26. Chapter 26
Chapter twenty-six
Benji
Briar and Milo are still sitting across from each other by the fire when Gina and I come out of the cabin in dry clothes. Milo’s glaring at a spot on the ground while Briar drinks her beer. It’s exactly as uncomfortable between them as I’d expect from them.
I hand Gina a beer, take one myself, and spy the food on the picnic table. Milo must have carried on grilling after his grandmother left.
Fuck it. I’m hungry. I grab a bratwurst, and it’s still hot. Hot enough that I have to slap it quickly into a bun. I look up to find everyone watching me, Milo with a scowl. “I can’t plan on an empty stomach,” I say.
Briar stands and walks around the fire to pull Gina back to her feet. “Come on. Let’s eat first.”
“I’m not hungry,” Gina says, but she follows Briar and fills a plate. Once we settle around the campfire, Milo gets up to help himself to the food.
We eat in silence, then set aside our empty plates one by one. Briar brings everyone another round of beers. Gina passes around the bug spray. A few stars twinkle overhead, and a loon calls out long and low across the lake. It’s such a sad, lonely sound that I shiver.
“Don’t be mad,” I say, mainly to Gina, “but what if you told Diana the truth? Tell her how committed you are as friends and how much Happy Lake means to you.”
“We can’t,” Milo says.
“I don’t know your grandmother very well, but—”
“You don’t know her at all,” he replies, stretching his legs out and crossing his feet on one of the large stones that ring the fire.
Gina touches my arm. “She won’t sell Happy Lake to us if we aren’t married.”
“She might be more open to the idea than you think.” Diana didn’t clutch her pearls when she found out what I did for a job back in Vegas. “I don’t see why not getting married would be a deal breaker.”
“It’s because of me,” Milo says, taking a long drink from his beer.
Silence follows, but Gina’s shoulders slump.
“Why?” I prompt.
“There’s a prenup,” Milo says darkly. “If I leave or am in any way at fault for a divorce, Gina gets the lodge.” Firelight flickers over Milo’s face, making him look even broodier. “Diana doesn’t trust me.”
“I haven’t signed the prenup,” Gina says, slightly defensive. “I don’t want it, and she hasn’t brought it up in months.”
“It doesn’t matter if you sign it,” he says. “You could still take me to court, and any judge would take one look at me and give the lodge to you.”
“Hold on,” I say, holding up my beer. “Milo, you are a catch.” I can already feel him glaring at me as I smile at my wife. “Just not for Gina.”
Her smile is weak, but I’ll take it.
“I love this place,” Gina says, looking around at the lake and the dark forest. “I don’t want to lose it, but I don’t see a way out. We have to call it off. Fake a break-up.”
Briar shrugs. “Hire a fake officiant, and don’t file the paperwork. Easy.”
“We have an officiant who can’t be fired or bribed,” Milo says.
Briar turns a questioning look to Gina when he doesn’t elaborate.
“He’s the local dentist and a stickler for rules,” Gina adds. “If we asked him to fake this or tried to fire him, he’d refuse and complain to Diana.”
Milo rubs at his jaw. “And he’d take it out on us in the dental chair.”
Gina claps her hands together. “We could invite him over for a fake rehearsal. Ask Mrs. Jennings to make her potato salad—”
“Adams knows better than to eat that potato salad,” Milo interrupts. “You are the only one who falls for it.”
“She puts it on my plate, Milo. What am I supposed to do? Feed it to her dog?”
He shrugs. “It’s either you or the dog, Gina.”
“Okay,” I interject because I’m pretty sure intentionally giving someone food poisoning is a crime. “This isn’t helpful. But Gina, point out this potato salad so I don’t eat it.”
She laughs. “It’ll be the one no one is eating, and it’ll have raisins. Not hard to spot.”
“Your mom’s brownies?” Milo suggests. “On Tuesday morning before the wedding? Get him stoned?”
“Okay, I’m going to need some of these brownies,” Briar says.
“Adams would never touch something with that much sugar in it,” Gina says after a moment’s consideration. “And I don’t think my mom could make a pot bran muffin that approaches edible.”
“No food poisoning.” I can’t believe I have to say it.
Milo sits up in his chair. “We could get a fake marriage license.”
Gina sucks in a breath. “At what cost?” she asks when Milo gets to his feet.
“What would you pay to avoid bigamy?”
“I wouldn’t let Travis Gallo turn Happy Lake into a meth lab,” Gina snaps. She glances at me and Briar, then adds, “Travis usually makes fake IDs and, with the help of the only lawyer in town, forges the odd document for people, but…it’s a Havenwood secret that he deals drugs.”
“I’ll talk to him,” Milo says. “I won’t make any promises.”
Gina’s curls bounce as she shakes her head. “No.”
“You won’t find him, anyway,” Briar says. “He sold the bar to Clay and left town.”
Gina gasps. “So it’s true? Lou will murder him.” She doesn’t elaborate if she means this Travis guy or Clay.
Milo drops back into his chair. “Fuck.”
For a long moment, we all stare into the crackling flames of the fire.
“When are you legally married in the eyes of the state?” Briar finally asks. “Is it when the officiant says ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’ or when you sign the license or certificate or something?”
Milo and Gina look at each other. He pulls out his phone. The screen lights his face in the dark. While he searches, I grab everyone a new drink, then slip two of Gina’s lemon bars out of the covered container still on the picnic table.
The first bite melts on my tongue, and I moan as I sit beside her. “I’m going to marry you again,” I say. “These are amazing.”
“My grandma’s recipe,” Gina says, taking the second one. Now I wish I’d grabbed three.
“We should put the food away before the raccoons decide to try us,” Gina says after she finishes her lemon bar.
Briar and I both get up to help Gina.
Milo joins us by the picnic table. “If the marriage license isn’t filed within five days, we’re not married.”
“Think he’d trust us to mail it?” Gina asks.
Milo laughs. “I doubt he’d trust even you that much.”
“He’d notice it missing if we took it. We’d have to do it again. It wouldn’t give us enough to finalize my divorce.”
I still don’t want to divorce Gina, so I grab another lemon bar to make myself feel better.
“If we could put something else in its place?” Milo says.
Gina frowns. “We’d not only have to take it off him but put a fake on him, which we aren’t doing. Plus, it’s probably fraud. Giving him Mrs. Jenning’s potato salad at least looks accidental.”
“No food poisoning,” I remind everyone.
“So it’s impossible,” Milo says with a harsh sigh.
Briar, walking past Milo, looks up at him and stops.
“Oh, you have something on your face.” She steps close to him, and he freezes in place as she reaches up.
“Just right here.” Her thumb brushes the corner of his mouth.
He stares at her in complete horror. Briar’s hand drops away as she steps back.
“Got it. Anyway, I can get the license off this guy.”
Milo unfreezes now that she’s not in his space. He snorts.
Briar smiles and holds up a dark wallet. “Got this off you.”
He scowls at her and snatches the wallet back, stuffing it in his pocket and pulling out a poker chip, which he tosses to Briar, who catches it, twirls it over her fingers, and makes it disappear in the dark. She holds up both empty hands, but he retreats when she steps toward him again.
“Pull that poker chip out from behind my ear, and you’ll regret it,” he says in a low voice.
“It wasn’t going to be your ear,” Briar says brightly.
I laugh, which earns me a glare from Milo.
“It might work,” Gina says, a spark of hope finally in her voice. “Maybe we can find another form to send in so that the clerk who processes it doesn’t call him for the missing paperwork. If Briar can make the switch—”
“Easy,” she says.
I put my arm around Gina’s waist, pulling her close. I don’t think I share her optimism. It would be better to tell Diana the truth, but after tonight’s fight, I can see how hard that would be for them, so I say nothing.
Gina leans her head on my shoulder. “The only other option is potato salad. Can’t get married if I can’t leave the bathroom.”
“Milo could eat it,” I suggest.
He gives me a flat look. “I could make Gina a widow.”
He’s joking. Probably. Still, I shift a little to put Gina between us.
“What you’re going to do,” Gina says to Milo, “is apologize to Diana tomorrow morning. If she kills you, that also solves the problem.”
“Maybe don’t make murder jokes,” Briar says, all the sunshine gone from her voice.
A shiver runs through me at the memory of the man chasing her. The sound of gunshots. Alejandro’s trashed apartment. I shiver.
Diana doesn’t solve the problem by murdering Milo when he goes to apologize, and Milo’s still seething three days later, though he takes it out on the bushes that are trying to reclaim a section of the trail rather than on me.
He even let me drive the four-wheeler with the equipment-laden trailer while he took his dirt bike.
But he does pause at one point, brush sweat and a few stray locks of brown hair off his forehead with a meaty forearm, glare at me, and say, “There’s a place about five miles further down this trail.
It’s off to the right, down a little slope.
It looks like a lake should be there, but it isn’t a lake.
It’s a bog, and it’s big. What I’m saying is no one would ever find your body there. If you ever hurt her.”
I lower the loppers and turn to look at him.
Did he just accept me as part of Gina’s life?
Up until Tuesday’s planning session, he’s pointedly ignored me or subtly—or not-so-subtly—tried to intimidate me, but giving me the hurt her and I’ll hurt you speech means he recognizes that I’m not going anywhere and that Gina and I are serious.