2. Eli
S tanding against the railing next to his sister, Eli closed his eyes as Vivien delivered a whispered pep talk about how he was the architect to build bridges between the families.
All he could hear in his head was…
You will never lay eyes on anyone with the last name of Wylie ever again!
Crista’s histrionics aside, he knew who’d really issued that decree. He didn’t know why—Crista hadn’t actually explained anything other than sweeping accusations with no specifics. Did it matter? Only one person in this family had the power to tell all of them what to do, when to do it, and what the price would be for disobeying.
When Maggie Lawson told her grown children what to do, they usually did it.
But never in his life had so much been at stake. He’d either lose his mother…or Kate Wylie, the woman he’d only just realized he loved.
“Hey.”
They both turned at the sound of Crista’s voice. She stepped outside onto the deck, the lights in the house silhouetting her narrow figure. Her hair was weirdly wild—she normally managed to tame her dark curls into smooth submission. Her shoulders seemed a little slumped, as if the fight had gone out of them, or maybe they were just pressed by the weight of her job tonight. She seemed even more petite than usual, and very, very sad.
At ten years her senior, Eli had often felt like both brother and father figure to his perfectionist little sister. Especially tonight, despite how her arrival had damaged the lovely peace they’d spent a month happily building at the Summer House.
Poor kid. It wasn’t easy being Maggie’s messenger.
“Come on out, Cris,” he said, taking a step forward. “Let’s start over with a nice family hello.”
She smiled and lifted a red Solo cup. “Jonah’s version of a greeting. It’s strong and I’m dizzy enough. Want it?”
He shook his head and led her to the grouping of furniture around a coffee table. “Have a seat.”
Before she did, Vivien came closer, the two of them regarding each other in silence.
Crista blew out a breath, caving first. “Hurricane Crista, cat five, has arrived.”
Vivien smiled at the ice-breaker. “Hey, it’s Florida. We get hurricanes here.” With that, she put her arms around Crista and closed her eyes. “Sit down and tell us everything, okay? Without…”
“Raising my voice?” Crista suggested with a wry self-deprecating laugh. “I’ll try, but it’s…upsetting. I’m really upset and when I saw her…” She huffed out a breath. “Yeah.”
Vivien reached for a throw blanket on the back of the sofa and Eli touched the wall switch to turn on the fire feature built into the coffee table.
Crista sat down on the sofa and took a sip, then quickly set the cup down. “Look, I’m sorry for…that. I was stunned to see her, is all. But…” She bit her lip and looked over the dancing flames into Eli’s eyes. “I stand by my position. We cannot fraternize with that family.”
Fraternize? Eli almost laughed. Should he tell her that he’d fallen so hard for Kate Wylie he couldn’t see straight? That he planned to get her down here from Ithaca this summer with her two kids? That Tessa and Lacey had started an event planning business together and they’d basically been one big happy family for almost five weeks?
God forbid.
No. The God he loved would never forbid that. But his mother would.
He opted to start on slightly more neutral territory—the house. He made a vague gesture around them. “So what do you think of the Summer House, twenty-first century version?”
“It’s nice.” She gave an easy laugh. “Understatement alert, and I’m not known for those.”
Eli smiled. “It’s fine, Cris. We know you’re upset. We just don’t quite understand why.”
“Well, this house is a work of art,” she said. “I mean, wow, what a flip. I can’t believe it’s the same place we came and stayed as kids.”
“Just the same piece of land,” Eli said. “Although we saved a few things from the original place, like the front door, which has been repurposed as the pantry door. And some ancient window glass. What else?” he asked Vivien.
“My diaries,” she said. “Those are a good time.”
Crista rolled her eyes. “I can only imagine.” She air-quoted, “‘Crista had a meltdown.’”
Vivien snorted. “That’s in there.”
Crista smiled, but her expression grew pained as it became obvious that they had to stop the small talk and get down to the business of why she was here.
“This is very serious, you guys.” She closed her eyes. “I’m sorry, but Artie Wylie is responsible for Dad’s death.”
“How?” Eli demanded. “Do you realize you haven’t told us yet?”
She nodded, taking another sip, but the booze made her shudder so she put the cup down and slid it away. “I couldn’t tell you while she?—”
“Tell us now,” Vivien interrupted with an impatient look.
“Artie Wylie turned Dad in to the police,” she said softly.
Eli stared at her, quite literally unable to breathe. He couldn’t have heard that right.
“He discovered…something, I don’t know what. And he went straight to the cops and because of him, because of his gross disloyalty to his best friend, the police launched an investigation that sent our father to prison. And prison, we all know, caused him to have a fatal heart attack. So, Artie is responsible for our father’s death.”
Eli shook his head. “How? When? Why didn’t we know this?”
“My answer to all your questions is a fat, I don’t know,” Crista said. “I have just told you the sum total of what Mama would share with me. You know how she is.”
Vivien grunted. “Information is power, and she wants it all.”
Crista angled her head in concession. “But she wanted us to know that much, especially after you said… they’d been here.”
“They?” Eli scoffed, ire rising at the word. “ They have names. Kate and Tessa Wylie.”
“Is Kate here, too?” Crista asked on a gasp.
“No, but she was,” Vivien said, sneaking a look at Eli.
“So now it’s just”—Crista jutted her chin—“her.”
“Yes, just Tessa,” Eli replied. “For now.”
“Well, she needs to leave. There’s no debating this, Eli. Mama would have a cow.”
He managed not to roll his eyes, having not called Maggie anything but “Mom” or her first name since he was twelve. But to Crista, she was “Mama.”
Honestly, it didn’t matter how they referred to her—she called the shots in the Lawson family.
As for a debate? There’d be plenty of debate when the truth came out. And he’d have to tell his mother eventually, wouldn’t he? He wasn’t going to hide his feelings for Kate. This whole household already knew he and Kate were on the brink of…something.
Something that could disappear as fast as it had happened under the weight of a revelation like this. What if it were true? Could he love Kate if her father played a role in Dad’s arrest?
Yes, but it would introduce one incredibly ugly complication.
“Why don’t you tell us every single thing Mom said,” Vivien suggested to Crista. “Because this narrative doesn’t fit anything we know.”
“It’s not a narrative ,” Crista shot back. “It’s a fact that I suppose you could look up in police investigation files.”
Eli shared another look with Vivien, knowing she was thinking exactly what he was—they could contact Peter McCarthy, their friend and a detective in Pensacola. Maybe he could look up those files.
“What did she say, Crista?” Eli pressed. “Exactly, word for word.”
“It was the typical conversation with Maggie Lawson,” she said with a shrug.
“In other words, she told you what to think,” Vivien said dryly.
“Pretty much,” Crista muttered, the comment surprising. Had he ever heard Crista utter an unkind word about their mother? “But Mama has strong feelings about things,” she added, as if she felt guilty even for implying anything negative about Maggie. “Some people do, you know. I appreciate that you hate conflict, Viv, but sometimes conflict is necessary.”
Eli looked from one sister to the other, who’d always been different on the subject of conflict.
Vivien hated it and usually capitulated, a pacifier in most situations, though she’d been working on her backbone this past month. But Crista seemed to thrive on conflict, along with a crippling need to have everything as perfect as she could make it.
All of which made him wonder just how hunky-dory it really was living with Maggie.
“Come on, Cris,” Vivien urged. “Time, dates, details? We need to know.”
Crista inhaled slowly, gathering her thoughts. “We were on our way to the airport for her big month-long trip to Europe with her gardening club. I told her that you two had called me to see what I thought about the possibility of keeping this house instead of selling it. And I told her that I thought that was something worth considering,” Crista added. “Because I do.”
She did? Eli felt his brow raise. He hadn’t been expecting that.
Vivien reacted, too. “I’m glad you do, Crista,” she said. “It’s an incredible place?—”
Crista held up her hand. “But it was given to us by our mother for the sole purpose of selling it for a profit to make up for what we went through with Dad,” she reminded them.
What they went through? A familiar disgust hit Eli in the chest at the thought of the decisions his father had made, the crimes he’d committed, and the shame he’d brought to the family name.
But somehow, his mother—wily and secretive as she was—had managed to squirrel away the beach cottage that Dad bought only a month before he was arrested, hiding the asset in a trust. For thirty years, she’d rented it out through an attorney, accumulating a considerable amount.
She’d used that money to hire Eli as the architect of this house, cleverly waiting until the statute of limitations on Dad’s crimes had passed. The law said that the house, or the profit from its sale, belonged to Roger’s three children, since their father had died while serving his sentence.
“Is she opposed to us keeping it?” Eli asked.
Crista shrugged. “Surprisingly, no. At first, she was a little taken aback because she knows that kind of financial windfall would be amazing for all of us.”
True. No one could argue that the cash from selling this place, even split three ways, would be a boon to all of their lives.
“She reminded me that under the weird loophole that her attorney found, we are legally permitted to sell and keep the profit, on or after the thirty-year anniversary of his death. Likewise, we are also permitted to keep the house. It’s our choice.”
Eli and Vivien shared a look, liking this news. They both fully expected Maggie to balk at the idea of keeping the house, but maybe she had recognized that it was their house to do with as they wanted.
“But then,” Crista continued, falling back as if the story was just too much, “the ground shook when I mentioned you’d been in touch with the Wylies. I made a game-time decision not to tell her they’d been here because…well, I could read the room. Or, in this case, the car. At the mention of the Wylies, she flipped out.”
“Eesh,” Vivien muttered. “Never fun.”
“No, it wasn’t.” Crista’s eyes shuttered. “She ordered me to tell you in no uncertain terms that we—none of us, all of us—are never, ever to speak to anyone from that family ever again. This is not negotiable. She said that our father would never have gone to prison if Artie hadn’t ratted on Dad to the police. Because of that tip—from a Cornell Law ethics professor, no less—they launched an investigation and the rest, as you know, is sad history.”
A sad and sickening history that had become etched in Eli’s life and heart.
“A history,” Crista continued, “that could have been avoided if Artie Wylie had kept his mouth shut and looked the other way, at least according to our mother.”
“Did she say how or why Artie would turn him in?” Vivien asked.
Crista shook her head. “She just said that he did, and that’s what ended their friendship and our summers in Destin with the Wylie family. She said that Artie Wylie was a ‘pompous goody two shoes’—that’s a quote—who somehow sniffed out that Dad was, um…doing some untoward things.”
Eli shifted in his seat and cast his gaze down. After thirty years, he still physically loathed the subject of Dad’s crimes. It hurt him body, soul, and spirit. And it had made him determined to be the polar opposite of his father, even though he had followed in his professional footsteps and become an architect.
“I know Artie taught ethics, so he should have known it was wrong to ruin all those lives,” Crista said, coming forward to look hard at them. “There’s such a thing as loyalty to your friends, you know. That’s ethical, too.”
“That’s why we’re defending Tessa,” Vivien said. “She’s become a friend. So has Kate.”
Crista grunted with visible disgust, and Eli fought the urge to respond. Not yet. He couldn’t tell her yet. But he would, eventually.
“That won’t go over well with Mama,” she said. “In fact…I’d rather she never found that out. The Wylie family is…our mortal enemy. If it weren’t for them, Dad would be alive today.”
“Quit saying that, Crista.” Eli’s words came out harsher than he meant them to, but he was sick of hearing a phrase that surely came straight from Maggie’s lips. “There’s got to be more to the story. If it’s true, there’s got to be a reason for Artie to make that decision.”
“Who cares what his rationale was?” Crista volleyed back. “I don’t need to know why he stabbed his best friend in the back. But I do know this—Mama made it clear that we are not to have anything to do with that family. Period, end of story. What difference does it make? They’ve been out of our lives for thirty years and they can stay that way.”
Eli winced and Vivien shot him a look that Crista definitely noticed.
“Why did you even get in touch with them?” she asked, fixing her gaze on Vivien.
“I wanted to talk to Kate,” Vivien said. “Finding out Mom still owned this property made me want to reconnect with two of my childhood best friends.”
“But you knew we don’t talk to them,” Crista said.
“I knew our parents had a falling out, and no one had any idea why until you came in here tonight. Not them, not us.” Vivien inched closer. “We had great memories of those seven summers. We honestly wanted to recreate them, and this past month? We have.”
“Well, how nice for you,” Crista said coolly. “My memories of those summers weren’t as spectacular.”
“Oh, Crista.” Vivien made a face. “I hate that.”
“Whatever,” she said, flicking off the sympathy. “I loved it here, too, but I was lonely a lot of the time. And at the end of those summers? You two were both in college, Dad went to jail, and Mama and I had to move into an apartment. She was never home because she had to work at that dentist’s office, remember?”
Eli sighed. “You know what, Cris? That’s a valid gripe. You were alone a lot those summers and as teenagers, we never really went out of our way to include a kid so much younger. And you’re right. During the worst of the legal wrangling, we were away at college and it was a lot easier for us to separate from Dad’s arrest. Then you ended up living with Mom, and she had to work.”
“I’m still living with Mom,” she said, a weirdly droll note in her voice as she lifted the cup again, but didn’t drink.
“And that’s okay, isn’t it?” Vivien asked, obviously hearing it, too.
“Oh, sure, it’s…” She tipped the cup from side to side, then put it down. “Is this truth serum? I’ve hardly had a drop but definitely feel it.”
Eli leaned closer. “Is everything all right with you?”
For a second, she looked like she might cry—no surprise, this was Crista the Crier. But it was the pain in her expression that got him. The deep, real pain that wasn’t just being annoyed by their mother.
“Crista?” He reached his hand out, but she drew back.
“Nothing’s going on,” she said, crossing her arms. “Nothing at all.”
Whoa, it might be worse than he realized. Of course she’d keep quiet about problems—she’d inherited that trait, or learned it, from Maggie. Add to it that having the appearance of a perfect life was very, very important to her, and…yeah.
His little sister had problems.
“Maybe you could spend some time here,” Vivien suggested, no doubt picking up all the same things. “This summer? When Nolie’s out of school?”
She shook her head. “No, we’ll have other things to do this summer,” she said vaguely, again giving the impression there was more she wasn’t saying.
“Can you stay a few days?” Eli asked. “Destin’s so good for the soul and we can keep talking.” Not only did he think that might help her, but he also had to break the news to her about Kate.
“My soul is fine,” she said lightly, then smiled. “Maybe not as fine as yours, Eli, but then, I don’t go to church like you.”
“But I do want to keep the dialogue open,” he said, not willing to give up. “Please think about it.”
She closed her eyes. “I’m not thinking about anything until both of you promise there will never be anyone named Wylie in this house again.”
Was she serious? Eli grunted softly and closed his eyes.
“You can’t promise that?”
He ran a hand through his hair, a band of pressure around his chest as he rooted around for the right words.
“Look, Cris,” he said. “We completely understand and respect that there’s a tough history here, especially for our mother. We love her, too, and would never want to upset her. But she’s not always right about everything. There could be much more to the story or even another side to the story. Or it could be a regret that Artie took to his grave.”
He almost told her that he and Kate had gone to visit old family friends in search of answers about the falling out, and they’d given conflicting—and ridiculous—stories about the couples having affairs with each other. But what if there was truth to that?
She’d flip out. Eli, Kate, Tessa, and Vivien had all agreed that allegation was simply preposterous.
“Honestly, Tessa and Kate didn’t even know our father had died,” Vivien told her. “Furthermore, they knew he went to jail but never once in the time we’ve been together has anyone ever said anything about Artie telling the police.”
“Not a word,” Eli agreed. “And people’s memories get foggy, especially as they get older. Mom’s seventy-eight…” He made a face and held up a hand as if he expected an argument. “I know you two are very close, but…”
Crista’s shoulders sagged. “Not quite like we used to be,” she admitted under her breath.
He knew it. “What do you mean? You and Mom are best friends. I mean, she lives with you, and you named your daughter after her.”
“I did and I would do it again,” she said. “I love Mama more than anything. But things…have been really hard recently.” Her voice cracked slightly, tears threatening.
Vivien leaned in, touching Crista’s arm. “Hey. You want to talk about it?”
“No, I’m just…emotional lately. More than, you know, usual.” She managed a quick laugh at herself, which touched Eli.
“You want to know something?” she asked after a moment. “The times you two did include me during those Destin summers? It was pure heaven. And I’ve been wanting some of that inclusion. I knew you were down here having fun and I…wasn’t.”
“But now you are,” Eli said. “So stay.”
She shook her head. “I can’t. Anthony can’t handle Nolie alone that long. She’s got… a lot going on in school.”
“It feels like you’re the one with a lot going on, hun,” Vivien said, putting an arm around her little sister. “No wonder you encouraged Maggie to go to the Netherlands.”
Crista gave a guilty laugh. “Maybe a little.”
“Well, she’s gone for a while,” Eli said. “Could you bring Nolie down? She’s only in second grade. Could she miss a few weeks of school?”
“Please, she’d love nothing more, but…” She tipped her head toward the house. “Will she still be here?”
“Yes.” Eli and Vivien answered in perfect sibling unity, the response instantly getting a rise from Crista.
“Why?” she demanded, sitting up like she might have to rocket to her feet again to make her point. “She’s not family. She doesn’t belong in our house!”
“She’s our friend,” Vivien said. “And Lacey’s working for her.”
Crista eyes widened. “What exactly has been going on in this house for the past month?”
Eli shifted in his seat, not ready to get into anything more right now. “Just think about it tonight, Cris.”
“I have to get a hotel.”
“Are you crazy?” Vivien asked. “This place is huge. I’ll move Lacey back in with me,” she added under her breath to Eli. “Crista can have Ka—the spare room.”
Crista instantly stood up and froze, then dropped right back down. “Either I had more of that drink than I realized or I’m just wiped out. I’ll go back tomorrow.”
“I’ll put clean sheets on the bed,” Vivien said, standing.
“And I’ll get your bags,” Eli said. “Assuming you have them.”
“One, an overnight bag.”
“Good. Then you’ll at least stay tonight.” He leaned over and kissed her on the head. “And longer, if we’re lucky.”
She looked up at him, more of that sadness in her expression.
“Because it’s more fun with you, Crista,” he added.
She rolled her eyes. “Liar. It’s just like it always was. Y’all are one little unit and I’m on the outside looking in.”
“But this time we’ll let you drink at the bonfires with the big kids.”
“Depends on who the kids are,” she said. “Because the price to get into the ever-elusive Big Kid Club might be my relationship with my mother.”
No one knew that better than Eli.
Oh, Maggie. Why did she make everything so difficult?