CHAPTER 14 Kimberly
Kimberly
He thought he was grieving a brother. He never realized he was grieving an entire future.
Penny turned twenty on a Saturday that the sky had the decency to stay clear.
We took her to Golden Gardens. Katelyn had packed a wool blanket that smelled faintly of the beach, along with a lopsided chocolate cake she’d baked at midnight.
It leaned dangerously to the left, the frosting slipping off the edge because Katelyn decorated the exact way she lived—with massive enthusiasm and zero spatial awareness.
I brought the cargo that mattered: the presents, wrapped carefully in thin tissue paper.
But Penny brought herself. That was the only thing that mattered. Watching her walk across the salt-bleached grass toward the shoreline in a bright yellow sundress for once, her face tipped up to catch the sun, was worth everything.
We spread the blanket near the shore where the sand grew sparse and met the rough grass.
The three of us sat in a tightly packed row, eating turkey sandwiches and talking about nothing important, which was the point.
Katelyn had brought a thermos of the hot chocolate she made with heavy cream, cinnamon, and a sharp kick of cayenne—the exact recipe our mother used to brew on Christmas mornings when the apartment got too cold.
"Alright, open them," Katelyn ordered, shoving the wrapped bundle into Penny’s lap with enough force to nearly dislodge her paper plate. "Open them right now before I lose my mind and do it for you."
Penny unwrapped her presents. The calligraphy set from me, and the custom-made brushes from Jack.
She finally lifted her head, her eyes bright and furious with the effort of not crying in public.
"Kim," she whispered, her voice cracking. "This is… Do you know how long I’ve wanted these?"
Then, she slammed the lids shut, clutched the box tightly against her ribcage, and said very quietly, "I’m going to paint tomorrow. A real canvas. I’m going to start tomorrow."
I caught Katelyn’s eye across Penny’s bent shoulders. Katelyn looked back at me, her usual chaotic energy stilling into a rare, fierce look of pride, and we both held our breath so the fragile beauty of the moment wouldn’t shatter.
Naturally, the peace didn't survive the first photo. Katelyn whipped out her phone, lens pointed directly at Penny’s face. "Smile, birthday girl!"
Penny instantly threw both hands over her face, "No! Absolutely not. Put that away. I look like a proper ghost who just discovered public libraries."
"You look beautiful, Pen. Stop it."
"I look like a case study for vitamin D deficiency. Take a video instead. I am highly videogenic. I am completely unphotogenic."
Katelyn scoffed, adjusting her angles. "That is a completely fabricated lie, you look beautiful either way."
"You are only saying it because it’s my birthday!" Penny yelled through her fingers. "In still photos, I look like a hostage being moved between safe houses. In motion, I have a personality and a semi-functioning jawline."
Katelyn snapped three photos in rapid succession anyway.
Penny let out a shriek and lunged across the blanket.
What followed was a ridiculous, chaotic sprint, the two of them chasing each other around the driftwood like toddlers.
Penny was shouting about her constitutional right to privacy and image control, while Katelyn dodged behind a green metal trash can, cackling like a hyena.
I sat on the grass and laughed until my abdominal muscles literally scheduled a strike. I watched them and thought of our mother, knowing she would have loved every second of it.
Penny caught Katelyn by the arm and both of them went stumbling sideways in a tangle of limbs. Arms windmilling wildly in a desperate attempt to stay upright, Katelyn crashed backward directly into a man walking down the paved path.
A small child perched on his hip let out a delighted squeal. The man caught Katelyn's elbow before she went down.
I recognized the broad set of his shoulders before he even turned his head.
Logan Whitlock stood on the path, balancing a dark-haired little girl with enormous, laughing eyes and a slightly crushed birthday crown made of purple construction paper.
Lily. She was wearing a tulle tutu over a pair of muddy denim jeans, and she was staring at Katelyn as if she were the most entertaining piece of street theater in the Pacific Northwest.
"Oh my God," Katelyn gasped, rapidly backpedaling and smoothing down her hair. "I am so incredibly sorry. I was being aggressively pursued by a feral youth and my internal gyroscope completely failed."
"No blood, no foul," Logan said, his voice warm and easy as he adjusted the little girl on his hip.
I walked up to them, leaning to Lily’s level.
"Happy birthday, princess," I murmured.
"I’m SIX," she announced to the entire beach, holding up a chaotic fan of all ten fingers.
Logan chuckled, reaching over to gently tap her hand down. "That’s ten, Lil. We’ve discussed the mathematics of this."
"I KNOW," she shouted, completely unbothered by accuracy.
We ended up singing right there on the gravel path.
Two distinct birthdays, celebrated in tandem, with Penny and Lily standing side-by-side like old friends while Logan, Katelyn, and I thoroughly butchered the melody in three completely different keys.
Lily did a frantic, spinning tutu dance in the sand.
Penny pretended to be mortified, rolling her eyes toward the sky, but she couldn’t keep the brilliant, soft smile from breaking across her face.
Halfway through the second chorus, Lily reached out and blindly grabbed Penny’s hand.
Penny didn’t pull away. Her fingers closed around the little girl’s small hand, and as I watched my stubborn, terrified sister look down at a six-year-old stranger, she looked, for the first time in a year, like a girl who believed she actually had a future to walk into.
When the sun began to dip into the water and we had to say our goodbyes, Logan stepped close to thank me for the impromptu celebration.
But I noticed—because reading people's faces had become a survival skill even when I desperately wanted a vacation from them—the way his eyes drifted back to Katelyn as she gathered the thermos.
It was a soft, intensely focused look that stretched half a second too long.
That night, I stayed at our house, which smelled of cinnamon, burnt chocolate, and Penny’s lavender oil. I lay stretched out on the couch with my woolen socks propped in Katelyn’s lap, detailing every single tactical failure of the past week.
"Alright," Katelyn said, shutting her book with a definitive snap and pulling a legal pad from beneath the couch cushion with the speed of a seasoned military strategist. "Let’s draft the blueprints."
She settled against a massive beanbag in the corner, clicking her pen. "The primary objective is to force Jackson and Logan into the same space, for a duration long enough that they are required to communicate like biological relatives rather than warring nation-states. Correct?"
"Correct."
"And the current situation is that Jackson would rather digest shards of glass than spend voluntary minutes with his brother, and Logan acts like an emotional lightning rod, absorbing the frost without pushing back."
"Devastatingly correct."
"Right." She tapped the plastic cap of the pen against her front teeth. "Strategy One: The Confined Quarter Matrix."
"The what?"
"The classic locked-room protocol," she said, her pen already flying across the paper in the same frantic, illegible scrawl she’d possessed since the seventh grade.
"Enemies forced into an enclosed space. They are incapable of exiting, so proximity forces an organic dialogue.
You bring Logan into the private study under the guise of an executive presentation.
Jackson is already anchored there. You introduce the files, you step out for a domestic distraction, and you let human nature run its course. "
"Or premeditated homicide runs its course."
"We are operating under the assumption of peace, Kim. Write it down."
Monday evening, I executed the play. I called Logan under the pretext of cross-referencing the West Coast supply chain projections before the Q3 presentation, and he agreed with his usual, easy lack of friction. "Sure, Kim. I’ll swing by later so we can work on it." He always said sure.
The study went cold the second Logan walked in.
Jackson was seated behind the mahogany desk, a financial report open in front of him. He didn’t rise. He simply lifted his head, his silver-gray eyes cutting first to his brother, then to me, and finally to the minuscule space between us.
"I was under the impression this was an internal audit, Ms. Bishop," he said, his voice clipped and freezing. "I didn’t realize we were operating as a cooperative committee."
"The vendor matrix is highly irregular," I said, keeping my tone sweet as I dropped a stack of manila folders onto the center table. "Logan offered his division’s data to streamline the integration."
"How remarkably philanthropic of him." Jackson’s eyes tracked Logan with a sharp, hawkish intensity as his brother moved around the long table.
As we began opening the files, Jackson’s attention shifted.
It wasn’t the standard corporate surveillance I was used to at the tower; it was something far more concentrated.
Every time Logan leaned across the table, Jackson's eyes were on me. He wasn’t reading his report anymore.
He was watching us. Specifically, he was watching me, and the look had a dark weight to it that made me squirm internally.
Logan unclasped his briefcase, completely ignoring the sub-zero climate. "The supply chain metrics need to be anchored against the Q3 overheads. Kim mentioned you’d already finalized the baseline analysis, Jack."
"I don’t recall authorizing my personal analysis for public distribution," Jackson countered, his fingers tightening against the edge of his tablet.