30. RHETT
RHETT
“You’re sure that’s what he meant?” Rowan asks as we share a drink in the basement.
The kids are getting settled with the sitter now that Callie has finished interrogating her and giving her all the strict instructions she needs to adhere to.
She’s done it all in front of Caleb as well so that he can report back.
That’s how cunning she is. Callie knows that if the sitter steps outside the lines she’s drawn, he’ll be the first to let her know so he buys himself some lenience credit when it comes to his practical jokes and pranks. Clever on both of their parts.
“It’s the only thing that makes sense. It’s the perfect murder. Potassium poisoning is virtually undetectable.” Rounding the far end of the room, I pace back toward where he’s setting up the pool table. “Since when do you play?”
“It’s something to do. I like keeping my hands busy when I’m thinking.”
“Yesterday, Kayla told Avery that they couldn’t talk at the club.” The woman’s name sours on my tongue. But that one comment is something that’s stuck with me along with Haas’s words. “She said, quote, ‘They’re always watching. Always.’”
“So she knows more than she let on,” he muses, breaking the game. “You know what’s bothering me?”
“What?” Pausing, I watch him circle the table and methodically pocket the balls in alternating colors.
“The bad-guy comment.”
“From all that Avery’s told me about Robert, he was a good guy. Sounded like a cheap shot to me. Given their history…”
“I don’t think she meant it about Robert.”
“The poison she followed it up with would suggest otherwise.”
“Or perhaps she was defending herself and her boyfriend. Take yourself out of the situation, if you told someone that the bad guys are closer to home than you think, what would you mean? Especially if you’re being pegged as the bad egg.”
Rowan pockets a couple more balls, only leaving the black and white on the table as he puts the cue down along the long edge and braces himself over one of the short ones. When I look between him and the two remaining balls, he shrugs. “Callie gets a kick out of shooting the last ball.”
“How sweet,” I mock him, even though I’m sort of impressed he hands her a win. Rowan has been beyond competitive all his life. Mom almost banned game night at one point when we were younger because of how intense shit got.
“What would you mean?” He ignores my jibe, taking us back to the conversation at hand.
“I’d be deflecting the blame.”
“Exactly. She doesn’t believe that they’re the bad guys. Put it all together and I think there’s a bigger fish behind all this. They’re just scapegoats. It happens all the time. People make messes they can’t fix and then throw the blame onto small fry.”
The logic doesn’t settle well. After all the shit Carl and Kayla have put Avery through…
it almost felt good to crucify them. But the more I think about it, the more Rowan’s deduction makes sense.
“Or maybe she’s the small fry. Why else would he have left her?
She thinks he’s disappeared, but he was in Virginia last we saw of him. ”
“And now he’s gone.”
“We can hope,” I bite out.
Ignoring me, Rowan states, “We need to figure out who the fuck the big fish is.”
“We need the list.”
“Exactly.”
“And then what? I keep going over all this in my head, trying to figure out what this will mean. Truth, justice…none of that will matter when Avery realizes how awful Robert’s death was.”
Since I overheard her conversation with Nora last night, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. The tormented look on her face and the sorrow in her voice. Now all I can imagine is how she would look if she found out the real circumstances around his passing.
“It’s a fact of the situation. You can’t change it. Nothing can.”
“She’ll have to live with that for the rest of her life, and I can’t let that happen.”
“But if Avery wants the truth…”
“She thinks she wants it, Rowan, but…” He’s looking at me as though I’m teeing up to drown his kittens. The reality is that he doesn’t understand how the detail would decimate her.
I promised Avery everything, and I’ll be dammed if I fail to protect her. Physically or emotionally.
“It’s your business, Doc, but you can’t protect her from the truth. At some point she’ll come to it on her own or someone will say something, and then she’ll be hurting because of the facts and your betrayal.”
“Do you know why it’s mandatory to anesthetize a convict before the lethal injection?
You know why it’s law?” Rowan stands straighter, looking directly at me while he swills his glass over the green felt of the pool table.
“It hurts beyond anything you can imagine. It burns through your veins, scorching and corroding until it reaches your heart. Sixty seconds of the most horrific pain anyone could ever fathom. They say it’s a minute, but for most it’s longer. ”
The room falls silent, the atmosphere taking an even deeper dive. Vocalizing it all only serves to make me feel sick to my stomach. By all accounts Robert was a great man, and “someone took him out like a criminal.”
“And we’re going to find out who. We’ll make them pay.”
“It’s too late for your brand of justice, Rowan. Avery might be the strongest person I have ever known. I mean, even after everything she’s been through, she can still love with all she’s got…but this…this will destroy her.”
With a deep breath, he levels me with that serious look that tells me he understands.
That’s the thing about Rowan—he’s straight down the line, but he’s also seen enough shit in this world to know that justice isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be.
There are situations in this world that are in a gray space, somewhere that in order for your actions to do good, they fall between right and wrong.
“It was a heart attack.” He nods. “That’s all she needs to know.”
“If she ever asks—if it ever comes up—I’ll tell her the reality of it, but not before then.”
Rowan opens his mouth to speak, but before he can say anything, he clears his throat and puts his usual funny-guy smile on his face. Something between a grin and a cocky smirk.
“What are you doing down here?” Callie comes down the stairs in a long, black dress that grazes the floor. And the fitted cut along with the platform heels she’s wearing make her look a helluva lot taller than usual.
I’m about to ask her if Avery’s ready, when she puffs up with her hands on her hips. “You had one job, Twilight. One fucking job.”
“I’m not spying on the sitter.”
“It was the only thing I asked you to do tonight.”
“Christ, you realize that you hired a White House–approved nanny, right?”
“One thing!”
“On top of all the running around your mother had me do. No, actually, Nora asked you to do it, so technically I was doing it for you. A thank-you would suffice, princess.”
Taking a few steps toward him, she growls, “Had you been doing the one thing I asked you, the two of you would’ve seen that Nora has done it again!”
Rowan grabs the cue, nodding to the pool table.
“What has your mother done now?” he asks while she snatches the cue from him, and with one quick hit, Callie pots the black quickly followed by zigzagging the white from the bottom of the table to the top, bouncing it off the sides with one hard hit before it goes straight into one of the top corner pockets.
“She’s invited Robert’s attorney for pre-gala drinks. And now Avery’s about to come down to an ambush she really could do without.”
“Pre-what now?” Rowan asks, shaking his head as he takes the cue from her and follows her up the stairs.
“Exactly, she’s being overbearing as always. She’s doing to Avery what she does to Rafe because she knows they won’t tell her to back off.”
Callie doesn’t stop her tirade until we get to the study, and Avery is already standing there. With her hair swept over one shoulder, her pretty face is completely exposed. And there’s nothing but calm. A small smile upturns the corners of her peachy glossed lips when she turns to me.
I’ve never seen anything so damn breathtaking in my life.
The emerald green of her dress brings out the golden tinge in her creamy skin along with the natural light chestnut and caramel streaks in her hair.
And while it has a plunging neckline all the way down to the top of her waist, she looks so demure and elegant with the way the long sleeves accentuate her slender arms and petite shoulders.
When she takes a step toward me, the full skirt parts, revealing the slit that shows off her long legs, all the way to the top of her thigh.
I can’t quite understand how I got so lucky. Especially given all the shit I’ve done in my life. Our glances catch, and she gives me an apologetic look.
“I asked Nora to invite Sean over to talk about my father’s will, but he’s going out of town tomorrow, so I guess today is as good a day as ever.”
“Avery.” The portly attorney calls her attention back to him as he shuffles the papers in front of him on the coffee table.
“We can do this another time. There is no rush.” He looks down at his lap, his hand flattening over the papers he’s already laid out.
His actions contradict his words, which makes me think he’s trying to pacify her because he knows something’s coming.
“Thank you, but like you said, it’s better to get these things dealt with sooner rather than later. I’ve put it off long enough.”
A trembling hand combs through the loose curls cascading to just below her chest, and I don’t waste another second debating whether to go to her or not.
It’s been a couple of days already and I won’t let her go through this alone.
The instant I’m at her side, she grasps my hand tightly as though that is enough to give her the strength she’s looking for.
I hope it is. I hope I am everything she needs right now, as she is for me every tick of every day.