96. Chapter 96
Jase stood next to his bike across the street from her apartment and waited.
He’d gone back to the house this morning, expecting to find her and, at the very least, charge his phone. She hadn’t been there. Everything looked the same as he’d left it last night.
There were half a dozen new messages on his phone.
RU alive and how pissed RU from Graham.
Verdict? from Luke.
Do I have to kill you? Please tell me I don’t have to kill you. I know how to do it right. I’m a doctor.
Luke again.
An irritated voicemail from Whitlock.
Then…
Hi, I wanted to let you know I’m not at the house. You know, in case you need a place to get out of the storm.
Shit. Whatever time it came in, Lindsey probably thought he ignored it on purpose. A battery was the lamest excuse he could think of for not finding her or responding.
He’d showered, giving his phone twenty minutes to charge up to three percent, and called Whitlock back. His second stop this morning was picking up an envelope he never expected to receive after watching a video of his old man basically saying, gotcha and I hope you know what to do with this.
Jase made one other essential stop, then headed back to Lindsey’s apartment. If she wasn’t there, he’d text Luke for their address in Youngstown.
It was a little scary how serious he was about finding her.
Even scarier was actually seeing her Wrangler parked outside. He quietly went upstairs and set the box from his old man against her apartment door. With two percent battery life in his paperweight, he’d texted.
Now he wondered if she’d come all the way out to the street, or if she’d find what he left her and think it was all he meant by come outside.
His phone buzzed with a text from Graham, asking if Jase talked to Whitlock. Jase flipped it shut without answering and only a single percent of battery left.
Another text: Can you believe it?
“Damn it, Graham,” Jase grumbled. He hadn’t actually opened the envelope from Whitlock yet. He assumed it was the money he thought they’d lost—at least, that’s how his dad made it seem in his latest video.
Jase pulled it from his pocket and tore it open. The first thing he saw was the letter.
I bet you thought you were done. Not quite. That was just the first leg. There’s more to this story, and I need your help telling it. I know this isn’t the money you were expecting, but it’s a start, and it’ll do for now. The rest is waiting at the end.
Have fun, kids.
The first leg? No map. No further instructions. Have fun kids. Another trip with Graham?
The apartment complex door opened as he was about to pull out the check.
No woman had ever taken his breath away. Lindsey, with her hair down and wavy, wearing a worn black leather jacket he thought he recognized, tailor-made for her slight curves, sucked the air from his lungs and made him forget his damn name.
“Jase.”
Jase. That’s right. That’s it. He exhaled. “Lindsey.”
She stayed on the other side of the street.
“Have you talked to Whitlock?” she asked after a beat.
They were getting straight to it, then.
“Yeah, I saw him this morning. Called him early and woke him up. He was pissed. Said he didn’t get any sleep since you kept him up late.”
She rolled her eyes with what might’ve been the start of a smile that vanished too fast to tell. “It was nine o’clock.”
Jase shrugged. “He’s old.”
She crossed the street to him, lifting a corner of the jacket. “This was in the box.”
“It looks good.” He cleared his throat. “It looks really good. You look good.”
She pulled a Polaroid from her pocket and handed it to him. “This was with it.”
He shouldn’t have been surprised to see his folks smiling up at him, two kids decked out for a ride on the Electra Glide, but he hadn’t seen them in a while.
It took longer than it should have to recognize that the jacket he’d carried to California and back for Lindsey was his mother’s.
“This means…did you…” she stammered.
Jase felt slightly better knowing she struggled with words now too.
“You got the money, right?” she finally pushed out.
“Yeah.” He thought so, at least. He still hadn’t laid eyes on the check he should’ve opened in front of Whitlock. The old codger practically chased Jase off his porch with a broom.
He pulled it out of the envelope, anticipating a whole mess of zeros.
The most surprising thing was not that it was not a check for three million dollars, only one hundred thousand. Only, as if it wasn’t the most money he’d ever seen. No, the shocker Jase couldn’t get past was the line next to the amount.
To: Jase Young and Lindsey Adams.
What the fu—
“Good,” Lindsey was saying. “I didn’t think he’d put you through all this for nothing.”
Jase was staring at the check while the pieces of a very messy puzzle began to arrange themselves in a clear picture.
Was his dad really that good? How could he have predicted this future before Jase ever laid eyes on Lindsey?
Saul and Farmer Pederson probably had something to say about that, and his old man hadn’t left him with any choice but to believe it.
It was all there, on a check dated before Jason’s death, a fate sealed in an envelope until this very moment.
Jase Young and Lindsey Adams.
That sly SOB.
Jase started laughing. He couldn’t help it.
“What’s funny?” Lindsey asked.
Even wearing his mother’s jacket, she didn’t see the bigger picture either.
He put the check back in the envelope and shoved it into his pocket, still laughing, muttering, “Son of a bitch.”
“He was a son of a bi—”
Jase took her face in his hands and kissed her.