10. Eve
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Eve
The storage unit is ash.
My grandmother’s china. The set she ate Sunday dinner off for fifty years and left to me because I was the only grandchild who sat still long enough to learn the stories that went with each chipped plate.
The quilt my mother sewed the summer I graduated, every square cut from a shirt I’d worn somewhere that mattered.
Boxes of books I could never make myself part with, a few of them first editions I’d saved for in college on a barista’s wages.
The journals I kept from fourteen to twenty-two, the entire embarrassing record of who I was before I learned to make myself smaller for a man.
Gone. All of it. Smoke rising in lazy curls against a flat gray sky, and the smell of it, chemical and bitter, getting into my hair and my clothes and the back of my throat where I suspect it’s going to live now.
“We’ve got security footage,” the detective says.
Rodriguez, his name is, a tired-looking man with a notepad who stopped being surprised by people a long time ago.
“Two individuals. Female, white, thirty to thirty-five. Male, white, late twenties to early thirties. They cut the lock with bolt cutters. Knew where the cameras were, mostly. Missed one.”
I don’t need the footage. I know exactly who it was, and so does the burn in my chest.
“They left something.” Rodriguez holds up an evidence bag.
Inside is a singed photograph, me and Simon at our engagement party, both of us smiling at a future that turned out to be a set.
My face has been gouged out with something thin and vicious, dug clean through the paper, while his is left untouched.
On the back, in red marker pressed hard enough to tear: YOU’LL LOSE EVERYTHING TOO.
“Can you think of anyone who might do this?”
The laugh that comes out of me is not a good sound. It’s the laugh of a woman fresh out of normal reactions.
“My ex-fiancé. Simon Valentine, who was arrested this morning for stealing from his own company. And his girlfriend, Kiara Nash, who hit me at my own wedding.” I hand the bag back. “She’s four months pregnant and out of money and entirely out of patience. Start there.”
Rodriguez makes a note. “We’ll bring them both in. Mr. Valentine made bail this morning, but the ankle monitor’s a separate order and the county’s backed up, it won’t be fitted for a few days yet. So we can’t say where he was last night. And Ms. Nash isn’t under any restrictions at all.”
“She could be anywhere,” Dean says, grim at my shoulder.
The drive to the loft passes in a smear of wet streetlight and silence. He insisted I stay with him after the storage lot, and I didn’t argue, because I couldn’t. The fight had drained right out of me and left something gray and quiet in its place.
His place is a converted warehouse downtown, brick and high ceilings and industrial bones softened by good rugs and furniture a person actually wants to sink into.
Warmer than a building that used to hold machinery has any right to be.
I stand in the middle of it, in his jacket that smells like cedar and him, feeling like a thing that washed up somewhere it doesn’t belong.
“Shower’s through there,” he says, gentle, the voice you use on someone after an accident. “Bedroom’s up the stairs. I’ll order food, and then.”
“And then what?” My voice cracks straight down the middle, same as the photograph did.
“They burned my grandmother’s china, Dean.
Plates she ate off for fifty years. The quilt my mom made out of my old clothes.
The journals with every stupid private thought I had before I turned myself into someone palatable for Simon.
” A sob breaks loose, raw and ugly. “Why isn’t it ever enough?
He lost his job. He got arrested. His face was on the news in handcuffs this morning.
Why does he still get to keep coming for me? ”
Dean crosses to me. Pulls me in. His arms are solid and warm, and I put my face against his chest and let it shake.
“Because he’s a coward,” he says into my hair. “Because for men like Simon, hurting you is easier than sitting with the fact that he did this to himself. As long as you’re the villain in his story, he doesn’t have to be. So he’ll keep writing you into it. Or she will, for him.”
“I hate him.”
“I know.”
“I want him to suffer. I want it in a way that scares me a little.”
“I know that too. It doesn’t scare me.” His hand moves slow on my back. “I’ve wanted it longer than you have.”
My phone buzzes in my pocket. Unknown number.
Against every instinct I have, I answer it.
“Hello, Evelyn.” Kiara’s voice, sugar poured over a blade. “Enjoying the fireworks?”
“Where did you get this number.”
“Does it matter? I wanted you to hear it from me. That was just the warm-up, sweetheart.” A pause, theatrical, savored.
“We’re going to take everything. Your peace.
Your family. That cute little loft downtown you’ve been hiding in with your new boyfriend.
The brick one. Top corner unit, the windows with the good light.
” She lets that sit, lets me feel her knowing it.
“Did you really think I wouldn’t follow where you ran?
The two of you looked very cozy through that big glass wall tonight.
You should close the curtains. Anyone could be watching. ”
My skin goes cold all the way through. She’s been outside. She’s stood on the street below these windows and watched us.
“Simon’s already talking to lawyers about suing Dean for interfering in a business relationship,” she goes on. “And once the civil suit buries the both of you in legal fees, once you’ve got nothing left.”
“Is this a confession?” My voice goes flat and level, the gray quiet hardening into something with an edge. “Because I’m recording this call. Has been recording since I said hello.”
Silence.
“You can’t prove anything.”
“I don’t have to prove a thing. The police have footage of you at my storage unit.
The quality’s poor, but your hair is distinctive, and you never could resist showing your face.
” I let the smile into my voice so she can hear it even though she can’t see it.
“You were never half as clever as you needed to be, Kiara. You just had the confidence of someone who’d never been caught. ”
“We’ll SEE about.”
I hang up. Block the number. Turn to Dean with something wild rising in my chest where the gray quiet used to be.
“She’s been watching the building,” I say. “She stood on the street and watched us through the windows. She knows we’re here.”
And Dean changes.
The gentleness I’ve gotten used to all week, the careful softness he handles me with, folds away in front of me, and the thing underneath it stands up to its full height.
His jaw goes tight. His hand comes up to cradle the back of my head, his fingers spreading into my hair, and when he speaks it’s quiet and absolutely without any give in it at all.
“She watched you. Through my windows.” Not a question.
He says it flat and final, a name read into a record he means to keep.
“All right. Here’s what happens now. Nobody gets near you again.
I don’t care what it takes, what it costs, who I have to call or pay or threaten.
You are not going to spend one more night listening for a sound in the dark.
I will put myself between you and the entire rotten lot of them, and I will not move, and I will not get tired, and I will not stop.
” His thumb traces my cheekbone, and his eyes are doing something I’ve never seen in them before, something that should probably frighten me.
“You’re mine to keep safe now. I’ve waited three years for the job. I’m not going to do it badly.”
It should scare me, maybe, the flat finality of it, the way the want in him has teeth I’m only now seeing. It doesn’t. It reaches into the part of me that’s been braced and clenched since the church and tells it, for the first time, that it can put something down.
“Okay,” I whisper.
“Okay,” he agrees.
His phone rings. He answers, listens, and the color goes out of his face.
“That’s my contact at the courthouse.” His voice goes hollow. “Simon made bail this morning, we knew that. But he just filed something else. A restraining order. Against you.”
My blood ices over. “Against me.”
“Claiming you’ve been harassing him. Claiming you’ve made threats.
” He meets my eyes, and I see my own disbelief reflected back.
“There’s a hearing tomorrow morning. And, Eve.
His lawyer is going to argue that you planted the evidence that got him fired.
That this whole thing is a smear campaign by a woman who couldn’t accept being left. ”
The audacity of it steals my breath. He cheated, he stole, he humiliated me at an altar, and now he’s going to stand in a courtroom and ask a judge to protect him from me.
Hours later I’m curled on the corner of Dean’s couch, facing the floor-to-ceiling windows, the curtains now firmly closed against them.
The skyline glitters out there beyond the fabric, beautiful and entirely indifferent to whether I survive the week.
Dean left twenty minutes ago to get real food, and the loft is too big and too quiet without him in it.
The door opens.
I sit up, expecting Dean back early with burgers or a pizza and an apology for forgetting the curtains existed. But the man who walks in isn’t Dean.
It’s my father.
“Dad?” I’m on my feet. “How did you.”
“Dean called me.” David Heart crosses the room, and as he comes into the light I notice how tired he looks.
How much older than the picture I keep of him in my head.
“Said you’d had a brutal day. Said you’d probably tell everyone you were fine, and that you’d need your family anyway, whether you admitted it or not. So here I am.”
“I’m okay.”
“You’re not. And that’s allowed, sweetheart.” He sits beside me on the couch and puts his arm around me, and I’m seven years old again, crying over a skinned knee while he promises to make it stop hurting. “I’m so sorry. For all of it. For not seeing it sooner.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Maybe not. But when you first brought Simon home, something in me went quiet and wrong, and I told myself I was just a father who didn’t want to lose his daughter.” He swallows. “I should have trusted the quiet wrong thing. I taught you to trust your gut, and then I didn’t trust mine.”
“Dad.”
“Let me finish.” He pulls back and looks at me with the eyes that have known me my entire life. “This Dean. The brother. He called me before he called anyone, because he figured out in about a day that you’d need your father and you’d never ask. He seems different from the other one.”
“He is. He’s nothing like Simon.”
“Your mother’s worried. Tyler’s ready to drive over here and start swinging on principle.
We’re all worried, because the last Valentine you brought around set your whole life on fire.
” A pause, weighted. “But I’d like to talk to him.
Alone. Before this goes any further. Man to man, the boring old-fashioned way. ”
“Dad, you can’t just interrogate him.”
“I’m not going to scare him off. If he’s what you say he is, I couldn’t if I tried.” A ghost of a smile. “I just have some questions. Starting with how a man can be sure he isn’t his brother.”
“He won’t mind proving it.”
“Then he won’t mind a walk.”
The door opens again, and Dean comes in with bags of food, and takes in the scene, my father on the couch, me standing between them, and he doesn’t look nervous.
He sets the bags on the counter and meets my father’s eyes, steady, and he looks like a man who’s been waiting for this conversation longer than either of us knows.
“Mr. Heart.” He doesn’t reach for a handshake yet, like he knows it has to be earned first. “Whatever you want to ask, I’ll answer it. All of it.”
My father stands. The two of them take each other’s measure across the room, and the air goes formal and careful.
“Good,” Dad says. “Let’s take a walk.”