Chapter 14
The next day, Kelly had to wait until late afternoon before she got a chance to get on Caleb’s computer.
Breah was around all the time, and there was simply no excuse for Kelly to be in Caleb’s office if she were to get caught.
Finally Breah left the house to go shopping. As soon as she saw the car pull out of the gates, Kelly hurried downstairs.
The office was locked, of course, but Kelly knew where the household keys were kept now, so she grabbed them from the kitchen, ran to open the office, and then returned the keys in case Breah returned quicker than expected.
On an edge of excitement and anxiety, Kelly locked the office behind her.
She’d been thinking clearly enough yesterday to make a stray comment after they had sex about how she hoped their session wasn’t caught on security cameras, and Caleb had laughed and told her the only cameras were outside and in the entry areas.
He didn’t want to be on camera in his own home.
So she thought she would probably be okay as long as she was quick.
She ran to the computer and typed in the password. To her relief, the home screen immediately opened up. He probably changed his passwords often, but he must not change them daily.
After that, it was really just a guessing game.
She tried the email first, being careful not to make any changes to his inbox in case he had it opened on his office computer and would notice.
She checked out the folders but saw nothing of interest—certainly nothing that went back seventeen years.
Next, she tried the deleted and sent mail, but all of that must be purged regularly.
There was nothing in the email that could help her, so she closed it down and pulled up his document folders.
There were hundreds of them—so many she stared blankly, overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of information he kept on this computer.
It was all perfectly organized though. Each folder labeled with the project or task and folders inside folders, compartmentalizing each document neatly.
He had an assistant, she reminded herself. He probably didn’t do all this organization on his own.
She scanned through the names of the folders, but she didn’t see one with any name connected to her father. It was so long ago he might not even keep records of it anymore.
What she needed might be in some obscure file cabinet in his company’s storage room.
What she needed might have been destroyed ages ago.
She found a group of folders titled only by years and clicked on the one with the year of her father’s death.
There was a whole group of folders inside it—a variety of different projects. And there was a folder with the name of the shipping company her father worked for.
In that folder was another folder with a name she recognized.
V. DiMauro.
Vinnie had been one of her dad’s bosses. He’d come over for dinner occasionally when she was little.
Her hands were trembling as she clicked on it, looking at the new folders that appeared on the screen. Project names she didn’t recognize but also dates.
She clicked on the date closest to her father’s death and blinked at the number of folders that pulled up.
When she opened one of the documents, it was filled with detailed information and financial transactions she’d never be able to decipher.
She pulled out the jump drive she’d brought and copied the entire project folder, glancing at the clock to reassure herself she’d only been in the office fifteen minutes.
No way would Breah get back from the grocery store that quickly.
She was about to close out the main folder when she saw a subfolder titled Correspondence .
Out of curiosity, she clicked on it, discovering folders by date again.
She sighed. Didn’t the man ever delete anything?
She found the dates just before her father’s death and started opening them.
They were all interoffice memos and saved emails. They were mostly innocuous—about boring, mundane items connected to the project.
She’d already copied all of them so she could sort through them at a different time. But as she was closing the documents, she noticed a few words that made her halt.
The note was from Caleb, written to his father, Arthur Marshall, and made up of only one lines.
The problem we discussed is being dealt with. Let me know if there are more loose ends.
Kelly stared at the screen with a sickening churn of her gut.
It was too vague to be compromising, but she knew—she knew —it was referring to her father.
Caleb. He’d “dealt with” her father, having the man killed instead of leaving a loose end that could compromise the family business. And he’d reported it as blandly and impersonally, as if he were writing normal work correspondence.
It didn’t matter that he wasn’t completely a monster. Even a semidecent man might cross a moral line if the reward was substantial enough.
Caleb had always wanted the career he had now, the legacy left to him by his father. He wanted to be a successful white-collar businessman instead of one of the mobsters on his mother’s side of his family.
His career was his priority. Everything else fell in service to that. Including her father.
Including her.
She’d known to expect it, but it still made her shake helplessly with emotion. There might be more in these documents. Maybe something genuinely compromising. She pulled out her drive.
She closed out the computer quickly and turned around to leave, feeling shaky and heavy and profoundly angry.
She’d only taken one step toward the door when she heard the key turn in the lock.
With a gasp, she reacted instinctively, ducking down to hide under the desk.
It was probably just Breah, straightening up or something. It wasn’t even four thirty yet, so Kelly couldn’t imagine how she’d returned so quickly though.
It wasn’t Breah. It was a member of Caleb’s security team, and she heard him talking in his earpiece. “There’s no one here. I told you it was just that damn misfiring sensor again.”
Shit. How stupid could she be? Of course Caleb had some sort of extra security on his office. He might not have cameras, but he evidently had motion sensors.
The man continued, evidently responding to something said through his earpiece.
“I’m not sure how you think someone managed to get onto the grounds and into the house and then into the office without being caught on camera or triggering an alarm.
But you still send me out to check every fucking fly that triggers a sensor. ”
Kelly wasn’t even breathing, afraid of making any sort of noise. To her infinite relief, the voice got softer as the man evidently backed out of the office, and then the door shut and clicked as it locked again.
She waited five minutes before she dared to crawl out from under the desk, then she took her jump drive and ran back to her room.
Kelly dreamed of her father that night.
She’d had dreams about him before—a lot of them just after he’d died, when she was just a kid—but the dreams now were rare enough to be memorable.
This one wasn’t made up of a real or coherent narrative. It was all just flickered images and feelings. Nothing she could really make sense of, but the fragmented pieces fit together into what felt like an actual experience.
And it was so concrete, so absolutely visceral, that it might as well have been real.
She could see her father in glimpses and flashes. His broad, laughing face, the lines beside his eyes and his mouth, the hair on his forearms beneath the pushed-up sleeves of his old gray sweatshirt.
She could hear hints and glimmers of his familiar voice, his comforting chuckle, the sound of him clearing his throat.
And she could smell him in heartbreaking wafts. A mingling of coffee and the soap he used and the indefinable, unmistakable scent of Dad.
In the midst of those fleeting, sensory flickers of the dream, Kelly could feel him too. His hand in her hair. On her shoulder. On her back. Until, at the very end of the dream, he was hugging her.
And he didn’t feel like a flickering vision. He was solid, warm, strong, real.
It felt so real.
But even in the dream, she knew he was lost. Knew he was gone. Knew that, no matter how much she clung to him, she’d never be able to keep him.
She was sobbing as she woke up.
As she’d slept, she must have turned over onto her stomach because her hot cheek was pressed down against the mattress.
She turned her head until she could bury her face in her pillow.
Choked on the waves of grief, trying desperately to hold them back, knowing she couldn’t cry in front of Caleb, even while he was sleeping.
He’d fallen asleep beside her again after they’d had sex that evening.
But there was no way she could hold back the emotion. She wept in tight, jerky spasms, clenching her whole body to try to keep from making any sound or shaking the bed. It felt like an old wound had been violently torn open.
Felt like her father had just died.
Caleb was sound asleep, just a few inches away. She could feel his presence and hear his steady breathing, although she didn’t dare turn her face to look at him. She needed to be away from him. Needed a real outlet for her grief. Needed something warm and alive to comfort her.
Reese. She wished Reese were here. Or Ralph, the dog. Or Breah with her comforting maternal air. Anything other than lying alone beside a cold, sleeping form, strangling on sobs with her face smothered in a luxurious pillow.
She tried to capture the dream again. Tried to see, hear, smell, feel her father—who’d been lost for so many years. Wanted it so much she felt like her chest would implode, but the dream, like her father, was lost.
And all that was left were scattered fragments and feelings.
Flickers that could never coalesce into substance.
Kelly couldn’t seem to stop crying, something she hadn’t done in years. And the large bed, the dark room, the house that wasn’t hers, all felt like they were swallowing her alive.
Her whole body shook with coiled grief and helplessness, and she wasn’t any different than she’d been at ten years old when her father had been violently, unjustly, unbearably snatched away from her.
Leaving a body with half a skull, bleeding into the dirt.
It was three o’clock in the morning. Caleb was sleeping. The rest of the staff was sleeping too. Warm and safe and content. With people they loved. With people who loved them.
And no matter how hard she tried to put things in perspective and accept the bitter irony of her life, she still couldn’t make any sense of it.
That Kelly had to lose her father—who had been all she’d had in the world, who had been the only person who’d ever truly been hers.
She knew she was sobbing too hard, too desperately. It was dangerous and might hint at things about herself that could never be revealed. But she couldn’t stop.
She felt Caleb shifting beside her and knew that even her tightly suppressed sobbing had woken him up.
But before she could think of how to explain this, before she could try to make her mind work instead of simply howling in grief and outrage, before she could even remember why she was in bed with Caleb in the first place, he put his hand on her shoulder and turned her over.
Revealed her wet, crumpled face.
He silently pulled her against his bare chest, and his arms wrapped around her tightly as she buried her face in his shoulder. She kept sobbing because there was no way she could stop.
It was wrong. She knew it was wrong. She knew why she was here and that Caleb was the reason for it. She’d seen the note on the computer screen not so many hours ago. But she clung to him anyway, let him hold her.
She knew that she hated him and that he was comforting her. And that she desperately needed him. She couldn’t begin to wrap her mind around that truth.
She couldn’t do anything but weep until she finally cried herself to sleep like a child.
Through it all, Caleb didn’t say anything, and she never looked up at his face. She had no way to read him, no way to understand what he was thinking, why he was doing this. Whether it was a random flicker of his humanity or he was putting clues together in a way that would ultimately find her out.
He was gone when she woke up the next morning.
And, staring at his rumpled side of the bed with bleary, aching eyes, Kelly wondered if she could have dreamed the whole thing.