Chapter Eight
EIGHT
Rocky
“Are you going to the funeral?” Oliver asks me in the bathroom of the boathouse.
Yeah, I learned who kicked the bucket. Jake offered the information freely in the stairwell. It quickly became public news, and it’s all this town could talk about for five days straight.
Emilia Wolfe.
She was cresting eighty-eight, and it’s not that she was revered or benevolent or charitable. As far as I’m aware, most people found her to be crotchety and shrewd. It didn’t take Sherlock fucking Holmes to figure out why everyone was acting as if British nobility died.
She was a Wolfe.
The Wolfes are the first of three founding families in Victoria. The Konings being the second. The Bennets being the third.
What I’ve heard about the Wolfes sounds more like urban legend. The family are shut-ins who live in a hundred-year-old mansion affectionately named Stonehaven. The three-story shingled dwelling is constructed on one tiny, jagged, stony island. It’s like they dropped a house on a rock and called it a day.
Stonehaven. The infamous residence is mentioned on walking tours and historical brochures in the welcome center. “Skunks” (out-of-towners) will even take boat excursions to the mansion. Harbor waves ripple against the girthy stone foundation, and tourists will snap pictures of the foreboding home, hoping to catch a glimpse of Emilia. Or her recluse of a son-in-law: Varrick.
I’ve seen the weathered oak shingles and the shuttered windows from the dock. The house itself is only accessible in and out by boat.
It doesn’t matter who you are—a college student (not calling them caufers ), a local, or a skunk—everyone is crossing their fingers they’ll spot the elusive Varrick Wolfe at the public memorial tomorrow.
“All of Victoria is attending,” I tell Oliver while I stand on the top of a ladder. Still in our shared bathroom. “It’d be social suicide not to go to the funeral.”
Oliver moisturizes his face at the sink. “Social suicide, a fate worse than actual death according to our mothers.” He gasps at the mirror. “But are they our mothers? Perhaps we’re just test-tube babies. Brought into this corrupt world via science.” He twists toward me. “We are a failed science experiment. Six botched test subjects.”
I give him a look. “How many dystopian melodramas have you been watching?” I bite on a screwdriver and try to pry this fucking bolt out of the air vent.
“Can you hurry up?” Nova barks up at me. He’s gripping the metal ladder, keeping it steady while I have my bare feet near the top rung. I’m attempting to unscrew the ceiling vent.
“Can you shut up?” I mumble back, mouth full of screwdriver.
Oliver slows his lengthy eight-step morning routine, eyeing his brother. Light rarely dims inside Oliver Graves, even when he’s concerned about those he loves, even when he’s in the center of a grotesque job neither of us really want to be in. He is a people-pleaser. Peacemaker. Pacifist.
A true middle child in the fact that he’s never celebrated or patted on the back enough for all he’s done.
Sometimes I envied how he could find joy in a youth that seemed joyless.
He reties a white cotton towel, wrapping it low around his sculpted waist. He just took a shower, and his wet, dyed hair looks closer to his natural dark brown shade. He has the same olive skin tone as Phoebe. Same dimpled chin. Hell, even Nova has a chin dimple. It’d be stranger if they weren’t siblings.
Despite Oliver obsessing over his appearance, he’s still partially focused on his brother. “What are you thinking, Nova?”
I realize how darkly Nova is staring off at the Italian painting on the wall. The art is insignificant to me. Just a canal in Venice. A gondola under a bridge.
He could have an aversion to Italy just as much as his mind could be five thousand miles away from the country. I’m good at reading people, but I’m not in his head.
Yet, I know him better than ninety-nine percent of the population. He attempts to walk an ethical line in this immoral lifestyle, but all ethics will be thrown out the window if it means going into battle for his siblings. Loyalty over integrity is the Nova Graves way.
Also, he currently has a fucking mustache.
I’d say he looks comical, but he was bestowed with good genes. Am I jealous he can pull off the heinous facial hair? No.
“I’m thinking we should leave.” He clenches the ladder with two hands like he’s strangling the metal. “We should all grab our shit. Get the girls on board. Get Trevor. Never say a word to the godmothers, the godfather. We escape them. This town. And we’re gone. Together.”
“And then what?” Oliver asks.
“Then we pull a job somewhere they can’t find us.”
“They’ll make it their goal to find us,” I chime in, screwdriver in my hand. “We’re assets twenty-five years in the making. You don’t throw that away this fast.”
“We’ll keep moving every time they track us down.”
“Says the getaway . All you know how to do is run.”
Nova jostles the ladder, and I seize the top so I don’t fall off. When I’m stable, I give him a middle finger.
He glowers. “You have a better idea, asshole?”
“Yeah, fuck-face, we stay and figure out why they want us to leave Connecticut so badly.”
“I’m not surprised.” He runs his hand back and forth across his buzz cut, then motions to me. “You always want to do the antithesis of what they ask. They say leave , you say never .”
“You want to give in to what they want, Winchester?” I use his nickname from Supernatural . “You want to go back to sucking the godfather’s toes? We don’t even know who the fuck he really is. He could’ve been a serial killer in the seventies and dumped bodies in the fucking Everglades.”
“I know!” Nova yells. “God, I fucking know . I can’t stand the idea of any of us around them, Rocky. And now, we’re setting up a family dinner . To discuss what? How they fucked us all over? Are you packing or am I? Because they might kill us before dessert.”
“Again, you don’t get rid of assets twenty-five years in the making, and we’re using the dinner as a way to get their DNA.”
Oliver tips his head to Nova. “You should take the Glock.”
“I am taking the Glock.” He’s staring up at me. “They don’t want us here. It’s still safer to leave.”
“Your sister wants to stay, too.” I remove the ceiling vent and glance over at Oliver, who’s suddenly very preoccupied with tweezing an eyebrow hair. “And so does your brother.”
Nova twists around to him. “Ol, it’s better if we go.”
“There are answers here, Nova.”
He lets go of the ladder. “Those answers could come at a cost I’m not willing to pay. What matters is our survival .”
“Not getting answers could come at a higher cost, Nov.” His brows rise. “I might not need them, but Hails does.” He drops his voice to a whisper, but I strain my ears to hear him. “I spent five hours just trying to get her to close the computer yesterday. She’s blaming herself for not seeing this sooner.”
“It’s not her fault,” Nova whispers back.
“We dubbed her the mastermind.”
“We were kids.”
“Her role. Her responsibility. How deep is it drilled in us, really? How deep is being the getaway in you? The seductress in Phoebe? Because I think it’s at least one half of who we are.”
“Ol,” he whispers, sounding softer than usual. I shouldn’t be eavesdropping, but I’m on autopilot now.
Oliver bows closer to him. “She thinks she failed us, and I highly doubt anything will curb her anxiety except for the truth. She needs answers, and I’m afraid of what’s going to happen if she doesn’t find them. So I have to stay for her.” His brown eyes shift to me. Realizing I can hear him, he returns to the sink and busies himself untwisting an expensive canister of shave cream.
She called out for him. The night she entered the loft in a distraught state with a pile of old books.
He’s been visiting the loft twice as much. Canceled therapy appointments with his clients. Phoebe said he was the one who got Hailey to take a bath.
I don’t know how. I don’t want to know why.
Sticking my head in the sand sounds great when it comes to the idea of Oliver with my sister in any way that’s not chaste and virginal. I think I’d rather choke on the desert dunes of Namibia than picture them having sex.
I hand Nova the ceiling-vent cover. “Have you talked to your mom at all?”
“She’s not my mother.”
“That would be a no .”
“We don’t know with certainty that she’s not our mom,” Oliver reasons with him. “We could still be related to Elizabeth.”
Nova unzips his cargo jacket, heating up. “I don’t care if we share her DNA, or that she raised us. The more and more I think about what Elizabeth, Addison, and Everett could’ve done to take Trevor, the sicker I realize they are, Ol.”
He frowns. “It could’ve just been Addison and Everett behind that. No offense,” he adds to me, since they’re my parents.
“None taken,” I deadpan, having little love for any of them. It’s more jarring seeing Nova join me to this degree.
Nova spreads out his arms. “Our mom was an accomplice to likely kidnapping a child . That doesn’t make it any fucking better.”
On the ladder, I rotate more to him. He’s done a complete one-eighty on the people he worshipped. It’s like he discovered the regular man behind the Wizard of Oz, and he’s mad. I never thought anyone would be as anti-godmothers and antigodfather as me. But Nova has boarded my raging ship of one. Or maybe two…considering Phoebe is also pissed.
I’m not sure how this much anger can sail it out to sea.
“They’ve never been good , Winchester,” I say. “None of us have been. We aren’t doling out Candygrams for a living. We screw people over.”
“There’s a line we don’t cross.” He threads his arms and lifts his stiff shoulders. “But fuck me for thinking they’d never put a pinky toe on it.”
“No, fuck them,” I tell him.
His nose flares. He holds my gaze for a long beat and nods a few times, his pain palpable. Oliver reaches out a hand and touches his brother’s head with love. Nova pushes Oliver off with playfulness he only shows his siblings.
I feel around inside the duct. Grabbing three metal boxes, I slide them out and pass a couple to Nova. I climb down with the third in hand.
I shouldn’t still be living with Phoebe’s brothers. And technically, they’re living with me . I’m the one renting the boathouse in Victoria, and they decided to crash here short-term. The longer we’re in this small town, the less vague we can be about who we are and where we come from and our relations to one another.
Our backstories need to be infallible. Never contradictory.
“Why are you living with me at the boathouse?” I quiz them.
“We’re new to the area,” Oliver says smoothly, opening his box. “I’m Oliver Smith, a licensed marriage and family therapist. My brother is Nolan ‘Nova’ Smith. Art curator at the local museum. And we’re still looking for suitable housing, but in the meantime, we’ve always been friendly with our sister’s ex-husband. She’s still friends with him, after all.”
“And we can’t stay with her. Her loft is too small,” Nova concludes with a sterner tone. He’s surly while flipping through IDs in his box. “But we would rather be there.”
I slip him a tight smile. “Trust me, I’d rather have her as a roommate, too.”
Nova glares at me like I said I wanted in her pants.
Already happened. He is not going to take me dating her well. At all. Especially considering he liked her “options” in this new town. Really, he’d like her with anyone but me. It’s annoying as hell, but I can’t say I’d feel any different if my sister were romantically involved with either of them.
Hypocrites-R-Us.
But I realize there aren’t many lies in our personas in Victoria, Connecticut.
Sure, Oliver isn’t really a therapist, and I’m not really an investor.
But the town knows Nova, Oliver, and Phoebe are triplets. They know Hailey is my sister and, more recently, that Trevor is my brother. They know we’re all cordial and close enough to live together.
This is the only place where we’ve ever established who we truthfully are to one another.
Some people even know our real personalities. I came in like a jealous, territorial, cold jackass who loves his ex—which is a big part of who I am.
It’s been therapeutic not giving a shit about the consequences that come with being myself, and I’ve understood why Phoebe wouldn’t want to walk away from that either.
The desire to maintain it for her, and maybe for me—it grows stronger.
We thumb through the metal boxes. IDs. Passports. Social security cards. Hell, I even have memberships to Costco and Sam’s Club under random names. Bernard Higgins. Ansel Odell. I take a new ID for the short time we’ll be out of town this week.
To meet our parents for dinner.
Oliver chooses one and latches his metal box closed. He’s picking up a razor when my phone buzzes.
I click into a text from Jake.
Strange.
Jake: Can you meet me tomorrow before Emilia’s funeral? I want to tell you the truth.
I read the text to Phoebe’s brothers. Oliver says, “Ask him if you can bring someone.” I do, and Jake is fast to respond.
“He said to come alone.” I reread the text. Great. “So I might die tomorrow,” I joke with the raising and lowering of my brows. Not enthused by this meetup, but I’m interested to hear what this so-called truth entails.
“I’ll wait outside the location,” Nova says, already planning my escape.
“You could wear a mic,” Oliver suggests. “The rest of us can listen in in case it gets dicey. Jake doesn’t strike me as the type to pat you down. Or would he?”
“He wouldn’t think I’d come in with a wire.”
He flips his razor between his fingers. “Perfect.”
I like the plan, so I ask Jake where we’re meeting.
Jake: My catamaran.