Thirty-Five
IHEAR THEIR BICKERING BEFORE I REACH MY DAD’S BATHROOM.
“At least wash it first,” Tom implores.
“Tom,” McCoy replies patiently. “It might surprise you to learn I have a few years of shaving on you.”
“Which is why what you’re doing should horrify you.”
I open the door, hating the headache I feel pulsing in my temples. I reach in vain for my favorite cure—vengeance. The room yields ready material. I remember when my mom lived here, the care with which she chose every painting on the walls. I remember when one day, during Dash’s marriage to Lexi, they were gone. I imagine Maureen’s eagerness to redecorate, to erase the past.
It… doesn’t work. For once, fury doesn’t erase the hurt or the stress.
I need something stronger. I need a win.
“Is there a problem?” I ask irritably.
McCoy stands at the sink, his jacket thrown over the ottoman. His beard is half shaved off. It’s hilariously ungainly, or it would be, if I were in the mood for humor.
Tom perches on the pearl-white tub. His distress is visible. “Yeah, there’s a problem,” he says, gesturing with urgency in the unkempt McCoy’s direction. “He’s just using your dad’s razor. You can get infections, or even, like, hepatitis. I don’t know,” he elaborates hastily. “But you’re definitely not supposed to share razors.”
“We’re doing a lot of things we’re not supposed to today,” McCoy remarks.
“Not unhygienically—” Tom starts to plead.
I interrupt him, impatient. “I meant a real problem.”
McCoy halts his shaving. His eyes find mine in the mirror. Tom turns to me, his objection dying on his lips while his expression shifts from surprise to concern.
Only with their reactions do I realize how harshly my words rang. It embarrasses me. Worse, it makes me feel guilty. The people in the room with me now have done nothing except perform excellently in the ways I’ve requested of them. They don’t deserve the worst of me. It’s poor leadership.
“Sorry,” I say hastily. “Look, if it makes you feel better, I’m ninety-nine percent sure Dash doesn’t have hepatitis.”
I’m hoping to make the moment light. Instead, the joke falls heavily to the marble.
Tom’s expression doesn’t waver. “What did your dad say to you?” he asks.
“Nothing,” I reply.
He just waits. When he raises an eyebrow, it isn’t prying or judgmental. It’s… kind. He’s inviting me to confide.
“Knight, I need you on Kevin,” I say.
Tom watches me, no doubt noticing the impersonal use of his code name. It’s not a closed door—it’s a slammed one.
“Whatever you want,” he says after a moment.
He strides out, letting his hand linger against my side when he passes me. It’s kindness I don’t need and kindness I don’t deserve. The half smile I muster is forced, imitation like my shouting on the stairs.
I move farther into the bathroom, the walls echoing the buzz of the electric razor. Little by little, McCoy transforms back into the teacher I used to know. Right down to his expression, the inquisitive sensitivity flickering in the glances he darts me. His knack for knowing when a person was having a hard day never failed to impress me. While he might be the world’s shittiest kidnapper, he was a wonderful teacher.
“You know,” he ventures, “I’m always here if you need someone to talk to.”
I walk to the ottoman and sit, putting distance between us. “You shouldn’t want to help me,” I remind him.
He puts down the razor and wipes the shaving cream from his face with a towel. “Olivia, what happened to me wasn’t your fault. I did my job, and I would do it again.”
I kick the leg of the ottoman, feeling like a child. While McCoy inspired me and was encouraging whenever he called on me in class, even when I wasn’t always prepared, neither his lectures nor his kindness were what I valued most.
He pushed me. No one ever pushed me. Not in the right ways. Everyone else pushed me to shut up or acquiesce when I irritated them. He pushed me because he believed in me.
The problem was, I was his student in the worst year of my life. The year my parents split up, the year I was kicked out of my own home. The year everything changed. The semester at Berkshire was already paid for, so I was allowed to stay until the end of the school year, but I knew it would be my last before I transferred to East Coventry.
I walked the halls feeling like their pretentious stone was crumbling around me. Like every marble staircase would collapse under my feet, leaving me in some sinister underside. Of course my grades suffered. I wasn’t good about doing readings or homework, not when I was focused on surviving the ruin of the life I knew.
McCoy was the only one who cared. He knew something was going on at home, but when he scheduled a meeting with me and my parents, Dash didn’t show. He was confident the donations he’d made to the school would ensure my grade point average.
It was what the rest of my teachers were doing. Practically Berkshire tradition.
The entire school was pretend, right down to its design. With stately walls designed to emulate impressive schools of England, when really, it had been constructed in Rhode Island in the eighties with investments from rich parents just like my dad. The place was a master class in hiding ambition and indulgence under facades of pretty propriety. The halls emulating Ivy League institutional legacy, the dances offering veiled excuses for debauchery, the promises of how we were future world leaders and entrepreneurial visionaries when everyone knew grades were cheated for and purchased. It was pretend, pretend, pretend.
I wanted no part of it.
I was determined to earn whatever I could. For weeks in the guesthouse, I stayed up studying while my mom worked late shifts. We woke up exhausted together. She quizzed me over instant-noodle dinners. Our final English exam was a comprehensive Shakespeare review worth twenty percent of my final grade. Even if I got one hundred percent on it, the best I could do was pull my C-minus to a B-minus.
I did.
I cried when I saw it, and for the first time in weeks, my tears were happy. That exam taught me I could do whatever I set before me. It taught me what I was capable of. Without it, I never would have planned something like today.
Is it kind of ridiculous to attribute my heist aspirations to The Taming of the Shrew? Yes.
Is it the truth? Yes.
I was incredibly proud of myself. Proud in a way I hadn’t ever felt in my entire life. McCoy was proud of me, too. He’d never had a student get one hundred percent before.
My dad was… not.
When Dash saw my transcript—saw the single B-minus I earned in a string of A-minuses I decidedly did not—he was furious.
In the end, donations don’t control just GPAs. McCoy was fired the very next week.
“I’m serious, Olivia,” McCoy says, turning to face me. “You are not to blame for what happened to me.”
I meet his eyes, hating how his kindness to me is only a reminder of the kindness he can no longer give classrooms of students. “It was because of me, though,” I say, letting emotion crack my voice.
“It was because of your father,” McCoy replies quickly. His tone is decisive. “I’ve met a lot of fathers over the years. Yours isn’t a good one.”
His judgment makes me incomprehensibly, immediately angry. “You don’t know him,” I retort.
McCoy reads me, like I’m Ophelia or Anna Karenina or another of his doomed heroines. When I see his gaze settle into calm scrutiny, I know what comes next. I remember it from the open discussions he would encourage in his class.
“Why do you defend him?” he asks patiently.
Why? Why do I jump at chances to defend Dashiell Owens? Why do I come to weekly dinners here while I feel like an intruder in my old life? Why do I want to impress him? Why do I even care?
I feel myself fighting to evade the questions, reaching for the one I find more comfortable. Why is McCoy asking? It’s hard enough to wrestle privately with my relationship with my father. Why did he have to invite the conversation out into the open? Why did he have to expose the way daughterly loyalty has its grip on me, like a little marionette—hating her strings, yet knowing she’d collapse without them?
“Maybe I’m misunderstanding,” he continues, conceding, explaining himself. “Misunderstanding you or him… Olivia, do you have fond memories of him? Was there a time your relationship was good?”
I seize on the opportunity he’s offered, the search for the empirical proof. The scientific, statistical measure saying, You, Olivia Owens, were loved.
I search and I search and I search.
It would make it so easy if I could just find what he’s asking for, I know. It would quell the conundrum in me. It would make me make sense—my hesitation for vengeance, my hunger for Dash’s admiration.
Yet with every passing second, my silent struggle growing more frantic, I find nothing. I scour Easters when he grimaced at the egg-dyeing colors little Olivia got on her hands or her meaninglessly expensive dress. I hunt every dinner I can remember for encouragement or interest instead of sarcasm and scrolling his phone. I scrounge for signs of companionship, finding only weekends when his absence for “investor events” prompted neither surprise nor loneliness. I pillage my own past, looking with sticky fingers for valuables, yet come up empty-handed.
When I look up, McCoy knows I have failed.
I have no real explanation for why part of me clings, even now, to Dash Owens.
I have to, I want to say. I don’t know how to get the words out so that he understands. I have to or else my soul would split and my whole self would fall into the chasm left in its midst.
“I’m just saying,” McCoy replies softly. “You deserve never to doubt your parents love you, Olivia.”
I have the windpipe-crushing urge to cry again. To let McCoy comfort me. To listen to his words of encouragement and share with him everything my dad just said to me. I kicked you out of this house once, and I can kick you out again. It would be so easy to let him help me.
Then what?
I’ll have only given one more person the power to hurt me. To reject me. To betray me. If not today, then one day.
I can’t do it.
I decide I’m past accommodating his miserable kindnesses. The anger finds my words for me, clean like fire, changing my marionette strings into dynamite fuses.
“He’s the only father I have,” I snap. “You’re certainly not my dad.”
Immediately, McCoy’s expression falls, wounded. Still, he’s too good, too unlike Dash. He hears the recoil in my voice and meets me with understanding instead of retaliation. “I know that,” he says gently. “I can still be here for you, though.”
No. No, you can’t.“What you can do is the job.” I stand up.
McCoy studies me, pausing, then nods. He turns back to the mirror to wipe the rest of his face.
I walk to the door, resisting the urge to meet his eyes in the mirror.
I’m grateful to Mr. McCoy. He taught me I’m a good student. I’m capable of learning. I can pull myself out of anything if I set my mind to it.
I learned my lesson well this last year. I won’t give anyone the power to hurt me again. Even if it means pushing away the people I care about.