23. AVERY
AVERY
How many times do you have to tell a person you don’t know the answer to any of their questions before they start believing you?
“Come on, Mrs. Henderson, you can’t possibly expect us to believe that you are oblivious to everything we’ve asked.”
Every time they call me by my married name, I feel sick to the pit of my stomach. This entire conversation is sickening.
“You must understand how it looks for you to have filed for divorce so soon after the investigation was outed.”
“Wouldn’t you file for divorce if your…significant other was being unfaithful to you?” Glancing down from the agent’s dark eyes, I focus on his wedding ring. “Surely if you know about the filing, you are also aware of the circumstances?”
“Yes, we are.” The quieter of the two blows out a breath.
“Then you realize that your guised suggestion about how it looks doesn’t make sense.”
“Mrs. Hend—”
“Please stop calling me that,” I ask, trying to stop my voice from rattling along with my insides. “You can call me Avery, or if you insist on carrying on with formalities, you can call me Miss Summers.”
Using my father’s name makes me sad. It’s a painful shock that highlights the fact that he’s gone. Like picking a scab, it leaves me raw, and my heart aches with a dull pain that lingers.
“Of course, Miss Summers,” the talkative one scoffs as though something about my name or the situation is funny. “I met your father once,” he tells me nonchalantly. “Everybody loved him.”
“He was a good man.”
“I’ve never read an obituary quite like his.”
Staring between the two of them, I’m left with a vacuum in the middle of my chest. It’s taking everything to hold myself together.
“If you think that you can rattle me by talking about my father, you are wrong. It might hurt, but it won’t make me tell you something I don’t know. You are wasting your time with me.”
“Your husband.” The smaller of the two raps his knuckles on the table. He’s an asshole, and he knows it. In fact, I bet he thinks it’s his best attribute with the way he’s grinning when I glare at him. “It must sting that he was the last person to see your father.”
A lead weight settles at the pit of my belly, churning and churning and churning at the statement. It takes me a second too long to recompose myself because the grin broadens as he leans back in the rattan seat opposite me.
What an odious man. The fact that he is enjoying this…
“I’ve answered all your questions as best as I can.” I stand and try to shake off the anger so that I don’t fall to pieces in front of them. “I would like you to leave now.”
No sooner have I said the words than Callie’s car comes into view.
My insides twist at the thought that Iris is going to know why they’re here.
I’m not even sure why it matters—it’s not as though I’ve done anything wrong or as if I’m hiding something.
But my anxiety ratchets up a notch or two, and I start coming over clammy.
Hot and cold sweats fluster through my body as my heart picks up its pace.
“Thank you for your time, Miss Summers.” The tall one stands, towering over me in a way that makes me cower away slightly.
Backing away, he nods at me with a small tip of his mouth while the shorter man edges closer. With a narrowed stare, he pauses right in front of me. “Yes, thank you for your time.”
“I don’t know anything,” I tell him again.
The agent scoffs without tearing his gaze from me. I shouldn’t have said anything else; I should’ve stayed quiet so that they would go. However, I’m flustered by his revelation about my father and Carl. He’s rattled me.
“I’ve heard that before.” He lifts his chin so that he can better look down on me since we’re about the same height.
“If you think of anything that might be useful”—his partner holds out his card—“please call me.”
When I don’t take it, he puts it down on the small glass-topped rattan coffee table before they both head back to their black Suburban.
“You doing okay?” Rhett asks, rounding the front porch to the side of the house where I’m still standing.
All I can do is look at him and nod. I don’t want to lie to him and tell him that I’m struggling to make the world stop spinning around me. I also don’t want him to think that I can’t handle things on my own. Getting him to hold back and stay inside while I spoke to the agents was hard enough.
“Deep breath, sweetheart,” he murmurs into my hair while folding me into him. “You got this, and I got you.”
Rhett isn’t wrong—he does have me. He has more of me than anyone has ever possessed, and the scary thing is that it feels safe with him. The more I know of him, the more my heart yearns to belong to him completely. Sometimes it’s as though it only beats when he’s near me. As if it beats for him.
Burrowing deeper into his chest, I press my ear over his thrumming heart.
The small hitch as I slip my hands beneath the hem of his shirt and slip them around to his back so that I can hold on to him makes me smile.
Then it jolts, thundering harder and faster.
It makes all the tension ebb away as I inhale deeply at the knowledge that Rhett Reynolds’s heart beats for me, as surely, wholly, and solely as mine does for him.
“Leave it with me,” Callie tells me, getting in her car to the sound of the kids fighting over who gets to sit in the front with her.
It’s getting dark, and the light from the porch and her headlights are the only things illuminating our surroundings.
“It doesn’t make sense that they would bring Robert up, but the feds are assholes like that. Who the fuck knows which angle they’re trying to play?”
“Why did they wait so long to talk to me?”
“My guess is that they wanted to catch you off guard. It makes it easier to get answers.” After relegating both of the kids to the back, she gets in her SUV. “Don’t stress over it, I’m on it.”
“Thanks.”
“In the meantime, Gretch wants to talk to you about an injunction to help speed things along with the custody and divorce filings.”
“What if it makes things worse?”
“Like I told you at dinner, it’s no coincidence that Carl has shown up here with the feds following. I don’t know what is going on there, but from my experience, I would say there’s a bigger game we haven’t been invited to. Leave it with me.”
“Okay,” I tell her as Iris comes running around the side of the house with Rhett chasing after her.
The two of them are laughing so loud and freely that it’s contagious. Even the dogs are jumping around to their excitement.
“I’ll see you at the school Monday morning. We can grab coffee with Gretch and talk everything through. If I get anything, we can talk it over Monday too.”
“Sounds good,” I manage to say as Iris yells at Scarlett that she’s camping with Doc.
Callie heads off once Rhett manages to throw Iris over his shoulder and goes inside. By the time I’ve wandered in, the couches are a few blankets and cushions short, and Jo is laughing at the two of them running out of the back door.
“I don’t know who’s the bigger kid?” she muses, patting the seat beside her. “I want to talk to you about something.”
There’s a serious shift in her demeanor that makes me wary of what’s coming. When I’ve sat beside her, she takes my hand and clasps it between both of her trembling ones.
“I owe you an apology,” Jo murmurs sheepishly into our tangled hands. “Sometimes I forget how strong you are, and I don’t mean nothing by it.”
“I know, and if my mom were here, she would react exactly as you did. If anything, it’s comforting that you are so similar.”
“I’m stubborn, but you’re brave and beautiful, and it’s so hard not to protect you.” I notice the way her tremble worsens as she gets emotional followed by the twitch of her mouth.
Every day there seems to be a new symptom or the deterioration of another.
Jo’s getting sullen too which makes me worry that like Mom she’s getting sicker too quickly.
In the short time we’ve known each other, she’s become an intrinsic part of our new family.
Oddly, it’s as though Iris and I have found ourselves an actual family rather than just people tied to us by DNA or contracts.
“You can’t protect me, Jo.”
“I know. Rhett’s right, you can fight your own battles. We’re your backup. I know. But when you’ve lived it too…there’s a solidarity that no one will understand.”
Unable to control her tremor, she tucks me into her and drapes her arm around my shoulders.
“You don’t stay broken forever, but the scars don’t fade and I…sugar…”
“It’s okay, Jo. I’m not mad—I understand why you wanted to protect me.”
“Not just you, Avery,” she murmurs at the same time as my phone vibrates in my back pocket. I’m fishing it out awkwardly so I don’t knock Jo’s arm off, when she continues. “Do you know, he’s been good to me. Better than a lot of children are to their parents.”
Doc
Coming? X
I smile at the kiss as another message comes through—a short video of Iris telling me they’re waiting for me. Jo doesn’t say anything more as she starts to get up, using her stick along with my help.
Pressing a kiss to my temple while I hold her up, she tells me, “He’s a better man than he knows.”
“I know.”
“Don’t forget the cookies. My baby girl won’t forgive you.”
Her baby girl. The smile already on my lips widens with the assurance that we are exactly where we belong.
I pause by the back door, staring at the small clear-topped tent. The mesh comes about halfway down the sides so that I can see Rhett and Iris sitting beside one another. She’s got his phone in her hand, and they’re staring at the screen as they hold it up to the sky.
He takes the phone from her, and almost instantly mine vibrates in the back pocket of my shorts.
Rhett
Get in the tent
With my heart picking up its pace, I go to the kitchen and grab a few plastic cups, milk, and the cookies. Joining them, I manage to crawl into the tent. The blankets and cushions from the couches are all arranged on the floor. Even in the dark, I can sense both of their smiles.
“I really shouldn’t leave you both unsupervised.”
“At least we’re not all wet again.” Iris shrugs, taking the cup I hand her.
“There’s that at least.”
I pour some milk for her and give her the cookie bag before I settle beside Rhett.
“Apparently you’ve never been camping,” he says, voice low and gravelly.
I can hardly breathe with how close we are, and although the breeze filters through the mesh, the air is stifling.
“No,” I tell him.
Unable to look at him without making a romantic fool of myself, I pour him a cup of milk too and offer it to him.
We may have touched before, but the shock of his fingers touching mine in the dark is stronger than anything I’ve ever felt.
It throws me. Then I look up at him, and his eyes make it impossible to catch myself.
I don’t relinquish the cup, and he doesn’t release my hand. We’re sucked into a moment where the ground falls away beneath us.
“Hey, sunshine…” he murmurs, thumb stroking over my knuckles.
He sounds as breathless as I feel with my heart hammering in my throat and stars gleaming at me from his eyes.
“Hey, Doc…”
Lips hitching to one side, he runs his hand up my arm to the edge of my sleeve, caressing around my wrist with long strokes, so soft and light that my stomach flips. It somersaults wickedly until frissons of heat and electricity course through me.
“Are you going to kiss again?”
Rhett’s quick to take the cup from my hand before I drop it or crush it in my attempt to dissipate the chagrin of being caught out by my daughter. He places it on the floor where Iris has set up a small picnic with the cookies and her own milk.
“Sure are.” He sticks his tongue out at her playfully, earning him a squeal as he follows through with a light brush of his lips to my cheek.
As much as I love the chaste kiss, I want more. The yearning to pull him close and taste him is staggering, and while he’s smiling down on me, I contemplate taking what I want. Kissing him. Tasting him.
Every second ticks louder in my ears, palpably as my longing is mirrored back at me.
“Can we take a photo?” Iris climbs in my lap, pulling Rhett so close that she’s sandwiched between the two of us. “You gotta say cheese, okay?”
“Why cheese?” he teases her, taking the phone and holding it out in front of us so that we can see ourselves on the screen.
Immediately, my eyes are drawn to the happiness on Iris’s face and then Rhett’s. Their blonde hair is so similar, and although her eyes are a shade darker than his…
Maybe it’s wrong to think it in the midst of everything going on. Maybe this is the rainbow I’ve been looking for. Maybe we could be a family?
“Nora says that if you say cheese properly it gives you a perfect smile.”
“Nora?”
“Nora,” I tell him, trying to shake myself out of my overly eager thoughts.
“Well then,” Rhett hums, scooting closer and wrapping his arm around my back. His hand grasps the side of my ass with a gentle squeeze as Iris moves to sit half on mine and half on his lap. “Cheese on three, okay?”
“Ready!” she claps.
I’m so enamored by the pair of them that when he snaps the photo, I’m lost back in my daydream of them, and my cheese is nothing but a faint breath while I hold Iris tighter and press a kiss to his jaw.