24. Annie
Chapter 24
Annie
T wo weeks and a day. I blinked and it was over.
It felt like I’d lived a whole different life in that stretch of time, one so far apart from Atlanta and all the heaviness I hadn’t wanted to deal with. The Fire won five of the seven games on the road, tight, brutal games that had me on the edge of my seat or screaming at a ref who absolutely couldn’t hear me, my heart pounding with every slap of the puck. I still wasn’t totally used to being in the crowd for the chaos of it all, seeing the speed and violence and precision in real life instead of on the screen, but god, I’d loved every second of it. It was so much better than catching quick clips on the big screen at Smokey’s or watching with my dad in between writing essays in high school.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d actually gone away as an adult. My last memorable vacation had been before I got my degree, the summer between high school and college, and although Dad had spent exorbitant amounts of money on it, it wasn’t as satisfying. Dad had taken me to Greece and Italy, but it had just been us. There was no waking up in crisp white sheets wrapped in one or two or even three sets of arms, there were no gentle forehead kisses in the middle of the night or stolen moans.
For the last two weeks, though, I’d played house in hotel rooms, been spoiled on room service, had late-night conversations under dim bathroom lights, and came more times than I could count on all of my fingers and toes. I’d written five new songs. Five , and I was actually proud of them. My notebook was starting to fall apart at the spine from scribbles of chord progressions and chunks of lyrics, and I wasn’t even upset about it.
I hadn’t thought about Elliot more than a handful of times during the whole trip. For the most part, I’d shut my phone off when I was in the hotels, using a spare old one of Cole’s without a sim on Wi-Fi. The weight that had lived in my chest before we’d left had uncoiled just a little. I’d laughed more, slept better, even when I hadn’t slept much at all — and I felt more like myself than I had in years .
So touching back down in Atlanta felt a bit like waking up from a dream I wasn’t entirely ready to wake up from yet. It meant coming back to real life, using my phone, and going to work.
Most of all, it meant seeing my dad. As much as I loved him, it was still a dread and not a want. I couldn’t help but feel like maybe I’d be able to play him one of my new songs and he’d understand, as insane as that sounded.
But I knew Dad. I knew that wasn’t how it would happen, especially not after his text.
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Dad: Come by this evening. We need to talk.
No warmth whatsoever. Just eight words with all the warmth of a cease and desist letter. My stomach had been in a knot since the second it had come through, which had conveniently been about five minutes after I’d walked through the doors of my apartment.
I was exhausted from my flight, but I knew the guys wouldn’t be getting home until tomorrow morning at the earliest, and I had nothing else better to do — so I drove the thirty minutes it took to get just outside of Atlanta on I-75, then took the back roads I knew by heart.
The long, winding driveway looked exactly as it always had. Neatly trimmed hedges, a line of white oaks and crepe myrtles guarding either side like the estate needed protection from the troublemakers who didn’t stand a chance of getting past the gates anyway. The grass was a sickly green in that overwatered, landscaped-to-high-hell kind of way, and the fountain in the loop still sprayed like it had any business being there at all. I could still hear Dad screaming at me the day I decided to swim in it when I was seven.
Our house, or rather, Dad’s estate , was bought with the money from his prestigious legal job and was built to be looked at. It wasn’t warm or inviting or a loving place to live after Mom died. Three stories of cold white brick and symmetry was a stupid idea for somewhere in the hurricane belt — we’d had the upstairs windows replaced at least seven or eight times from debris. Even as a kid, those windows freaked me out, watching me like brand new eyes every time we’d come home from evacuating and they’d be broken. I’d spent the first eighteen and a half years of my life in that house and still never felt like I’d earned the right to lean on a wall or call my room mine .
My tires crunched over the gravel that lined the loop, slowing to a stop right in front of the freshly painted wooden steps. I spotted him immediately, standing on the wraparound porch with his arms crossed, his crisp blue dress shirt tucked into charcoal slacks, his greying hair styled back away from his face. A human gavel in fucking loafers.
I sat there for a moment, the engine idling, my fingers tightening around the steering wheel, trying to talk myself out of opening the door. But it didn’t work. I’d only get an earful later.
“Annie,” Dad said, nodding at me as I shut the door on the same black Ford Fusion I’d had since high school. I didn’t bother to lock it — it wasn’t like anyone was going to break into it out here.
“Hey, Dad.” I walked up the front porch steps, my body still a little sore from the position Xavi had held me in last night, and came to a stop in front of him.
He gave me a once over, his eyes sharp, his mouth flat. Just that unreadable, lawyer stare I’d seen him use in a courtroom too many times to count that could make a witness stammer and make me feel fifteen again.
“Come inside,” he said as if I were a guest in this house, stepping back and holding the door open with enough stiffness that it set my alarm bells off. Dad was a board most of the time, but this was a step further even for him.
I walked into the front hall, the marble floor making each fall of my boots echo. I kicked them off at the shoe rack before he could ask me to, knowing the drill. Everything was exactly the same, but still so unfamiliar — white walls, crown molding, the same oil painting of the Savannah coastline hanging above the fireplace. There was no warmth, no clutter, and more importantly, no trace of me or Mom anywhere.
He motioned toward the leather couch across from the mantle and I followed the wordless command without thinking about it, sinking down onto the edge of the sofa like it might bite me. He didn’t sit, though, and that made my stomach twist. He stood in front of the coffee table, his arms crossed, looming like he was trying to decide if I was his daughter or a witness on the stand.
“Where have you been the last two weeks?” he asked.
I swallowed. Fair question. “I went to LA for a bit,” I said, not fully lying, but my voice was tight. “I just needed to get away for a little bit.”
His brow raised, his brown eyes boring a hole in my skull. “Just LA?”
“Just LA, Dad.”
He walked over to the built-in bar, poured himself two fingers of Lagavulin, and didn’t offer me one. He turned back to me, leaning back on the bar, and let the silence stretch between us as he sipped.
The tension was eating me alive, but I knew better than to put my foot in my mouth with him.
“Tell me, Annie, are you particularly fond of the Atlanta Fire lately?” he asked, and bile crept up my esophagus. “You used to like watching the games with me. Never seemed overly interested in attending one though.”
I blinked at him, my pulse starting to rise.
“I know you’ve been following Cole Maxwell, Colton Miller, and Xavi Moreau from city to city.”
My spine stiffened. “What?”
He didn’t flinch, just took another sip and stared at me over the rim of the glass. “I said I know where you’ve been. I know who you’ve been with. I know what cities they’ve played in, and I know you’ve been in every one.”
I could feel the color drain from my face, my cheeks suddenly feeling ice cold. “How… How do you know their names?”
He shrugged. “I’m a fan. You know that. And I do my due diligence,” he said flatly. “Especially when my daughter disappears without notice. Made a few calls, double-checked flight logs. Word of mouth.”
I stared at him, my mouth going dry, my brain scrambling for words. I replayed every moment I thought I’d been discreet, every moment I’d failed at that. None of us wanted it out there, but now of all people, my father knew.
He took another sip of his drink before holding it in front of his waist like a shield, like he was measuring the weight of his words before he said them.
But nothing could have prepared me for them.
“Are you sleeping with them?”
The air got sucked out of the room in the span of half a second. My jaw tensed, my breath caught in my throat. “Excuse me?”
He didn’t even flinch. “Are you sleeping with the three of them, Annabelle Marie Brent?”
His use of my full name hit me the same way it always did when I was in trouble as a child. “I’m not answering that,” I rasped, my chest tight, my body screaming at me to leave . But Dad had a way of locking me down with just a stare.
He set his glass down on the bar with a sharp clack. “So that’s a yes.”
I didn’t respond. I couldn’t . Never in my life had I imagined my father interrogating me over this, outright asking if I was sleeping with them, shoving his nose into the life he helped create but usually kept an unhealthy distance from.
“You know,” he said, taking a few steps forward until he was right on the other side of the coffee table, his eyes locked on mine, his forehead lines prominent and angry. “I thought you were smarter than this. But then I remember you got your degree in music performance and I’m reminded all over again.”
A dry, humorless laugh bubbled up my throat, anger coating the sound of it. “Wow. Really? Attacking that again? Was this not enough of a Dad-deemed fuck-up that you had to throw in my degree?”
His jaw worked as he looked at me. “What happened to Elliot?” he asked, dodging my words entirely.
I recoiled a little. “What does any of this have to do with Elliot?”
“He was good for you, that’s what it has to do with this,” he said flatly as if it was a fact, as if it had been carved into stone and prophesized for millennia.
“You barely liked Elliot.”
“He had direction though, Annie. He had ambition. He was smart. He was published.” He shook his head as if it was obvious. “I would have gladly welcomed him into the family. At least then I’d have a child that didn’t run off chasing men like some?—”
“Some what , Dad?” I snapped. “Some whore? Is that the word you wanted to use?”
His jaw was tight, the vein in his temple twitching. “You’re humiliating yourself,” he said, dodging my question.
My body finally unlocked, my patience wearing thin. “No. I’m doing something that makes me happy, which you’ve always had a problem with. Karate? No, she needs more math tutoring. Acting? No, she needs to study. Singing lessons? No, she needs to do debate club. Music lessons? No, couldn’t have her end up a deadbeat, she needs to learn how to file taxes ,” I listed them on my fingers, walking him through a shortlist of times he’d let me down as a child alone. “I took control when I went to college and you’ve fucking hated it since. If my life choices embarrass you in front of your stupid golf buddies who don’t give two shits about you, then maybe they’re the wrong people to impress.”
He stared at me in silence, mouth pressed into a hard line. It was so obvious that he wanted to say more, wanted to drag me back down into the polished, spotless version of me he’d spent eighteen years trying to build. But I wasn’t going to let him.
“You think Elliot was good for me?” I asked, my voice lowering. “You don’t know a damn thing about what I need.”
“That’s not true,” he said, his gaze hardening. “I know you need money.”
“I have enough between work and my occasional gig and my trust.”
“Funny you should mention your trust.” His hands slipped into his pockets. “I’ve moved it.”
The world tilted on its axis. “You what?”
“I moved it,” he said again. “I looked at the statement. Looks like you pull just enough out for your rent each month, is that right?”
“Dad,” I swallowed.
“I’ve got a new card for you.” He pulled out a sleek black card from his pocket, holding it out to me like some kind of bargaining chip. “It’s a direct access to the trust.”
I reached out hesitantly, but he pulled it back just an inch before my fingers could touch it.
“Step back in line, and you’ll keep access.”
There it was. The other shoe dropping, the storm after the calm. “What?”
“You heard me, Annabelle.”
I blinked at the black card, my head spinning. “You can’t do that. Mom left that for me.”
“Your mother left me in charge of the account. I can do what I please with it,” he said, his voice too calm, too eerie. “And if that means saving you from yourself, then that’s what I’ll do. No more chasing hockey guys, and you have one year to make music work otherwise you’re coming to work at the firm.”
I couldn’t breathe. My throat felt like it was closing in, the backs of my eyes burned .
“And give Elliot another chance, while you’re at it.”