Chapter 39
It felt like a purge. One she hadn’t been planning.
But sitting here in the empty house after Rowan asked her exactly how many dollars she would need him to find to save her property felt almost freeing.
It had been a shock having him add twenty-five percent to whatever her high number might be and telling her he thought he could make it happen.
But she hadn't been prepared for him to wade boldly into the muddy flood waters of their own pasts.
Yet here he was, braving the murky depths, and she had to fight hard to tell herself that he wasn't doing it for her. That it didn’t make him brave. It still made him the one who protected his parents for fifteen years instead of looking just a little bit deeper.
She wanted to cast a spell on her heart, to wrap a steel cage around it. Though she hadn't seen him in well over a decade until just recently, this man knew her. If she did it, she had a sneaking feeling he would not only know what she was casting but why.
She held her hands and her spell back as she sat there next to him, almost questioning why she'd sat back down, but it was clear the conversation wasn't over.
They were going to have to dissect everything.
She put it out there—the things that Rowan might not know.
“Your dad came to Story when he got the prostate cancer diagnosis.”
She watched as Rowan's eyes flew wide. “Did Story turn him away?”
He didn't say it, but she finally heard in the notes under his words that he felt Story would have been justified in doing so.
Annelise tipped her head at him, offering her best dumbass look. “Of course she didn't. She did her best, just like she does for everyone here.”
When he didn't say anything, she added, “I think that's why he killed himself.”
Rowan shook his head, the first action that looked like anything other than a wounded animal whose captor kept standing over it and shooting it again and again.
She hated being that captor, but her bullets were truth—truths that Rowan needed to hear, and he wasn't going to die from them. Even if he might feel like it.
She had carried it for fifteen years, and damnit if she wasn't done with it.
She was offloading every bad feeling tonight, and if he couldn't bear the weight of it, well, that was on him.
She'd borne it when she was seventeen. She’d borne it again when she was eighteen and her mother died and she graduated without her mother there.
She carried far more with her—the loss of Marina and Teagan, of Monica disappearing.
The moment she and Story had turned to each other, eyes wide, hearts heavy.
Story hadn't even spoken. It was Annelise who whispered the words: Monica's dead.
She carried all of it. She carried the weight of being told she was the most powerful and yet never being able to set things right.
She was a water witch who wasn't able to stop the flood from taking her home, who wasn't able to stop the waters that lingered from hosting black mold that piece by piece stole her mother's health until ultimately it strangled her.
Annelise and Story had felt the effects too, getting sick often, but they'd bounced back.
Melissa, with her own internal anger that Annelise fully understood, hadn't bounced.
Even when the walls had been torn out and cleared, and Annelise worked extra shifts to make it happen, it hadn’t been enough. Story found money every place she could to cover their expenses because Melissa had lost her job by then. But it was all too little, too late.
It felt like she was ripping off layers of grief and anger. She abandoned them on the floors around her, and it seemed they melted through and away. Annelise just wished she could have done it earlier.
“You really think my father killed himself because Story helped him?”
“Story helped him. He and your mom didn't tell anyone here that there was likely black mold in our walls, too.
The same thing happened to everybody, and they didn't even tell us to look. He took his higher salary and moved you all up the mountainside. Then, when he needed her help, Story opened her door and did her best and refused to take any of his money. So yeah, I think maybe he felt really damned guilty about it.”
It felt good to say that. She had believed it for so long, and she almost wished Rowan would counter her.
He was a lawyer. If he had evidence, he would lay it between them.
But when he did, it wasn't with a heavy smack of proof and justice.
It was simply reaching into a bag that he'd set on the other side of him and pulling out some papers.
He very quietly handed them over, and she shuffled through.
“Police report?” she asked. She'd been prepared for anger. She'd been prepared for sadness. But not for this odd passing of evidence.
“The police said it wasn't a suicide. The coroner agreed.”
She couldn't help the snort that escaped. “Please, Rowan. You know who your father is in this town.”
Martin Velasco had promoted and promoted again through the ranks at the plant.
He'd moved his family up the hill again.
Though he hadn't openly bragged, everyone in town knew that even though the kids didn't live at home anymore, Martin Velasco made sure they each had their own bedroom.
He brought in contractors from out of town to install the most wind-resistant shingles.
He imported installers to put in the double-paned windows that were stormproof and UV-proof for a clear view that looked over everyone else in town.
It was a beautiful house, but Annelise had never quite been able to get past what it represented. When she'd been in it the first time the night of the flood, it had been too thick and dark outside to see the mountainside the Velascos lorded over.
Even if she didn't believe they felt that way, the house made a statement. Everyone in town knew it. “The local police were not going to burden the Velasco family with a suicide.”
He shrugged, just a slight movement of his shoulders, a tilt of his head as if to say, I guess we'll never know.
But she flipped through the pages—coroner's report, autopsy, and then the police report, crime scene photos and all. She held a photograph toward him. “Look.”
He looked at her, the two of them making eye contact again and not in anger.
This time, she felt bad for him, and she told herself to shut it the hell down.
She couldn't harbor feelings for a man who would align his loyalties elsewhere.
It was one thing when they were seventeen, but they were adults now and, because they'd promised themselves so thoroughly at such a young age, there couldn't be anything casual between them. Now she knew that.
Sleeping with him had been playing with fire.
A sweet fire, for sure, but nothing she could afford to do again.
Even now, sitting here with her anger at last peeled away, she saw that her justice was breaking him, and she hated it.
She hated that he felt that way. Hated that he was about to see what she was going to show him.
“I've looked at that,” he told her. “I don't understand what you're saying. How does this prove anything?”
She held the photograph upright, the moonlight leeching the ink through so she could see from the backside what she was showing him. “The footprints are clearly aimed toward the water.”
Rowan nodded. Surely, he'd read these police reports over and over. “They said he slipped and fell. Maybe hit his head.”
“He didn't slip. He walked straight into the water.”
This time he frowned, leaning closer to the picture. “What do you mean? How can you tell?”
He seemed to be asking what witchcraft she used to determine this, and the answer was none. It was called hard evidence. He wouldn't be able to believe it away.
“The footprints walk into the water. None of them slip. If he slipped, it was after he was already in the river. There are no marks here where he walked indicating that he slid, tripped, fell back onto the mud. It was muddy, look. If he slipped, it would show. But he walked a very straight, easy line into the river.”
Rowan's eyes widened, the green and brown mingling with grief resurfaced, given what she'd showed him.
Silence stretched between them, but he didn't tell her she was wrong.
Eventually, after staring at the page in her hands where she held it up between them, he nodded.
Even then, she couldn't set it down. The flimsy sheet was the only barrier between them, and it stayed there until he gently pulled it out of her fingers, laying it on the ground beside him.
She watched as his eyes fell closed. She told herself she knew this man, and she did, but she was tapped into him for the first time in a very long time.
She felt the grief as it rolled through his chest, the anger at his father for doing it, and under that, almost pushing that anger out of the way, swelling in the background, was anger for the way she and the other families on the road had been treated.
She told herself she could sit there in the silence and let him stew, but she couldn't. She couldn't do that to him.
“None of it was heinous,” she said. “It wasn't even a white lie about the black mold. Just silence.”
He nodded. “My mother must feel like shit, because the family that moved in there abandoned the house.”
Annelise understood what he didn't say. No one who lived here on the river road had the kind of money to abandon a house they had bought.
“They must have found more. I'm sure she thought she got it all.” Annelise offered it as consolation and also because she did know—or she believed—that Vienna Velasco would not knowingly leave a danger behind, or worse, sell it to someone.
She fought with her feelings, wondering why she was the one brushing off the Velasco family sins now. “Your father took a promotion that was offered to him.”
“He fired her,” Rowan added.
Annelise nodded. That one was harder to swallow. By that point the family had moved, which means they'd already dug out the black mold from the house.
“Did he know about the mold when he fired my mom?” she asked, only wondering now for the first time if Vienna had managed to hide it from everyone. She could have said things were wrong with the walls and that they needed the work.
“We all knew eventually. I don't remember when he knew though.”
Annelise nodded. It was another nail in Martin Velasco's coffin, and she hated that he was gone and that he'd done it to himself. She’d once thought of him as a father. She’d loved him and readily believed he was just a good man.
Maybe somewhere in there, he still was, and when he saw the sins stacked up, he hadn't been able to live with them.
Annelise had shed much of her anger and grief tonight.
She’d done it by shifting Rowan's world, turning the bedrock he’d built his life on to sand with a snap of her fingers.
She could feel the turmoil coursing through him, and she told herself she didn't want to, and that she couldn't help herself.
Leaning into him then, shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh, temple to temple, she found that somehow it was her apologizing. “I'm sorry, Rowan.”
She didn't see him nod, but she felt the movement. When she turned her head toward his, she felt his breath in the air. It was magic, and it was hope, and she told herself she was stupid for thinking it. His wide eyes looked at her and into her in a way that hadn't happened in so many years.
This time, as she leaned into him, she knew it wouldn't just be sex.
She wouldn't be able to lie to herself the same way and say it didn't mean anything.
It was going to mean everything. She inhaled the clean scent of his breath, feeling the bond between them tightening down, the fortress walls around them sliding shut, keeping the world at bay like they once had.
She blinked when he moved. Jumping to his feet, he reached down and snatched his bag and shook his head as if he could shake off everything that had just happened.
She was too stunned to ask, but he blurted out, “I have to go.”
She would have jumped to her feet and followed him, but she couldn't quite make her muscles work. She couldn't make the world work. This wasn't supposed to be happening, but she did call out, “Are you going home?”
“No,” he said as he passed through the still-open doorway, walking onto the porch and into the moonlight. “I can't go home again.”