Chapter 30
CHAPTER THIRTY
EMMA
“How’s Seamus?” Sophie asks after the door closes behind her, leaving us alone in the private room at Buchanan Brewery. She’s dressed in a cozy branded hoodie and looks much less harried than she did the other night in the emergency room.
I’m a wreck, although I did put on one of my favorite silk, button-up dresses. A power dress.
“He’s okay,” I answer tightly.
I sent Chuck home after I got back to Smith House yesterday. When I texted him later to ask how Seamus was doing, he sent a thumbs up. But I shouldn’t have even temporarily doubted his worthiness as a correspondent, because he followed up with a three-paragraph text that boiled down to this: they’d eaten a pizza and watched an old movie on Netflix that had a strange ending. Seamus hadn’t done anything dangerous, but he seemed to feel really low. He hadn’t talked much, but hey, the rabbit had really taken a shine to him. There’d also been a string of emojis.
I woke up in the middle of the night, my whole body aching with sadness, and found myself crying . I haven’t cried in years. I didn’t even cry after the whole mess with Jeffrey. It made me feel bitter, my heart shriveled, but now it feels anything but. My heart is alive and weeping.
Poor Shadow didn’t know what to do. She padded around my body and then batted me in the face with her paw as if she thought a brisk slap might bring me around.
It didn’t.
But I brought the flask into bed and slept with my hand wrapped around it. In the morning, I was surprised to see it before I remembered.
The heart is such a fickle thing. It seizes onto things associated with a person when it can’t be with them. But in the light of day I knew the truth. The flask wasn’t him any more than the car was—they were his things and they were no substitution.
That hollow ache kept making itself known.
I didn’t call or text him, though. I wouldn’t reach out to him until I was sure. I didn’t want to play with his feelings, because now I knew he had plenty.
“His rib isn’t too bad?” Sophie presses, bringing my attention back to her.
“He seems to have kind of forgotten about it,” I say truthfully. I doubt it’s foremost on his mind right now.
“Oh, well that’s good, I guess,” Sophie says, looking doubtful. “I just wanted to say you and your friends were kind to get Otis a job. Between you and me, it might not be the best situation for him. He’s a bit too…impressionable. But he needs to keep busy. When he’s not working, the whole house is covered in dirty laundry, and to be honest, Jonah can’t stand him.” She trails off before continuing, “My boss also told me about the call you made to him. Thank you , Emma.”
“You’re welcome,” I say, feeling unequal to it. Otis’s job is very temporary and probably won’t be much fun once I put Ellie into a bad mood.
“When she gets here, I’ll bring her straight back, but if you could keep her in this room, I’d appreciate it.”
I smile at her. “You’ve got it. And no skunks. Nicole got a lecture from me and the owners last time.”
She smiles at me, then surprises me by handing me a sourball candy from the pocket of her apron.
I raise my eyebrows in question. “These are my emergency candy,” she says. “They remind me that I don’t exist to please other people. Or at least they’re supposed to.”
“Thank you,” I say, surprised by another surge of emotion clogging my throat. Damn. It’s as if all of my emotions have been freed at once.
She smiles again and leaves, and I pop the candy.
She’s back five minutes later with Ellie, Otis, and two glasses of beer on a serving tray.
Ellie gasps, then says, “It’s you ,” and grabs one of the glasses off the tray and instantly pours it over me.
Sophie gapes at us, probably surprised things have gone wrong this quickly.
“Did you get that on camera?” Ellie asks Otis, still glaring at me. He nods like a bobble head, her phone raised.
The beer is seeping into my hair, my dress, my bra. But I don’t get up. If I did, I’d be giving her the reaction she wants, and I need to remain in control of this interaction. So I just pick up the napkin at my place setting and calmly wipe my face before asking, “Are you done with your tantrum?”
“Should I call the police?” Sophie asks, pulling her tray away from Ellie with a scowl as Ellie reaches for the other glass.
“Yes!” Ellie shouts. “Call them. There’s a restraining order against her.”
“Uh…”
“There isn’t,” I say pleasantly. “There’s nothing keeping me from being in the same room as you. Aren’t we lucky?”
Sophie looks confused. Her cousin seems nervous but is still filming with Ellie’s phone while sweat slicks his brow.
Ellie straightens her perfectly straight dress. Beer sops down my back, all the way down to my underwear, my hair soaked and sticking to me. But I keep my cool, even expression. This is it. This is the big show.
It may all be over soon. Finally.
The thought doesn’t fill me with as much relief as it should, but I’m in no mood to dwell on that.
“I’m leaving,” Ellie says, but she doesn’t move. Neither do Sophie or Otis. It’s like we’re in a big standoff, but only two people have any idea what’s going on.
“You shouldn’t,” I tell Ellie. “If you leave now, Jeffrey’s going to destroy you the same way he destroyed me.”
She laughs, glancing at the camera Otis is carrying. Her next laugh is completely for the camera. “Can you believe this?” she asks the screen. “his woman is crazy. She ambushed me. She’s completely obsessed with me and my boyfriend.”
“He was my boyfriend, Ellie,” I say, seeking out her gaze. “For two years. He said we had to keep it secret because it would be unprofessional for other people to know, and I was okay with that. I didn’t want everyone to know. But then I noticed something was wrong with the books. He was charging for more hours than he’d given people. Embezzling. I thought it was an honest mistake, but after I talked to him about it, he assigned me to your divorce case. He made sure that I found out you were sleeping together so he could sabotage me and destroy my reputation. He made sure no one would believe me.”
Sophie gasps and drops the second beer. It explodes with shattered glass and foam and drops of beer everywhere. I don’t care about the mess—I’m already wet—but Ellie acts as if she’s been hit with a literal bomb.
“This is cashmere ,” she shouts at Sophie, climbing up onto the chair as if the floor has turned liquid.
“I’m sorry,” Sophie says in a flat tone. “So sorry.” She plucks up the big pieces of glass and throws them away in the trashcan. Then she reaches forward and grabs Otis’s arm. “But we need to get out of here and get some cleaning supplies. We’re obviously going to come back, but it’s really important to get going on the cleanup job. So have a great conversation, and yeah, we’ll be back.”
Otis’s eyes look wild, but at Sophie’s urging, he sets the phone down and starts to back out of the room, stepping around the mess.
“If you leave this room, you’re fired,” Ellie snaps at him.
He looks like he’s going to relent, but Sophie is surprisingly strong and tugs him out.
Swearing, Ellie presses something on her phone and says, “It’s still recording, Emma. Give me something else so I can show the world how nuts you are.”
“Do you want to know what Jeffrey has planned for you?”
Her gaze narrows on me. “I don’t trust you.”
“I know. I also know that you’re thirty-six.”
A gasp escapes her, and anger floods her eyes. She slams the red button on her phone screen, turning the recording off.
“Who told you that?” she hisses as she leans over the table.
“Jeffrey knows, and he plans on telling everyone. As soon as he gets what he came to Asheville to get. The information you said you have on him.”
“We’ve been having some issues, sure, but he wouldn’t do that,” she objects.
I can tell I’m getting through to her, though.
“He wouldn’t leak it directly, so it could be traced back to him,” I agree. “After all, he’s the one who created those documents for you.”
She blanches again at this evidence that I know what I’m talking about.
“But he’d do it to ruin you,” I continue. “That’s what he does to women after he gets tired of them. Especially if they’ve threatened him. He’ll do anything to protect himself, Ellie. He’ll step on anyone.”
“I don’t believe you,” she insists, but she’s obviously worried. I can see it in the slight trembling of her lips and the way she keeps fidgeting with the neckline of her dress, flecked with beer splatter. I’m cold now, my wet dress clingy and uncomfortable. “You’re trying to turn me against him.”
“I am,” I agree. “I want that information you have so we can ruin him. He’s the one who deserves it, not you or me or whoever else he’s decided to crush beneath his heel. Do you know what he called you when he handed your case over to me? An over-dramatic harpy.”
“You’re lying.”
I pull something up on my phone and pass it across the table to her. It’s a screenshot of the email Jeffrey wrote to her social media star frenemy, from a burner email address, asking if they’d have any interest in some juicy information about Ellie Reed.
Her face is drawn as she glances at me, and for once, she almost looks her age. “This could be from anyone.”
“Don’t you know who it’s from in your gut?”
She considers this for a few seconds, before saying abruptly, “Where’s the other assistant, the sexy one? I want to hire him back. He wouldn’t have left because of some broken glass and spilled beer. I should never have let Nicky keep him away from me.”
“No. He already bruised a rib for you.”
For me.
“He has Carrot,” she says. “I need his contact information. Immediately .”
“He has Carrot,” I agree. “And he’s going to keep Carrot. You were drugging that rabbit so he’d act docile on camera. Do you deny it?”
“I need that rabbit,” she snaps, glaring at me. “You can’t keep him from me. He’s part of my brand.”
“He’s a living, breathing being. We all have the right to be treated with decency.” I think of Seamus stroking him between his ears and feel that awful burning behind my eyes.
“He’s my property.”
The burning sensation turns to rage, thank God, because I would never forgive myself if I cried in front of her. “You forget. Jeffrey’s not the only one who knows your little secret. Seamus is keeping the bunny, and you can sleep at night knowing someone who likes him is actually taking care of him. Get a stuffed animal if you want a mascot. It wouldn’t need to pretend to like you.”
She gapes at me, then looks around for something else to throw. The closest thing is a napkin, which she grabs and balls. The missile misses me by several inches.
“I hate you!” she says, spit flying from her mouth.
“What about Jeffrey? Do you hate the man who wants to ruin you just because he can? Because you might be an inconvenience to him? Doesn’t that make you angry?”
Her expression changes, some resolve forming on her face. “We’ll see about that,” she says, and then grabs her phone and storms out of the room, her effort slightly downplayed by the necessity to step around the remaining pieces of broken glass.
“Ellie, where’s the information you have?” I call out before she can leave.
She taps her head, which isn’t encouraging. Knowledge is important, maybe crucial, but only evidence will bring him down. The door swings shut behind her, and I have to wonder if I just made an enormous mistake.