Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CATCH A GRENADE
TULLY
I walk her home from the diner. She tries to let me off the hook, but I insist. We’re quiet on the chilly walk. I’m still trying to process everything she’s told me, and I can tell by the careful way she’s bracing herself that she’s questioning her decision to tell me.
She pauses and points at a building.
“This is me.”
It’s a walk-up, narrow and a little crooked, with a buzzer panel that has approximately forty names in different styles of handwriting spanning what looks like several decades. There’s a small stoop, three steps up. She stops at the bottom of them and turns to look at me.
“You don’t have to walk me up,” she says.
“I’d feel a lot better if I did.”
She nods slightly, and we walk up the stairs and into her building. She leads the way, up the flights of stairs, and when we reach her door, she turns to face me.
“Thank you. For walking me home. For hearing me out.” Her eyes squint, and she shakes her head slightly.
“I can’t believe I told you. It was foolish and a relief…
and probably the worst thing I could’ve done.
” She steps closer, her eyes pleading. “Tully, listen to me. I worry what he will do to you if he ever finds out that you know. That’s the only thing that’s brought me peace, knowing he’s taking it out on me, not you.
He’s threatened to, though, if I tell you. ”
“I’ve made him millions.” My jaw ticks, the thought of what this man has done enraging me. “He’ll be hesitant to lose access to more of where that came from. I can’t let this go. You know that, right?”
She looks terrified.
“I’ll be careful,” I tell her. “Do you trust me?”
“Yes,” she whispers.
I don’t want to leave. I have a hotel room twelve blocks uptown and practice in the morning for our back-to-back game here tomorrow night.
Not to mention, enough emotional material to process that I could probably keep a therapist employed for the next calendar year. Leaving is the smart thing to do.
My heart doesn’t care.
She takes another step forward and puts her forehead against my chest. I stop breathing for a second. Then I put my hand on the back of her neck. My fingers can’t resist clutching her hair.
Five years ago, I would have given anything to know she hadn’t chosen to leave. That the girl I loved hadn’t looked at what we had and decided it wasn’t worth fighting for.
She was pushed.
I hurt for all that she’s suffered at Daniel’s hand. All because the bastard wanted to control my life. All over fucking money.
She reaches up and touches my mustache.
“We’re in the thick of Movember,” I say.
She gives me a soft smile. Her eyes are bright, and she blinks the tears away before anything spills over.
“You can pull it off. Thank you for walking me home,” she says.
“Sure. Thanks for talking to me.”
She almost smiles. Almost. “You should get some sleep.”
“Yeah.”
I don’t move.
She raises her eyebrows, the way she used to when she was waiting for me to do something I was clearly not going to do on my own. So unfair that she’d pull that cute sass out on me now.
“I’m going,” I say.
“Okay.”
“This is me,” I say, gesturing vaguely at myself, “going.”
“I can see that.” She does smile then. It’s small and weary, but her eyes light just a little, and that warms me up inside just a little too.
“Good night, Trouble.”
“Good night, Captain.”
I take a step back. Then another. She watches me with her arms wrapped around herself now, leaning against her door.
“I’m going to need some time,” I say.
She nods, her expression careful again.
“Not because—” I stop. Try again. “I see now the price you’ve been paying for all of this…the pain you’ve been carrying. I’m so sorry, Lola. I’m not going anywhere. I need to figure out how to process this, but I don’t want to stop talking…if you’re okay with that.”
She swallows hard, and her lips lift.
“I’m good with that,” she says softly.
I walk past my hotel without even realizing it at first.
Lola’s words detonated like a grenade—they landed, went off, and then there was a moment where I stood there thinking, Fuck, things are blowing up.
Every time I think I’ve absorbed the worst of what she told me, something else hits hard.
I would wreck everything for you if I stayed.
Boom.
I got pregnant, Tully.
Boom.
He offered me money to leave.
I circle back to I got pregnant, Tully, again and again. It threatens to take me under. I start walking again.
Here’s what I know about myself: When something is wrong, I try to fix it, and when I can’t fix it, I make light of it. That Tully feels like another person right now. When I can’t make light of something, I skate hard enough that my body eventually forces my brain to shut up.
What I don’t typically do is simply feel my feelings. Goldie calls this a coping mechanism. I call it being functional. We’ve been having this argument since we were nine.
The problem is it’s 1:47 a.m., and I can’t get ice time.
So I keep walking.
I think about calling Camden. He’s the one I should call because he’s probably still at the restaurant, shutting things down for the night.
Dylan is who I’d call to feel light about everything for a few minutes, and Goldie is who I’d call to vent. She’d listen and ask the right questions.
I call Noah. It’s selfish because he has to get up early with Grayson every morning and has a hard enough time raising his son alone without being exhausted too. But he’s calm and methodical and does not wear his heart on his sleeve. He believes in solutions, and I really need that right now.
It rings three times and then: “Hey. You okay?”
“I’m so sorry to wake you up.”
“I actually just got in from Elm & Echo. Dad’s got Grayson for the night, and I’m off tomorrow. Great game tonight, by the way.”
“Thanks. And good, I’m glad you were up. I feel bad for calling, but—”
“What’s going on? Talk to me.”
“I’m going to tell you something. This can’t go anywhere.”
“I’ve got you.”
I start with Nantucket. How I connected with Lola, and she disappeared again. How I finally got through to her on her phone after never being able to before. Then I tell him about tonight. How she looked scared when she saw Daniel, and everything she revealed about him.
He’s quiet until I pause. “Fuck, Tully. That’s messed up. I can’t believe we all trusted him. Why would he do this?”
“I know. I can’t believe it either. And it gets worse. She was pregnant.”
“When she left?” he says.
“Yeah. She didn’t know how to tell me. She was scared, and Daniel was in her ear telling her she’d ruin everything, and she was twenty-one and—” I stop and press my fingers against my eyes.
“She lost the baby.” My voice cracks, and I clear my throat.
“After she left. She was alone and she lost it and I didn’t know. I didn’t know any of it.”
When Noah speaks, his voice is lower. “God, Tully.”
“She went through that by herself.”
He exhales. Long and slow. I hear him shift.
“That poor girl,” he says quietly.
Something in my throat tightens.
“I keep thinking about that part,” I say. “More than anything. More than Daniel, more than the money, more than years of believing she never loved me like I loved her. I keep thinking about her grieving alone.”
“You would have been there. If you’d known, you would have been there.”
“Hell, yeah, I would’ve,” I say. “Noah, I don’t want to let this rest with Daniel, but I can’t put her or our families at risk.”
“Right.” He pauses. “We’ve gotta be strategic about this. What does she want?”
I think about her face when she told me not to let Daniel know that I know. The fear in it. The kind of fear that comes from having learned, repeatedly, what the consequences look like.
“She wants him to leave her alone,” I say. “She wants her dad to be safe. She wants to be able to stay in one place without waiting for the floor to drop out.”
“Okay,” Noah says. “So the goal isn’t revenge. The goal is to make her safe and make him unable to do this to anyone else.”
“Those things can coexist with revenge.”
“They can,” Noah agrees. “But revenge is a bonus, not the strategy. You start with the strategy.”
I breathe out. “Okay. I hear you. I need to hear this. Because right now I’m just so fucking pissed, I can’t see straight.”
“There are probably other people he’s done this to. Which would mean he’s not just a problem for you and Lola. And he has connections. My guess is he probably also has a trail of paperwork.”
I stop walking. Paperwork.
“You think I can find it?”
“I think he’s probably left more behind than he thinks he has,” Noah says. “And you have a lawyer.”
“Marcus.”
“Call Marcus in the morning. Tell him you need your agent’s financial history. Start with property holdings and LLC registrations in New York and Minnesota. And tell him to be quiet about it.” A beat. “Can you be quiet about it? While he works?”
“Can I not kill him is the real question.” I exhale into the phone. “I can try.”
“Tully.”
“I can,” I say. “I can be patient. I want him to actually go down, Noah, I don’t want to just—” I push a hand through my hair.
“I don’t want to just scare him into hiding.
I want him to not be able to do this again.
To anyone. But I want his days of tormenting Lola to be done for good.
She’s changed because of him. She never deserved any of this. ”
“Then let Marcus do his job,” Noah says. “He’ll probably know a great investigator, right? They’ll find something.”
I stand on the corner and look up at the polluted sky.
“Can you get a few hours of sleep?” Noah says. “Call Marcus when you get up.”
“Okay. Thanks, Noah. Thanks for picking up. It helped.”
“I’m here. Call me anytime, okay? I love you, Tully.”
“I love you too.”
We hang up.
I should have been there for her.
I think about Lola at twenty-one, alone, and afraid, and somewhere underneath the grief and the anger, there is something cold and clear and absolutely certain settling into place.
Daniel’s wrecked too many lives. He’s been comfortable for a long time, controlling things he had no right to.
He took away something that was so important to me.
That’s about to change.