Chapter 4 Wren
Iwas right: Angelo Visconti can pick you up with one arm without grunting.
“Water,” I announce as he wraps an arm around my waist, hauls me to his side, and lifts me a few inches from the ground.
I lean back against his forearm to stare up at him.
Gotta make sure he’s listening. “Lots and lots of water. Do you have electrolyte packets? If not, salt will do.” I poke the top button of his shirt.
“Just a pinch though, otherwise she might have a puffy face for tomorrow.”
He checks his watch. “That would be a travesty.”
“Oh, God. Don’t even put it out into the universe.
” His shoulder connects with the nightclub door, and we spill out into the icy night.
I pull my knees up to avoid my socks touching the veranda’s wet concrete.
“She has silk pillows, right? Make sure she piles her hair up into a loose ponytail—emphasis on loose—and that she sleeps on her back.”
Glancing to where Rory is sliding into his car, Angelo dips his free hand into the pocket of his pants and pulls out his cell. Then he lazily checks his messages before putting it away again. “Silk ponytail. Got it.”
My frosted sigh grazes his cheekbone. He’s not paying attention. “You know what, maybe I should just stay over tonight. Rory’s lax with her skincare routine at the best of times, let alone when she’s—”
“Wren.” Angelo comes to a stop under the heat lamp, his eyes humming with quiet amusement. “You’re welcome at our house anytime. Anytime, but not tonight.”
There’s a stiff second before the penny drops. When it does, the shells of my ears grow hot. “Oh,” I mumble, fiddling with the shoulder strap of my SOS bag. “Yes, of course. Well, um, just make sure she’s hydrated.”
“Yes, boss.”
I rake my fingers through my bangs, then wiggle down the hemline of my dress.
Though always polite and pleasant, Angelo is a man of few words, and I bite back the urge to fill the comfortable silence with a barrage of vapid questions.
Am I heavy? Cute suit, where’s it from? Sooo, are you nervous about tomorrow?
Instead, I readjust my position on his hip and squint out into the depths of the parking lot, looking for my uncle.
Taxis arrive in a slow-moving conveyor belt, then peel off into the night with slumped silhouettes pressed up against their windows. A few feet from the veranda, a group of girls nurse empty champagne flutes and puff on cigarettes, desperate to stretch the night out a little longer.
I look beyond it all to the tree branches rustling against the black sky. A gust of wind brings the hiss of a striking match past my ear, and I shiver.
“You’re cold. Rory’s got my jacket. I’ll get you another.” Angelo glances to the left and gives a curt chin jerk to someone in the shadows.
“No need.”
Despite my bare legs and the fact the heat lamps switched off a while ago, I’m far from cold.
I’m hot, itchy, antsy, and riled up by the exchange I had earlier with Angelo’s rude-ass brother.
For a moment, I consider telling him about it.
I wouldn’t have to mention our previous encounter, just that I tried to introduce myself and was immediately threatened.
But that feels like snitching, and besides, I don’t want to cause any family drama the night before his big day.
When Angelo jerks his chin again, it’s at Uncle Finn.
He strides through the parking lot toward us, two fingers looped into the heels of a pair of pink sneakers. His gaze drops to my socks and fills with disapproval.
“You’re too nice, Wren.”
My jaw tightens. He sounds like Tayce. But I keep my mouth shut.
He’s done me a solid by bringing me vomit-free footwear at this time of night.
I grip onto Angelo’s arm for balance, and stuff my feet into my running shoes.
He makes pleasantries with Uncle Finn above my head before touching me lightly on the shoulder.
“You know I’m going to ask.”
My smile wobbles. “And you know I will politely decline. Thanks for the offer though.”
In the few months he’s lived on the coast, I can’t count how many times he’s offered me a ride.
My answer is always the same.
He nods and wishes us a good evening. We wish him good luck for tomorrow, then he strides toward a waiting car on the far side of the parking lot.
Uncle Finn’s eyes burn into the side of my cheek.
I know what’s coming. It always comes.
“Next September is going to come around quicker than you think, you know.”
Of course I know. How can I not know? This September hit me like a lightning-speed slap, and so did the one before it. These next ten months will peel away like steamed wallpaper, and I’ve run out of excuses.
Now I’m hot and itchy for a different reason, so time for a change of subject.
“You look nice.” I pass him my SOS bag, now weighed down by my smelly boots, and cast an eye over his wool coat. His shoulders tense, then he tightens the scarf around his neck.
But it’s too late. I’ve already seen the cashmere sweater underneath.
“Hmm. You look really nice,” I say, eyes narrowing. I lean in, sniffing him like a curious dog. “You smell nice too. Where have you been?”
“Don’t change the subject. When are you going to start driving again?”
We fall in step to cut across the parking lot. “Don’t change the subject by telling me not to change the subject. Where have you been?”
He side-eyes me over the rim of his designer spectacles.
“In my workshop, measuring up some biscuit joints for my latest commission. Passing the time until my favorite niece finishes partying, because she insists on risking her life by walking the forty-five-minute journey home down a dark, scary road instead of driving.”
I laugh, not because I’m his only niece, but because he’s lying. He’s been at the Devil’s Hollow Country Club playing chess and eating caviar on fancy little crackers.
Finnegan Harlow is often mistaken for my father, and not just because he scolds me like one.
We share the same sun-yellow hair, deep-blue eyes, and wide smile—although you wouldn’t know he was capable of smiling most of the time.
Even with the perma-frown denting his brow, he looks nowhere near his forty-eight years, which I guess is why he gets away with telling anyone who asks that he’s forty-two.
He’s a carpenter. Well, he cosplays as one, spending hours in his workshop and buying ridiculously expensive tools.
In his previous life, he was one of Seattle’s highest-paid lawyers, with a reputation for representing the discriminated, the framed, and the justified.
Poverty-stricken teens in the wrong place at the wrong time, housewives who couldn’t take another beating. That kind of thing.
He was the people’s lawyer.
I was eleven when he scrawled his signature on my adoption papers and took me out of Seattle.
He said we weren’t leaving the city because of the men with cameras hiding in the bushes on the front lawn, but because a slower pace of life would be healthier for us.
His husband, Oliver Harlow, had dropped dead of a stress-induced heart attack some months before, and he suspected it was the chaos of the city that did him in.
Finn had driven us west with a locked jaw.
I had my feet propped up on the dash, humming along to ABBA’s greatest hits on the stereo and flipping through his copy of Country Living magazine.
Devil’s Dip was the first place we came across that looked like the pictures within its glossy pages.
By the time he’d realized the town was more rusty than rustic and that had we’d stuck to the highway for a few more minutes we’d have hit a town far more palatable, it was too late.
He’d already bought ten acres of farmland, enrolled me in a local school, and committed to a carpentry course.
I fell in love with Devil’s Dip’s wonky charm, but Finn has never let go of his big-city thinking and luxury habits, though he’s far too stubborn to admit it.
And so for the last ten years, we’ve played pretend.
We pretend like I don’t know there’s a wine cellar behind a false wall in his workshop, or that he spends most of his days in Devil’s Hollow schmoozing with the likes of Castiel Visconti at the country club.
As for the whole carpenter shtick, I’ve never seen him build anything with my own eyes, aside from the bookshelf he put up for me a few years ago.
It collapsed the moment I placed a hardback on it.
Finn tugs back his coat sleeve to check the time on his Rolex. “Your insistence to walk is cutting into my sleep schedule, you know. I have to be up at the crack of dawn.”
I frown. “To do what?”
He tuts. “Chores on the farm. Have to be done before I fly over to Colorado for my carpentry course tomorrow.”
“What chores on the farm?”
“Farm-y things.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, you know. The usual.”
I bite my lip, choosing to focus on his shiny timepiece instead of picking apart his crappy agricultural knowledge. “I thought you only wear that thing for birthdays and weddings?”
He pauses, then his eyes warm behind his glasses. “Nothing gets past you, Wren. You’re going to make an excellent lawyer.”
My smile flickers, as though the wiring in my brain is faulty. I don’t bite; I never do. So it sits like a wedge between us, solid and heavy, as we turn onto the main road that leads us home.
It’s a long, lonely road, and the only one connecting all three towns on the coast. A crumbling slab of asphalt less than twenty feet wide that separates the edge of the National Reserve and the rocky cliff face.
Uncle Finn hates this road, and not just because the potholes have blown out his tires countless times.
On one side, there’s the Pacific Ocean and its unrelenting wind, steep drops, and no guard rails.
On the other, the streetlamps, strangled by vines escaping the border of the woods, are few and far between, leaving large stretches of darkness when the sun goes down.