Chapter 34
Chapter Thirty-Four
SAbrINA
O ur presence at the gala did exactly what we’d set out to achieve.
1. We faced the backstabbers—Hitchens, mostly—and stared them down. Which in the end only helped Cal, as many came out in support of him and with offers to work on projects together.
2. We announced our marriage at the gala and with an Instagram post of our hands entwined with our wedding bands. Then we did a second with my engagement ring bright and shiny.
3. We spurred his dad into making a strike.
Cal was right—we were woefully unprepared for the counterstrike from Dalton. Our imaginations had not been good enough. He made us wait, which Cal said was an attempt to create a false sense of winning. On the surface, it looked like the narrative was swinging our way with the exception of a few comment jockeys who accused us of faking the marriage. We didn’t care about them. And while all that was playing out we moved forward with entwining our lives. Making Wyoming a hub for us both. Fort had set up an appointment with child protection services as we wanted to start the process to get custody of Rod, and I made plans to have my Texas home maintained on a schedule; leaving it empty unsettled me. Turning it into our vacation home felt very bougie, I told Cal on a laugh. This house was more than just a place I loved. It was a part of my history and held so much of me and my family.
But under the waters, a riptide was developing. We’d collapsed into bed late and fallen asleep after some slow, tender loving, only to be woken up an hour later by my phone. The number was for Flower Mound Police Department. It was three in the morning, West Coast time. Flower Mound was where I lived.
“Sabrina Holloway?” the voice asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you own the property on 257 Grapevine?”
“Yes.” I sat up and switched the phone to my other ear.
Cal turned on the bedside light and studied me.
“Ms. Holloway, my name is Detective Pham. I’m calling to say there has been an accident at your home.”
“What sort of accident?”
“A fire. Looks like it started in the garage. Your neighbor called it in. We need you to come do a walk-through with us.”
“There’s been a fire at my house,” I told Cal. “I need to go home.”
“Was it arson?’ he asked as he reached for his phone.
“Was it arson, Detective Pham?” I asked.
He cleared his throat. “That will be looked into. We need you to meet with the fire inspector. How soon can you be here?”
“I’m currently in California. I have to look at flights?—”
“I’ll have the company jet ready to go in an hour,” Cal said.
“I should be there in about four hours,” I told the detective. “Is it bad?”
“It’s not good.”
We made plans for me to call the detective as soon as I arrived, and he and the fire inspector would meet me at my house. While I was throwing my clothes into my suitcase, I called my insurance company. Cal was on the phone, coordinating the plane.
We were in the car, heading to the airport, when I said, “I have a bad feeling about this.”
Cal rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m not one for believing in coincidences, but maybe that’s what this is.”
I knew he wanted that to be true. The guilt would be huge if this could be traced back to his father.
“You are not responsible for the actions of another person.” I took his hand and squeezed. “I love you. Whether it was an accident or not is irrelevant because all of us are safe. That’s all that matters.”
He was leaning in for a kiss when his phone rang. It was Morgan. He put her on speakerphone. “You’re up early,” he said.
“Cal, there’s been a fire in Brynna’s barn. An explosion really.” Her voice quivered with emotion.
“Is everyone okay?” He met my worried gaze with one of his own.
“One of the hands was in the pasture with some cows when the barn exploded. He was hit with debris. He has some burns and a head injury. He was airlifted to the hospital in Cheyenne. Fort is on his way with a fire inspector. Brynna is devastated.”
“You have to go home,” I told him.
He was torn, but a person couldn’t be in two places at once. “After we go to your house.”
“That’s not all,” Morgan said. “I was served papers last night. Your father has filed for divorce and is asking for the ranch.” She choked back a sob. “The nerve of that guy.”
Cal filled in Morgan about my house fire. I gave Cal the look—the one that said he needed to be with his mom more than he needed to be with me.
“He’s splitting us up. You see that, right? I think he wants you to be home alone,” Cal said.
“Then I’ll ask Nick to come with me. Just because we aren’t together doesn’t make us weak,” I said.
“You’ll take Nick and a bodyguard. And, Mom, I’m sending a few people to the ranch as well. He’s not taking the ranch today, but he has taken away our sense of safety, and I can fix that immediately. I’m headed home, Mom. Don’t do anything until I get there.”
As he disconnected the call, I was already on my phone, calling Nick. I gave him the quick rundown and asked him to meet me at the airport. He was already headed to his car when I made my request. That was how good a friend he was.
Cal called Optium and had two executive protection agents sent to the ranch and one sent to me. The plan was that as soon as I talked to the inspector and could leave, I would head back to the ranch. Cal was worried about all of us not being together.
Then, just when we thought it couldn’t get worse, a video of me socking Kathy in front of her child made the gossip sites. The image was not from a leaked county camera but captured on someone’s cell phone. I became an instant meme and GIF. Neither of which were flattering. The vitriol was awful. Many questioned how I could ever think I should be a mom when I’d done that in front of a child. I had to admit, that hurt. It wasn’t something I hadn’t thought myself. Not only was Dalton pulling us all in different directions physically, but he was pulling our attention into all directions as well.
At the private airport, Cal waited for Nick to arrive before leaving me to catch a charter. “I don’t like this,” he said, pulling me into a tight hug.
“We’ve been through worse. Physical distance is nothing so long as we’re on the same page.”
“Let me know as things unfold, and get out as soon as you can. I know that’s asking a lot, but I would feel a lot better being with you and knowing you’re safe.”
“I would question whether your dad could stoop so low, but I remind myself that nothing is off-limits to him.”
We kissed goodbye, and Nick and I boarded one plane while Cal went to board another, and we went in opposite directions.
Exactly four hours later, I was standing in my yard with Nick, Detective Pham, a bodyguard, and the fire inspector looking at my mostly destroyed house. The fire had caught at the garage, and both the garage and my SUV were toast. No pun intended. Or heck, maybe the pun was intended because the space was nothing but charred remains. Unlike toast, the burned parts couldn’t be scraped off to salvage the space.
The fire had taken my home office, which included guest quarters for clients and consisted of a kitchenette, bathroom, living room, and bedroom space. When clients were leaving everything they knew and had opted for an arranged marriage in search of freedom, I tried to make that transition as comfortable as possible. It wasn’t the loss of the space I mourned but the pictures I had put on the walls—images of happy couples, some with their children. Proof that what I did actually made people happy and gave their lives meaning. And losing that felt symbolic, like Dalton was trying to destroy all of it.
From there the fire traveled into my bedroom and living room. My kitchen was the only room with four walls.
I had to prove to the inspector that I had been out of town for the last ten days. Seeing as there appeared to be evidence that the actual living space of my home had been ransacked before the fire was started added evidence to the findings of arson. He walked me through where the fire had begun and how it had progressed.
“Do you know what they were looking for?” Detective Pham asked.
I shook my head. We did several walk-throughs, and with such a mess, there was no telling what might be missing.
“It’s going to take weeks to get this squared away,” my insurance guy said. “But it’s a total loss. I’m sorry, Sabrina. I’ll leave you to it.”
Though I wasn’t sure what it was supposed to be. Should I mourn? Cry? Rage? I decided on all the above.
I stood in the burnt-out garage and stared. Everything was replaceable. That was what I told myself. Maybe I’d lost pictures, but most of them, I’d stored in the cloud. But I’d lost other things: the first saddle I’d had as a child, which my mom had picked out. My dad’s favorite blanket. The records he and my mom had collected in their short marriage. That was what I couldn’t replace, and it would take seeing those things in pictures to realize they were gone. So Dalton had taken away my desire to have those memories or maybe just added an ache to them.
“Maybe I should go through the house again to see if I can find anything worth saving. Maybe I missed something the first walk-through.”
“I’m sorry.” Nick’s voice was heavy with empathy as he looked around. He squeezed my shoulder in comfort. “You know all this can wait. You two shouldn’t put off a honeymoon in order to take care of this.” He gestured to the charred space. “I bet disrupting that was part of the plan.”
“It is hard to think about going away. It’s too much to process right now. I lost so much.” I turned to the left and pointed in front of me. “That wall was all decorations. Christmas, Halloween. My tree is gone. All the ornaments I made for my parents. The ones I collected over the years. All those keepsakes are gone.” I turned to the right and pointed. “On that wall, I had my dad’s tools and car-washing stuff, and even though all that can be replaced, I’m still so sad about losing it that I…” I wiped tears off my face. I couldn’t sum up how I felt and was at a loss for words.
Dalton knew how to cut deep. The house, I could rebuild. But the items that would trigger memories were gone forever.
“What do you think they were looking for?” The house being ransacked told us that much. Why take the time to go through a house when starting a fire and getting out of dodge only took a handful of minutes.
I shrugged. “And do you think they started the fire because they couldn’t find whatever they were looking for?”
“That’s my guess.”
Nick walked over to the pile the fire inspector had made when he’d done his investigation. It consisted of a metal box the length of my forearm and a foot deep, my SUV’s license plate, and a few tools. “What’s in this box?”
I pulled my attention off the loss and onto the box. I couldn’t place what I had used it for. Maybe the fire had discolored it and I was too far into my trauma response to put the brain power into figuring it out. “I’m not sure.”
“A fireproof metal box. Do you have so many you can’t remember them all?” Nick reached for a tool. “Mind if I open it?”
I shook my head. “I have three, but I don’t remember any of them being in the garage.” I began to search through the remains for anything worth keeping.
“Sabrina.” The tone of his voice made me look at him. He was staring at me, slack-jawed. “It’s some papers of your dad’s. There’s an unopened letter addressed to you in this box.”
“What?” After the funeral, I’d gone through everything… hadn’t I? I walked to Nick and looked into the box.
“Does any of this look familiar?”
I shook my head. All of my dad’s important paperwork had been in my fireproof safe inside my bedroom closet. Well, the closet was gone, but the safe was still there. Fortunately.
“I don’t think I ever saw this.” I turned back to the space where the wall of decorations used to be and tried to picture it.
“You know, after Melissa died, I had to go through all her stuff. At one point, I hit a wall and couldn’t do it anymore. So I stopped. A few years ago, I was in our closet and realized I hadn’t cleaned it out. Her clothes were still there. Her shoes and purses. So much of her, and I had lived with it all there because I didn’t want it to go away, as if taking out her stuff would really and truly mean she was gone for good. After Travis died, did you even think of going through the garage?”
I shook my head.
He picked up the letter and handed it to me. “Maybe Travis even forgot it was out here. Maybe he meant to do something with it, but you know how hard those last few months were. He and Melissa weren’t themselves.”
At the end of both Melissa and Dad’s lives, it had been about pain management. I flipped the envelope over. It was card-sized. His penmanship on the page was even and easy to read, which told me he’d written this before things got really bad.
I slid my finger under the flap, opened the envelope, and withdrew three pieces of paper. One was a letter from my dad to me, and the other was a note from my mom—well, more a bullet list than a letter—and it explained the third piece of paper.
“She lists out things like you do,” Nick said as he read over my shoulder.
I unfolded the third piece of paper, and we both studied it. “Holy shit,” we said in unison.