our newest member. My pinched smile puckers my cheeks the longer his affectionate gaze touches mine, as though he loves me.
He does love you, Hailey. Oh, to be loved in a small town. Not just by one man but by two—Oliver perches an arm on Jake’s shoulder, and his grin drops down to me. It’s a little dreamy, but I’m certain I’m awake.
Even my dreams have never felt this peaceful and happy.
“Nice of you both to show up five minutes late,” Rocky says dryly.
“Thirty seconds late,” Phoebe corrects, jutting a finger at him.
He seizes her wrist. Just to hold her hand. “I see we’re playing the lying game.”
“We’re here now,” I chime in. “Fully intact. All truths.”
“Yeah, just in time.” Rocky arches his brows. “Nova was thirty seconds from calling Search and Rescue.”
“That was you,” Nova retorts, blowing on his cold palms.
Jake and Oliver laugh.
Rocky flips them off with his free hand, and Trevor swipes the flask from Olly to raise it in the air.
“Toast first,” Trevor says.
No one knows where this is headed. He might just want to drink. Rocky has been trying to get our brother to lay off the alcohol.
Then he decrees, “To the dead.”
Oliver is amused. “Is this a circle of remorse? Are we paying respects to the people we’ve offed?”
“Not so fucking loud,” Rocky chastises.
Phoebe scowls. “I’m not toasting to that creep.” Her dad.
Nova looks like he’d love to light this conversation on fire. Rocky, not far behind.
“No one is asking you to, PG,” Trevor snaps, then he slowly catches all our eyes around the circle. His arm goes back in the air. “To Rocky’s family.” He motions his flask over to the row of chipped headstones beside us.
All of Brayden Wolfe’s siblings, his mother and father, who’d been moved into the rear of the cemetery to be hidden and forgotten.
“To my family,” Rocky says to our brother. “The one that’s alive.”
My eyes mist as Rocky looks at me. He mouths, Sister.
I mouth back, Brother.
Trevor smiles, then drinks to that, and Oliver steals the flask back before my brother downs the whole thing in one gulp.
“Let’s get this over with,” Nova mutters, crouching to pick up a large shoebox on the mossy earth. Everyone but Jake begins to dig in pockets or grab things they’d set aside on the ground.
Rocky, a manila envelope. Trevor, a plastic grocery bag. Oliver, a waterproof container. Phoebe has her things in her purse, and I dig for a makeup pouch in my messenger bag.
The midnight hour has my mind buzzing.
A waxing moon as our light, we stare around at one another and exchange softer, fond expressions of our strange adolescence and lifetime spent together. Every city, every town, every short and long job.
Our story, as it’s been written. “And so,” I begin, narrating the legend we created as kids in a graveyard, “there once was a silver-tongue.”
Rocky’s dark smile crests. He places the manila envelope in the shoebox Nova outstretches to him.
“A seductress,” I say to my very best friend.
Phoebe grins, then dumps her old burners into Nova’s box.
I add, “A getaway.” Nova lifts the shoebox, showing he’s already placed his fakes in them.
“A chameleon.” I smile over at Oliver, who wags his brows at me, then pops open the stuffed waterproof container. He slides out checkbooks, burner phones, credit cards with fake names, and photo IDs into Nova’s shoebox, then raises a finger and says, “Attendez,” in a smooth French lilt. Wait.
We do wait for him as he reaches back into his peacoat pockets, digging out another stack of plastic IDs and passports.
Jake gives him a look, like What the hell?
Which only causes Oliver to grin. “I’ve been many people, Koning.
” He places the rest in the box. “Sorry for the intermission, Hailstorm.”
I try not to blush when he winks at me, and I clear my throat to say, “A mastermind.”
Nova extends the shoebox to me, his shadowy smile present.
Before Phoebe and I moved to Victoria, we got rid of most of our fake IDs. But I kept one just in case we needed a quick exit. A backup plan. I plop my old burner phones, a credit card, a checkbook, and one fake ID inside.
Done.
I release a breath and turn to Trevor. “A psychopath.”
Trevor overturns his plastic bag into Nova’s shoebox. Putting his fakes with the others.
I finish, “And a king.”
Jake bends his head, pressing a kiss to my hair. He doesn’t have any forgeries to dispose of. He’s never had a fake alias. A fake name.
The irony is that all our names are fake. None have ever been real. Except, these are the realest versions of ourselves, here in Victoria, and maybe that’s why it’s easy to give Nova our old, fake identities one by one.
Those we’ve kept around for side jobs and emergencies. Those we don’t really need anymore.
Phoebe asks Nova, “How are you destroying them?”
“Incinerator,” he replies, putting the lid on the box. Our old identities are going up in flames.
We all decided it’s safer to remain in Victoria without ties to the past. We’ve never been in one place for this long, and preserving who we are now is more important than trying to become someone else.
“Is this the end?” Trevor asks us. “Are we seriously never going to pull another job again?”
Oliver smiles first, then Rocky, and it feels infectious. I catch Phoebe’s big grin. Nova smiles down at the earth, and before I know it, my cheeks hurt, too.
“Once a spider, always a spider,” Rocky tells him.
“Translation?” Trevor asks.
“We’re going to protect this town and our identities here for the rest of our lives. In the way we all know how. Anyone who’s a threat to us becomes a mark.”
Rocky never lied when he said he’d never quit grifting. He’s conditioned to protect us, and even when the dust has settled, he’ll still set his sights on the people who kick it up.
I look at Olly. “Our final web is Victoria.”
He smirks. “I do love trapping prey.”
“And predators,” Phoebe adds.
“Always,” Rocky says deeply.
Trevor begins to really smile, happy we aren’t disbanding. We’re just doing things our way now.
“I gotta head out,” Nova says, tucking the shoebox beneath his arm.
“Midnight booty call?” Phoebe teases.
“No, I’m exhausted,” Nova says. “You all are fucking exhausting.”
“Let the old man sleep,” Oliver quips.
Nova must really be tired. He doesn’t remind Olly that he’s only minutes older than him. In the moonlight, the long scar on his cheek is more noticeable. I know Rocky wanted to protect Nova from killing Varrick by being the one to do it, but I think it had to be Nova in the end.
Phoebe said he’s more at peace.
He gives us a tired, stiff wave, but we all know he’ll wait in his Pontiac near the exit. Just to ensure we all make it out of the cemetery okay.
Trevor trudges in the same direction. “I do have a booty call.”
“Ew.” Phoebe grimaces.
“He’s your actual brother, PG.” Trevor points toward Nova’s shadow.
“One was a joke.”
Trevor opens his mouth, but Rocky cuts in, “Go fuck your girlfriend. Don’t waste time antagonizing Phoebe.”
Jake sighs. “We really need to go over what shouldn’t be said when the baby is born.”
“Yep.” I nod in agreement.
Trevor strolls down the slope, hands in his pockets. He fades into the darkness. Then Oliver walks backward in the same direction out of the cemetery.
I find myself drifting.
Not a mental drift.
A good drift as my feet—one in front of the other—follow Oliver, and Jake isn’t so immune to the pull. His strong arm curves around my frame, warming me, and he smiles as Oliver lifts his flask and toasts, “To Baby.” We still haven’t decided on a name for her yet.
Baby, she’s been for now.
Oliver drinks, then makes another toast to endings and beginnings.
“And middles,” I add.
“Why a middle?” Jake asks me.
I look from him to Oliver. “That’s where most love is made.”
Their emerging smiles cause my face to heat, and I hope I never stop blushing. I hope love always kisses my cheeks with fire.
When we’re farther down the hill, I cast one glance backward. Phoebe and Rocky linger behind together, as they’ve done most of our lives, stealing a clandestine moment at the headstones.
And I smile softly.