Chapter 30
Caleb was on his way to his business dinner that evening when he got a call from Vinnie DiMauro.
He knew it wouldn’t be good news as soon as he saw the man’s name on his phone.
DiMauro never called just to chat.
“What’s going on?” he asked, pausing in the hall and connecting the call.
“I had a break-in last night.”
Caleb’s body went cold. “What was stolen?”
“An old computer. My wife uses it for her recipes and computer games. It used to be mine.”
“Nothing was on it, was it?”
“I’d deleted everything work related, but sometimes things can be retrieved.”
“Who did it?”
“I don’t know. Professionals. My security system isn’t peanuts, you know. You need to protect yourself.”
“I’m protected. Let me know if I can do anything.”
“Will do.”
When Caleb hung up, he felt rattled and anxious in a way he almost never was.
There was legally nothing that could be done to him. But if certain things became public, then Kelly would find out about them. She would never forgive him. She would leave him. He knew it for sure.
The thought panicked him so much he did his normal mental-defenses thing and focused on what he could control.
He had to get through this business meeting. Then he would call in a few favors to find out who was investigating Vinnie. If they found out the source of the search, then he’d be in a much better position to make it stop.
Get through the dinner. Find out the source of the investigation. Stop it.
These were things he could do.
Living without Kelly, now that he’d found her, was something he couldn’t do.
Three hours later he was in his home office, staring at more email on his computer.
He despised his email so much this evening that he felt vaguely nauseated at the sight of so many unanswered messages.
The meeting over dinner had been fine. Then he’d made some calls and gotten things going on finding out who was looking into Vinnie.
But there was nothing else he could do. Kelly wasn’t even here. She’d gone out to dinner with her friend Reese, so he couldn’t even bury himself in her and start to feel better.
He felt himself going into an emotional spiral of anxiety, stress, and helplessness. He could feel it happening. It had happened before. And every time it had, he’d done things he’d ended up regretting.
He needed Kelly. She could help him stop it. He pulled out his phone and texted her. You coming over tonight?
She’d said she probably would, but it hadn’t been definite.
It was a few minutes before she answered. Yeah. I will. You okay?
Sure.
He wasn’t okay. He hated feeling this way. The first time it had ever happened had been when he was ten, sitting next to Mallory’s bed in the hospital, watching her die and having absolutely no way to stop it.
There was no reason to feel that way now, but he did.
He pulled out his phone again and texted Wes. Tell me.
A minute or two later a reply came through. I finally had an idea about who she reminded me of so I searched some old photos. Check your email.
Caleb had his email open, so he watched as a new message popped up in his inbox.
Attached was a photograph. He felt wrong, guilty, like he was stomping all over Kelly’s privacy, as he clicked it to pull it up.
But he still did it.
The photograph took him a few seconds to identify as one of the annual company picnics his father had thrown for Reliant.
This one must be from around twenty years ago based on his father’s appearance and the clothes people wore.
It was a casual snapshot, and there were a lot of employees and their families scattered around the park, eating and talking.
It didn’t take him long to find what was significant about this particular photograph.
One of the women in the background looked enough like Kelly to make him jerk. Zooming in to see her more closely, Caleb peered at her face, her long blond hair.
She was older than Kelly was now, but she had to be related. And right next to her was a little girl with the same long, blond hair. Caleb wasn’t skilled at identifying the age of children, but he guessed she was maybe eight or nine.
Kelly.
That little girl was Kelly.
At a picnic for employees of Reliant.
His heart was freezing into a hard block in his chest as he shifted the zoom on the image to the side. To the man beside the woman and girl.
He recognized the man. There was no way he could fail to recognize him.
It took a full five minutes for the reality to process.
When it finally did, the photo, his computer screen, his monitor, his whole office blurred in front of his eyes.
He was shaking all the way from his teeth down to his feet. He couldn’t stop it. He couldn’t understand it. It left him cold and numb.
Kelly’s father had worked for him. Caleb had been his supervisor. He thought he might have even seen a picture of her as a child on her dad’s desk, although the memory was too vague now to retrieve.
Her father had been murdered. Her mother had been sure the DiMauros were responsible. And now Kelly was here—with him, hiding what she must have known.
The whole story came together slowly, but it clicked into place with perfect precision.
She was here on purpose. She thought he had killed her father. She wanted him to pay. There was no Russian gangster. Nothing about what they’d had together was real.
All of it— all of it —nothing but the worst kind of lies.
He loved her, but she didn’t love him.
She must hate him. She must absolutely, irrevocably hate him to have done what she’d done, used him so heartlessly, not even cared when he’d fallen head over heels in love with her.
He was shaking so much now that his teeth were chattering, so he stifled it, held it back.
Tried to hold everything back.
All his life he had been smart and careful. All his life he’d protected his heart. Never in his life had he been a fool.
Until now.
It hurt so much he couldn’t even feel it anymore, but he kept holding it back until he thought he might actually be sick.
Then his phone vibrated with a text and he reached for it blindly, taking a full minute before he could focus enough to read the words.
I’m coming over now. Kelly. Coming to him. Acting like nothing had changed. Like they were really in love.
When they weren’t. They just weren’t.
Caleb finally lost it. With a roar of anguished rage, he grabbed his sleek, high-end computer monitor, yanked it away from the cords, and hurled it across the room to slam against the far wall.
The monitor broke into pieces with a resounding crash, smashed remnants littering the polished floor.
He stared at what he’d destroyed, trying to feel relief and satisfaction at this embodiment of his feelings.
He couldn’t. It hadn’t worked.
Because his heart was just as broken as that monitor.
He saw her car pull up less than an hour later.
He wasn’t any more controlled than he’d been before, and he had no idea what he would say when he saw her.
There was nothing he could do. Nothing that would come close to equaling the damage she’d done to him.
So he waited in a numb stupor, assuming the answer would come to him when he saw her.
He hadn’t left his office, and Breah must have told her where he was, because Kelly tapped on the door and opened it a few minutes later.
“Caleb?” she asked, coming into the room, looking fresh and lovely and as untouched as she’d ever been. Completely innocent. Completely a lie. “Are you—?” Her eyes landed on his face, and she must have seen something there. “Are you okay? What’s wrong?”
She came over toward him, but then she obviously saw the wreck of the monitor, which was still in pieces on the other side of the room. “God, what happened, Caleb? Are you okay?”
He stood up because that was how one faced an enemy.
He couldn’t take a step though. Couldn’t speak.
She hurried over to him, reaching out to cling to his shirt. “Caleb, sweetie, what’s the matter? What happened?”
Her eyes were wide and worried and tender, and he still—even now—could swear that she meant it, that she cared for him, that she was scared for him, that she wanted to take care of him.
And it hurt more than anything ever had.
Because he still almost believed her.
“Please, Caleb.” She reached up to take his face in her hands. “Tell me what happened.”
Then suddenly he was hit with an inspiration—blinding, cold, and exactly right. “It’s…” He cleared his throat to make his voice work. “It’s… work. One of my projects fell through. I spent four years on it.”
Her face twisted with sympathy. “Oh no. I’m so sorry. You should have called, and I would have come back right away.”
“It’s okay. I’m okay. It’s nothing to worry about.”
He was lying to her now, the way she’d always lied to him. If she could do it to him, then he could do it back.
He could play this game just as well as she could. She wasn’t the master here.
“Don’t lie to me, baby.” She wrapped her arms around him and held him. An hour ago he would have needed the embrace. He would have taken such comfort in it.
Now he wrapped his arms around her too, and he pretended that nothing had changed.
She thought she could break him, but she couldn’t.
He was going to find out what was really going on here.
By the time this thing was over, he would have broken her.