Chapter 14 Gabe
“Jonah was a real man. Six foot, biceps the circumference of my waist. He was fresh meat, straight off a plane from Cape Town. You ever look at someone and just know you’d make beautiful babies?
’Cause I was a smoke show back then too, even after I had a kid.
Every time I stepped out to the store, I’d turn more heads than a car crash.
” Her laugh breaks into a crackling smokers cough.
“Not that you’d know it from my mugshot, of course. ”
She’ll rant about her mugshot for the next ten minutes, so I pick up the angle grinder and drown her out with the sound of metal scraping metal. Green sparks fly, and the garage fills with the smell of burned dust.
When I switch it off, set it back down on the workbench, and readjust my earbud, she’s still fucking going.
“… hadn’t had my roots done in months. Not to mention, the police dragged my ass out of bed in the middle of the night, which is why my eyes are hanging out of my head. And what’s up with that lighting? I looked so pale, you’d think I hadn’t had a vacation in ten years.”
I headbutt the lip of the tool shelf, impatience fizzing through me. Come on, Mildred. Get to the good part. I need the good part.
I’d learned to weaponize secrets in The Middle, but my obsession started back in The Beginning.
The first time my brothers and I squeezed into the crawlspace behind the confessional after Sunday service and listened to Mr. Foster admit to blowing his late wife’s life insurance on hookers and cocaine was the first time my brain stopped hurting.
Because suddenly, I didn’t feel so bad about drowning Angelo’s best friend in the pool that summer or setting the outhouse on fire to see how quickly the flames would spread.
I’d realized listening to the sins of others had a way of silencing my own.
But I grew older and more depraved and more addicted. The highs became weaker, the trips shorter. I needed to find bigger Band-Aids for bigger wounds.
So I began to dig.
First, I dug deep into our bloodline. Then I dug up the whole coast. When that stopped working, I dug up the state, the country, the world.
I dug until my fingers bled. I dug all the way to fucking China. I dug until I was a full-fledged crackhead, desperately chasing the feeling of my first hit.
“… and it wasn’t even about how handsome he was. We connected on a spiritual level, you know? I’m a Scorpio, he was a Virgo. He loved ramen; I studied Japanese for a semester in school …”
Grinding my jaw, I palm the workbench and close my eyes.
And then along came Rafe and his hotline. Another game to him, a gamechanger for me.
Though he’d created Sinners Anonymous to bond us brothers and scratch a nostalgic itch, he’d also unknowingly hooked an addict up to an infinite supply.
Now, all the sins I could ever ask for are in my ear. A constant stream of bad thoughts to distract me from my own.
Granted, most are dog shit.
Few are potent.
And none are Hers.
I snap my eyes back open and turn up the call to max volume.
“… he was smart. Unfortunately for him, it was in a solve-Soduku-puzzles-over-breakfast way, not in a check-that-my-affair-partner-hasn’t-left-lipstick-on-my-collar way.
” Mildred lets out a wistful sigh. “But even if she hadn’t, the stench of her dollar-store perfume walked through my front door before he did, anyway. ”
Mildred Black calls like clockwork. And today, she’s called just when my brain hurts the most.
“… so I had his favorite meal cooking on the stove and had lit loads of candles to set the mood. I’d brought his favorite wine too, but it turns out, he hadn’t planned to drink that night.” She scoffs. “I’m sure he regretted that decision when I—”
The side door connecting the garage to the main house crashes open just when Mildred’s finally getting to the good part.
My agitation bleeds into amusement when I glance up to find my sister-in-law darkening the doorway.
She’s rolling her sleeves up, then throws her curls into a careless bun. When her gaze roves around the garage, I sigh, end the call, and prop my foot up against the wall behind me.
“Gabe.” She pushes over a broom. “What did you do to Wren?”
Her name rakes down my back like glittery pink nails on a chalkboard. Hearing her name aloud, through someone else’s mouth, stings.
But Rory notices these things. So I retrieve the cigarette tucked behind my ear and slide it between my lips to stop them from curling.
“Seems like you already know,” I muse, watching her foot connect with an empty bucket. It skids across the concrete and clatters against the far side of the wall.
I’m not surprised she snitched—she looks like the snitching type—I’m just surprised it’s taken her so long. She kept her mouth shut after she crossed my path three years ago. Said fuck-all when I shoved her house key down her throat in her own hallway.
So what was it about me folding her into my trunk that has her squealing like a little pig?
It could be the accumulation of events, of course.
Three-chances-and-you’re-out kind of thing.
But then I remember her reaction to the last time I’d picked her up and headed toward a waiting car.
How she fought and begged and touched me, and I can’t help but think, that somehow, it all leads back to her secret.
“But why?” Rory topples a box of screws as she passes. “Why Wren? It’s Wren, for goose’s sake.”
A dark wave of irritation brushes my skin, and not because she’s stomping toward my tool cabinet.
I did it because she couldn’t tell me what she’d do if someone tried to hurt her.
Because the sound of that fucking whistle snapped my one and only nerve.
Because I didn’t force her into my trunk after the explosion, and I needed to prove to myself that I could.
“I let her out, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, well—” Rory huffs, reaching for a hammer. “You made her cry, so now I’m gonna make you cry.” She swings it into the wall with so much energy, yet so little strength, that the impact doesn’t even crack the bricks.
I’d laugh if She hadn’t got me so fucked up.
Last night was a rare moment of weakness.
The silence was too loud. Her voice even louder. No sins coming through the hotline were bad enough to drown out the feeling of her weight in my arms or the sight of her dress sliding up her thigh.
So I did what I’ve resisted doing every damn day for the last three years: I googled her.
I drag my teeth over my bottom lip, bitterness brewing in my chest.
Turns out, ignorance really is bliss. The only thing worse than finding something is finding nothing.
No news articles. No family tree to climb.
No secret.
There’s barely any trace of her on the internet. In fact, typing in her name only brings up one result: Her Instagram profile.
She’s lucky I was out of my mind last night. While I was zooming in on cheesy selfies, reading every pun-filled caption, and rolling my eyes at photos of every meal, coffee, and cocktail the girl had ever shoved into her fucking mouth, she’d posted again.
It was yet another picture of herself. On a public Instagram profile. And if that wasn’t stupid enough, she’d tagged her location.
And clearly, I wasn’t the only man with ill-intentions to take advantage of it.
My thoughts shade black at the memory. Standing under a punched-out streetlamp in the alleyway between Moodys bar and the Irish pub, I watched as he fed her an act even a five-year-old could have seen through. Then I watched in disbelief as he led her to a phone booth and slipped in behind her.
I grind my molars and reach for the matchbox on the side shelf to light my cigarette. Then Rory gives up on trying to smash open the padlock to the guns cabinet and upturns a jerry can instead, so I think better of it.
“Oh, sparrow,” she mutters as oil splashes on the cuffs of her joggers. She lifts her gaze to mine and puffs out a breath.
“You done?”
“No, I’m taking a break.” She wipes her arm across her brow and glares at me again. “You’re going to apologize.”
I laugh. Hell will freeze over before an apology of any kind leaves my lips.
“I’m being so serious. You know she’s scared of cars, right?”
A familiar itch crawls over me. The fresh scab I’d picked at last night starts to crack. It covers a wound three years deep that just won’t go away.
The Google search didn’t heal it. Finding her Instagram account only sliced it wider.
No. Can’t. Shouldn’t.
“Why?”
Fuck’s sake. I turn around and adjust the settings on the drill press so Rory doesn’t notice the self-loathing tightening my jaw.
“I’m not sure—she won’t tell us. She just walks everywhere instead.”
“I’m aware,” I grit out. “She’s asking to get kidnapped.”
“Gabe. It’s Wren.”
There she goes, saying her fucking name again. And in the same breath as mine. She says it as though her name alone is an explanation. A perfect reason as to why she can walk the streets alone with no consequences.
Behind me, something metal and heavy lands on the floor with a dull thud.
“The girl’s a liability,” I grit out, curling my hand around an old rag.
“She’s not. She’s, like, the nicest person on the planet. It’s like an unspoken rule around here, everyone leaves Wren alone.”
“Apart from the man who followed her into the phone booth.”
Rory pauses for a beat too long. I turn around in time to see the surprise flicker over her face.
Interesting. The little angel failed to mention that part when she snitched.
“Oh,” Rory mutters, letting the hammer clatter to the floor. “She didn’t tell me that bit. Well, who was it?”
Some loser who’d gone to Cove on a business trip.
Clean record. That’s about all I know, because hitting him too hard too soon was the second mistake I made last night.
His head bounced off the sidewalk like a tennis ball, and he was a goner before I could drag him into the cave, string him up, and have some fun with him.