CHAPTER 12 Kimberly #2
"My sister is in a clinical oncology unit, Jackson. She is nineteen years old, and she is fighting a malignant brain tumor. The only reason I am standing in this room letting you walk over me like dirt every single day is because the stipend from your mother’s will is the only thing keeping her clinic bills paid.
That’s it. That’s the entire grand scheme.
I don’t want your company. I don’t want your fortune. I just want my baby sister to live."
I wiped the back of my hand across my nose, my chest heaving as I took a step backward toward the door.
"I don’t expect you to care. I know you’re not capable of it. But could you at least stop sabotaging her? Could you at least leave the one small part of my life that isn’t about your family’s money alone?"
He sat there like a statue carved from limestone, his eyes burning into mine with something that looked horribly like panic, but I couldn't breathe that air for one more second.
I turned and ran.
I flew through the marble foyer, threw open the massive front door, and tore down the limestone steps into the freezing night.
Behind me, from the top of the terrace steps, his voice cut through the dark.
"Kim!"
I didn’t look back. I hit the iron gates and kept running.
I didn’t have a destination. I just walked until my lungs felt like they were filled with crushed glass.
I walked down the long, tree-lined avenues of Medina where the mansions retreated behind thirty-foot privacy hedges, past the black, motionless expanse of the lake, until the grid began to shift.
The houses grew smaller, the lawns shrank into patches of gravel, and the streets finally began to look like the ones I had grown up with.
I ended up at a deserted municipal park outside the estate lines.
It was entirely empty, the rusted swing sets creaking rhythmically in the wind.
It looked exactly like the playground I used to take Penny to when our mother was too sick to leave the apartment.
I used to push her on those swings for hours, her little sneakers kicking at the air, while I made up ridiculous, elaborate lies about the houses down the block.
That one belongs to a secret princess, I’d tell her. And that big one at the end of the street? That’s going to be ours someday, Pen. When we’re rich and nobody’s allowed to be sick anymore.
I sat down on one of the wet rubber swings, my fingers gripping the freezing iron chains, and let myself completely dissolve.
I thought about our father, a midnight intrusive thought.
Did he ever sit in a car somewhere in another city and wonder if his daughters were warm?
Did he carry any scars from the day he packed a single duffel bag and walked out on us, or were the marks entirely ours to bear?
The happy memories were always the ones that inflicted the deepest damage—the rare Saturdays he’d taken us for ice cream, because they proved he had been capable of loving us once.
I lost track of the time. Then, a pair of sharp, blinding halogens cut through the chain-link fence of the park, flooding the sand pit with stark white light. A car door slammed—a heavy, metallic sound that echoed off the plastic slides.
I recognized the stride before the man even cleared the headlights.
Jackson Whitlock crossed the wet sand toward me.
The wind caught in his hair, whipping it wild, the drizzle plastering it across his forehead. The usual frost in his expression was gone. His eyes were wide, and what I saw in them looked like fear.
He stopped exactly six feet away, his chest heaving as he stared down at me.
"I shouldn’t have done it," he said. "The package. I didn’t know… I didn’t look at the label, but that is not an excuse. It’s an explanation."
He took a sharp, ragged breath that fogged instantly in the freezing air between us. "I’m sorry, Kim. I’m so goddamn sorry."
I leaned my head back against the rusted iron chain of the swing, looking up at him through the drizzle. Jackson Whitlock, the cold prince of Pacific Northwest logistics, standing in a waterlogged sandbox at ten o’clock on a Friday night, asking a gardener for forgiveness.
"Your apology doesn’t fix the box, Jackson," I whispered, my voice cold and dead. "It doesn’t change the cycle. You’ll go back to the office on Monday, you’ll look at me through that glass pane, and you’ll find another way to audit my breathing.
Because you cannot handle the fact that your mother loved a stranger more than she trusted your spreadsheet. "
The rain was falling faster now, the drizzle picking up with the wind. Jack looked at the sky and then back at me. "Kim, please. Just get in the car."
"Go back to your mansion, Mr. Whitlock." I turned my face away from him.
The rain hammered down around us, the fat drops splashing hard against his leather shoes. His presence radiated like a heat source in the freezing air, vibrating with a tension that made the space between us feel volatile.
"I am not leaving you in a municipal park during a flash flood warning," he said, his voice low and hard.
"I’d rather drown than ride three miles in your passenger seat."
"You don’t have an umbrella, not that it’d help.
" He took two steps closer, his boots sinking into the wet sand until he was standing directly over me, blocking out the wind.
"You can either let me take you back to a dry room, or you can stay on this swing and ensure your sister spends her twentieth birthday sitting in a hospital waiting room while you’re treated for hypothermia.
Those are the two available variables, Kim. Choose."