Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
FLETCHER
“ Don’t put that there. Are you crazy?” Mom hurries toward me with her arms outstretched as if ready to take the stone from me. As if it doesn’t weigh a million pounds and wouldn’t send her straight to the ground.
I grunt and shift my weight, my hold starting to slip. “Then where does it go?”
She points to the opposite side of the yard as if the answer’s obvious. Maybe she did already tell me that. I stumble that way—to a patch of grass with absolutely nothing else around it—then meet her eyes and lift my eyebrows in question. She nods confidently.
I finally release the damn thing, nearly out of breath. At this point, I’m not convinced she has a plan. She could very well just be enjoying watching me move heavy things back and forth.
“Trust the process!” she calls, and I wipe off the sweat from my forehead along with whatever look I had on my face. “What’s got you so distracted today?”
I frown and shake my head. “I’m not distracted.”
She narrows her eyes in that scary way she does that makes me feel like she has X-ray vision, so I pretend to be very interested in the new bags of mulch scattered through the yard.
I haven’t given any thought at all to the prospect of Christine hanging around the camp longer than usual today. Didn’t spend any extra time doing my hair, or put on a second coat of deodorant, or overthink what to wear. I usually opt for athletic wear for the camps—something easy to move around in. Something easy to wrangle the kids in.
But today it was like I was seeing everything in my closet with fresh eyes, wondering how obviously twenty-three my choices paint me in a way I never have before.
My phone rings in my pocket, mercifully cutting off whatever she was going to say. I shoot her an apologetic smile as I bring it to my ear and turn away.
“Hey, Liam.”
He sighs. “We’ve got a problem. Are you free?”
I hold up a finger to Mom before heading for the house and slipping into the kitchen. “What’s up?”
“I’m tied up with a client for the next few hours, otherwise I’d do it myself. It’s Asher.”
My stomach drops. I was starting to think we were in the clear with him. It’s been almost a year since the last time one of us had to peel him off the floor. “How bad is it?”
Of Liam’s siblings, Asher’s always been one of the wilder ones, but things seemed to calm down once he stopped hanging out with his douche of a best friend last year.
And for someone like Mr. Candyman Brooks, image is everything. Having one kid defect like Liam was bad enough, but two ? And on top of his divorce? He’s been threatening to ship Asher off for years—not that any of his previous stints in rehab made a difference.
“I don’t know. Bad enough for whatever girl he’s with to call the first number she could find in his phone. She just left this frantic voicemail that I should get there as soon as I could, and now she’s not picking up.”
I close my eyes. “Shit.”
“Look, I can cancel if?—”
“No, no. I’ve got him. Do you know where he is?”
Liam sighs. “Home, I think. And you know if my dad sees?—”
“He won’t. I’m heading over right now.” I gesture through the window at Mom, hold up my keys, then point to the garage. She frowns but nods and waves me off.
The line crackles as I dip into the garage. “Send me an update when you can?”
“Of course.”
I rub my eyes as I pull onto the road and head in the direction of the Brooks mansion. It sits squarely between Sweetspire and the next town over. It’s quiet as I loop up the winding drive. The mansion is as gaudy and foreboding as ever, but something about it feels more ominous now.
Not that I’ve frequented the place. Liam and I have spent most of our time together over the years, well, just about anywhere else. Half the time when he called, I figured he was looking for an excuse to get the hell out of here.
Maybe it’s knowing Christine that has it feeling different.
Despite the Brooks grandeur being a better match for her than someplace like the High Dive, I have trouble picturing her here. Picturing her with him . She’s so full of life, and Liam’s dad has always felt like a vampire to me.
I frown at the time on my phone as I head for the front door. It’s not even noon. Why the hell is Asher fucked-up first thing in the morning? And since their sister, Makayla, started a new branch of the business last year and brought him on as an employee, for the first time in his life, Asher has a job he’s supposed to be reporting to.
The front door’s unlocked, and the house is quiet as I step inside. Judging by the other cars out front, their cleaning crew is here somewhere.
I try calling Ash’s phone, but it goes straight to voicemail.
No matter how many times I’ve been in Liam’s house, I still get lost. I follow one of the curved staircases—because of course there needs to be two —to the second floor, and peek in each room I pass. Asher used to have a room on the third floor when we were teenagers, but I’m pretty sure he moved into Liam’s old room after he moved out. It’s bigger and has a little balcony overlooking the pool.
But Liam’s old room is empty. I check the bathroom, the hall, hell, even the closets, but he’s nowhere to be found.
I was hoping to do this quietly, but…
“Ash?” I call.
There’s a thump directly over my head, then footsteps pound somewhere off to the left—if I’m remembering correctly, the stairs to the third floor are over there. Just as I reach the bottom, a flash of dark hair appears at the top.
I blink and shake my head. “Carson?”
Other than seeing her around with Gracie here and there, I’ve barely run into her since we graduated high school, and I still haven’t gotten used to her new look. It’s the polar opposite of how I remember her. She swapped out the blond hair and tomboy outfits for silver chains, ripped black jeans, and a dark bob.
I also don’t think I’ve ever seen her and Asher in the same room. So then why is she…?
We don’t have time for this.
Her eyes are wide, and she waves an impatient hand for me to join her. She leads me to Asher’s old room—now a guest room, I think?—
Where Asher is currently passed out shirtless in the middle of the floor.
“Fuck.” I kneel beside him, checking for a pulse, then for signs of breathing. “How long has he been like this?”
She lingers in the door, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. “About half an hour.”
“What did he take?”
She chews on her lip and shakes her head. “I don’t know.”
“Carson, you have to tell me?—”
“I really don’t know! We weren’t—I wasn’t doing that with him. I don’t do that stuff.”
I check the floor around him, then his pockets, but come up with nothing.
“Asher.” I shake his shoulders, then peel back his eyelids to get a look at his pupillary response.
“What are you doing?” asks Carson, her voice edged with panic.
“Asher.” I take his face between my hands and gently slap his cheeks. “Asher, wake up.”
“I didn’t know if I needed to call an ambulance,” Carson continues. “But he was breathing, so…”
“Asher, come on, buddy.” I shake him harder. Between the three of us—Liam, Leo, and me—we’ve been in this situation with him at least half a dozen times before, and only once did he end up needing to go to the hospital. And that…didn’t go well. But if I can’t wake him up…
“Help me get him to the bathroom,” I decide.
Carson, to her credit, doesn’t hesitate. We each take an arm over our shoulders and shuffle him to the en suite.
“You might want to look away for this part,” I mutter as we position him over the toilet and I force his jaw open.
She cringes but shakes her head and tightens her hold to keep him upright.
At least there’s a toothbrush on the counter I can use instead of my fingers. Not that I haven’t done that before too. He gags as I push it to the back of his throat, but nothing comes out.
“Come on, Ash.” I cringe as I fish around with it.
“He’s gonna be okay, right?” Carson gasps. Is she crying ?
Finally, finally , he retches into the toilet. I have no idea how long ago he ingested whatever he took, so I make sure he throws up a few more times for good measure.
His eyes open with the third one, and he catches himself against the toilet with shaky hands.
“Ash? You good?”
He grabs some toilet paper to wipe his mouth and gives me a weak smile. “Oh, hey, Fletch. Fancy seeing you here.”
Carson disappears into the room as we flush the toilet, and Ash rests his back against the bathtub.
“What the hell, man?” I ask gently.
Carson returns with a glass of water, and Asher gives her a grateful smile before pushing himself to his feet to rinse out his mouth at the sink. Carson and I follow closely behind, but he manages to maneuver himself into the room and sit on the foot of the bed.
He meets Carson’s eyes first. “I’m sorry.”
Now that he seems okay, she puts as much distance between them as possible and rests her back against the opposite wall, her arms crossed over her chest. “You scared the shit out of me.”
He grimaces and looks at his hands in his lap.
“You feeling okay?” I ask.
He nods. “I’ll just sleep it off.”
“Ash, what’s going on? It’s not even eleven yet. And you have work?—”
“I know,” he snaps, all the usual cheerfulness gone from his voice.
It’s surprising enough that I stumble back a step.
He winces and rubs his eyes with both hands. “I’m sorry. Can you just—can we not tell Liam about this?”
“He already knows. That’s why I’m here.”
He groans and flops onto his back.
I sigh and glance at the time on my phone.
“I can take it from here if you need to get going,” Carson offers.
“You sure?”
She nods, though her glare doesn’t waver from Asher’s prone form on the bed. The last thing I hear as I head down the stairs is “What the fuck were you thinking?”
The nerves from this morning about seeing Christine prove to be unfounded, because today, Casey arrives with Liam instead. I offer him a brief recount of the Asher situation before camp starts, but other than a shadow passing over his expression, he doesn’t comment on it, so we let it drop.
I have a feeling Asher will not be given the same luxury.
As the minutes tick by and we get closer to the end of camp, I catch myself repeatedly checking the parking lot. But then we’re fifteen minutes until the cut-off time, then ten, five.
Then parents are arriving, and one by one, the kids head out for the day, leaving just me, Liam, and Casey waiting a good ten minutes afterward.
Liam frowns down at his phone after trying to call her. “No answer. Just rang a million times.”
Something gnaws at the pit of my stomach. This doesn’t feel right. I could tell she didn’t love the idea of hanging around here, but I also believed her when she promised Casey she’d show.
Granted, I might not know her too well, but this doesn’t seem like her.
“Do you think she forgot?” Casey asks, his wide, sad puppy dog eyes staring up at me.
“Something must have come up,” I assure him. “Something she couldn’t avoid. She’d be here if she could.”
Liam curses under his breath and checks his phone again. “I’ve got a client coming in fifteen?—”
I wave him off. “Go on.”
He looks from me to Casey with a furrowed brow. “You sure?”
“Yeah. We’ll hang out for a few more minutes, and if she still doesn’t show, I’ll drive him home and check in to make sure everything’s okay.”
He shoots one last apologetic look at Casey before turning and jogging to his truck. The moment he’s gone, Casey edges closer to me, his hand twitching toward mine like he wants to take it but isn’t sure. I offer mine, and his tiny fingers grab it immediately.
“Do you think Mommy’s okay?”
I squeeze his hand. “Oh, I’m sure she is, bud.”
I frown as I say it, my eyes locked on the entrance to the parking lot, willing that gaudy SUV to appear, but the road remains empty.
I glance from Casey to my car—the last one in the lot.
“I’m hungry,” laments Casey.
“Come on.” I tug him toward my car, the address I snagged from his parent sheet already in the GPS on my phone. Fuck, I don’t have a booster seat for him. A seat belt in my back seat and driving five under the speed limit will have to suffice.
Casey bobs along to the radio as we drive, apparently unconcerned now, but I can’t help the anxiety thrumming in my veins and drum my fingers against the steering wheel. That pit in my stomach only grows wider when we pull up to his house and Christine’s car is sitting in the driveway.
“Oh, Mom is home,” says Casey.
I punch in the phone number she listed on the sheet then help Casey out of the car.
It rings and rings as we walk toward the front door, and I pause, cocking my head as we reach the front step. Slowly, I lower the phone from my ear, but I can still hear the ringing.
I squint through the window beside the door as I knock. All the lights are on, but there’s no movement. It sounds like the phone is near the back of the house.
No answer.
“We keep a key here!” Casey announces as he snatches a painted rock off to the side of the door.
“Good thinking, buddy.” I take the key from him, but the moment I open the door, a security alarm beeps in warning.
“My birthday!” cries Casey, pointing at the pad on the wall. “It’s my birthday!”
I wince, trying to remember. I know it’s in the summer.
Casey huffs. “May 29.”
“I knew that.”
I punch in the numbers, and the alarm shuts off abruptly, casting the house into a hollow kind of silence.
“I’m home!” Casey calls.
“Casey?”
Christine’s voice is thin, high, and far away. And sounds…panicked?
I hit the stairs at a run. “Chris?”
“I’m up here!” she shrieks, her voice definitely edged with panic now.
I reach the top floor, and the ladder to the attic is lowered in the middle of the hall. Something groans and creaks up there. I grab the rungs but hesitate when I realize Casey followed me up here.
“Stay right here, okay, buddy?”
He looks from me to the hole in the ceiling, his little face screwed up with worry.
“Casey,” I say, my voice firm.
“Okay!”
I make short work of the ladder and duck into the cramped space. It’s lit by a single battery-powered lantern discarded beside the opening, and Christine is in the center of the room.
Namely, hanging on for dear life because the floor caved in. Splintered floorboards surround her, the breaks jagged and uneven. Her chest is pressed against the rim, arms braced on what remains of the floor in front of her, the rest of her disappearing into the hole.
“Shit,” I mutter as I scramble into the room.
“Careful!” she gasps. “I don’t know how much more of it’s unstable.”
The surrounding wood is discolored, and the scent of rot and mildew is heavy in the air. I cough against the dust swirling around us as it catches the weak light filtering through the attic windows.
I test my weight and inch forward. The floorboards groan but seem like they’ll hold.
“How long have you been hanging here?”
“Please don’t make me answer that.”
I drop to my knees in front of her and wedge my hands under her arms to pull her up, but her nails are still dug into the floorboards.
“You have to let go.”
She looks up at me with wide, panicked eyes.
“You’re all right. I’ve got you,” I say softly.
She swallows hard and squeezes her eyes shut before releasing her hold. I start pulling her through before she can feel a drop, and she lets out a breathy little sob as she collapses against me. I can feel how fast her heart is beating through her chest, and her hands tremble as she curls her fingers tightly around the fabric of my shirt.
“Shit,” I breathe, taking in the rest of her. The undersides of her arms are all scraped up. I have a million questions, like what the hell she’s doing up here in the first place, or why she didn’t just drop down the few feet into Casey’s room, but I settle on “You hurt anywhere else?”
She glances down at herself like she’s not sure.
“No, no,” she says, her voice several octaves too high. “I’m fine. Sorry.” She waves a shaky hand in front of her face. “Thanks for the hand.” She gestures the way I came. “And Casey—God, you drove him here? What time is it? I didn’t—I was—I probably should’ve just let go, but I—I’m not the best with h-heights, and if I moved, it felt like more was going to b-break—” She hiccups around the last word.
Jesus Christ, she’s scared to death.
“Hey.” I pull her in against my chest before I can think better of it and cradle the back of her head with my hand. “You’re all right. Take a deep breath.”
“Mommy! There’s a hole in my ceiling!” calls Casey.
“Oh God, I was going to pick up Casey early to watch him skate,” she whispers and covers her face with her hands.
I rub my thumb along her arm. “As far as alibis go, I think you’ve got a good one.”
“Mom! Did you hear me? I said there’s a hole in the ceiling!”
“Come on. Let’s get you down.” I climb to my feet first and hold her hand to help her up. She still has that shell-shocked look in her eyes, but she lets me.
Casey gasps when we hit the bottom of the ladder, his eyes going round at the blood on Christine’s arms. “You’re hurt.”
“Oh, Casey, sweetie, it’s nothing. I’m fine.”
“You have a first aid kit?” I ask.
She nods as she shoots a look inside Casey’s bedroom. The debris is scattered all over his floor—dust and bits of plaster and plywood. Poor Casey’s bed is covered in it.
“Kitchen,” she murmurs.
“Hey, Case, weren’t you telling me your favorite show comes on right after camp?”
He perks up. “It does! Mom usually records it so I can watch it later.”
I extend my hand toward him. “Can you show me how to turn it on?”
He grins as he links his little fingers through mine. I meet Christine’s eyes before heading down the stairs. “You. Kitchen table.”
She blinks at me as if stunned.
Once I have Casey happily occupied on the couch, I dig through the cabinets in the kitchen until I find the first aid kit Christine was talking about.
She shuffles into the room and sinks into a chair at the table. “I can take it from here,” she says, though her voice doesn’t hold much conviction.
“You could,” I say lightly as I take the seat across from her and gesture for her arm.
Luckily, under the light, they’re not as bad as I originally thought. The undersides of her arms must have scraped against the edges of the floor as she caught herself, but nothing looks too deep.
She hisses through her teeth as I start cleaning them.
“Sorry. I know it stings.”
She says nothing, her face screwed up in an expression I’ve seen on Casey a dozen times as I secure a bandage over the first arm and move to the second.
“So, heights, huh?” I say lightly as the peroxide hits her skin.
Her eyes snap to mine, but she winces less this time, so the distraction worked for something.
“It’s not funny.”
I shrug and fish around in the kit for another bandage. “I don’t hear anyone laughing.”
Neither of us says anything else as I finish up. Music from the TV and Casey’s laughter filter through the doorway.
“What were you doing in the attic?” I ask.
She sighs and rubs her eyes. “Casey’s dad had a bunch of stuff sent over—photo albums, Casey’s baby clothes, that kind of thing. I was just looking for a good place to store them. Now I get to fix a hole in my ceiling.”
“Oh, I can do that.”
She peers up at me, her eyebrows drawn together in utter confusion, and I laugh.
“My parents flip houses for a living. I’ve been helping since I was a teenager. I’m pretty handy with that kind of stuff.”
Her eyes narrow. “Bartending, kids’ camps, flipping houses…am I missing anything else?”
“That about sums me up.” I smirk. “I like to keep busy.”
She clears her throat, rises from the table, and grabs the first aid kit. “Which is exactly why you don’t have time for this. And it’s not your problem. I can find someone to hire.”
I follow her deeper into the kitchen as she puts the box away. “Hire me.”
“Fletcher.” Her voice is a small, exasperated exhale.
“I want to help.”
“It’s not a good idea.”
“Why not? I have the skills. I already have the materials I’d need leftover from a build. I’d want to inspect the surrounding area to make sure you won’t have any more problems first, but I could have it done in a few days?—”
Finally, she turns to face me, those striking blue eyes meeting mine in a way that makes my breath catch. “You know why not,” she whispers.
I swear I don’t imagine it. For a moment—just a moment, but long enough—her gaze flicks to my mouth. And I recognize that look in her eyes, even though this is the first time I’ve seen it since that night.
I can’t help it. I smile. Because the moment I found out who she was, I thought I was dead in the water.
But I might have a fighting chance here after all.
But that’s not what this is about, and I don’t want her to think that’s what this is about. She really does need that ceiling fixed, and not from some semicompetent handyman who will charge her too much and cut too many corners. Especially not when it’s something I can do in my sleep.
And it’s clear whoever did the inspection prior to her buying this place did a shit job. She might even have a case here if she wants to sue. No one should have missed that level of damage. Pointing that out right now will probably just make her feel worse.
Luckily, the attic only runs over the end of the hall and Casey’s room, so the rest of the house should be safe until it’s fixed.
“I can be perfectly professional. I’ll even charge you my premium rate. Five bucks an hour. It’ll need a more thorough inspection, but the good news is the damage seems pretty localized.”
That, finally, gets a small smile out of her, even if it’s accompanied by an eye roll.
“Thank you for the help earlier. And bringing Casey home. I’m not usually a professional damsel in distress.”
I tilt my head to the side. Is that what this is about? She feels like she’s hit her quota for accepting other people’s help? Or is it my help that’s the problem?
“Tell you what, I’m off this Saturday from the bar, so if you don’t find someone else to fix it by then, you can give me a call. And if I don’t hear from you, I won’t bring it up again. But I am going to inspect it before I leave to make sure it’s at least safe enough for you guys to stay until then, all right?”
Slowly, she nods.
Considering it’s already Thursday, I like my odds.