Chapter 13
At five a.m., Stone and I are the only two people at the hotel gym where the entire crew and most of the contestants are being put up for the duration of the show. The gym is fair to middling, but there’s no FTW franchise on the island, so here we are.
I blow air out at the top of my press, then lower the bar.
“Two more,” Stone says, spotting me as I lift the barbell again.
I’m nearly at the top, arms shaking, when my earpiece rings with a call. I always keep one earbud in when I work out in case of emergencies. Though, at this time of day, it rarely, if ever, rings. The robotic voice in my ear tells me it’s the father of the devil herself, Bert Wallace, then asks if I want to accept the call.
I doubt Bert is calling me. It’s more likely Cecily, whose number I blocked, using her father’s cell. My throat tightens even as my arms strain against the bar. I breathe out, “Don’t answer.”
There’s a beep as that helpful little AI mishears and answers the damn call. I’ve pushed the bar to the top, with Stone coaxing me, when I hear a soft, “Easton?”
With an assist from Stone, I grunt the bar into the j-cups and sit up. For a moment, I don’t say anything. I sit there breathing heavily, arms shaking, heart pounding.
Stone leans around, and I wave at my earpiece. He quickly puzzles it out and steps away.
“I know you’re there, Easton. I can hear you breathing, and even with you in another time zone, I know your regular workout schedule. I used to work out with you, remember?”
I do. Surprisingly, the memory doesn’t hurt like it used to. “What do you want, Cecily?”
I hear Stone make a noise behind me. I glance over my shoulder and see him making a slashing motion across his throat. He’s right. I need to end this call.
To include him, I switch from my earpiece to speaker. “You’ve got two seconds.”
She says, “I’m here with my father. His cancer took a turn.” She lowers her voice. “The L.A. district attorney’s office gave me leave to transfer to the Houston office for the duration of my house arrest or whenever…” She clears emotion from her voice and resumes at a normal level. “He’s in hospice. He wanted me to call you so he could say goodbye.”
I close my eyes. It must be bad. It’s one in the morning in Texas. And as much as a villain as Cecily was with poor morals and bad choices, I really liked Bert. “I’m sorry,” I say, and mean it.
“Thanks.” I hear the genuine sorrow in her voice, hear her grappling for control, and dammit if I don’t wonder if she’s faking it. How fucked up is that? I can’t even trust a normal and expected emotion from this woman I’d lived with for three years. It’s like I’ve lost all ability to trust my own perceptions.
Cecily doesn’t say anything else. She hands me off, and I hear the raspy voice I’ve come to be so fond of.
“Easton,” Bert says, “that you, boy?”
“Yeah, Bert,” I say, choking on emotion at the weakness of his usual booming voice. He sounds sick and tired. “I’m sorry to learn about the cancer.”
“Cancer sucks,” he says. “Worse than sucks, but it’s given me a chance to make some things right, too.” He coughs, breaths heavily for a moment, before continuing. “Made things right with my ex-wife—even though she divorced me, leaving me to handle every other weekend with her mess.”
I hear Cecily object in the background, and Bert laughs hoarsely. “Okay, fine, she was the best kind of mess.”
I can’t help but smile at their familiar, acidic banter.
Bert continues, “I also made things right with my brother and got a priest to give me the last rites. You know, just in case.”
He chuckles and so do I because Bert is an avowed agnostic. He breaks into a coughing fit.
I clutch the phone tighter. “I’ve no doubt you’re on the list for Heaven,” I say. “Putting up with Cecily earns you that right.”
He doesn’t laugh at that, and I realize I’ve overstepped. Although, we once joked about how she’d be the death of us both, I’m no longer that guy. We’re no longer that to each other. Regretful, I add, “You earned your place by putting up with me, too.”
He snorts hard at that. “You broke my girl’s heart.”
I close my eyes and swallow the unexpected barb of grief. What does he know about what happened? I can’t begin to guess, but I doubt it’s the truth. Even with it being all over the papers, Bert hasn’t been in any condition this last year to read it. I offer him what I can. “She broke mine, too, Bert. But I’m sorry if I caused you any pain.”
For a moment, all I hear is his breathing heavy and hard. Then he says, “You can make it up to me.”
I wait, uncertain how to reply and not really sure if I want to.
“Promise me, boy, that you’ll stop this madness and look after her when I’ve gone. Promise me.”
“Hang up,” Stone whispers under his breath.
I motion for him to stay quiet, as my stomach turns. I have no intention of honoring this request from a dying man, but I can’t hang up. “Bert, I’m not in control of our legal system.”
“Promise.”
I hear Cecily pleading, “Give me the phone, Dad.” There’s a slap sound and an outraged cry from her. “Don’t hit me. Give me the phone.”
The next thing I know, she’s on the phone. “I swear, Easton, I swear to God I didn’t ask him to do that. You know I wouldn’t.”
I glance at Stone, who is rolling his eyes. Bert shouts something in the background that sounds like, “Promise me!”
I hear Cecily’s heels tapping across floor tiles as Bert’s voice quickly fades. She sighs into the phone and the background is quiet again. “Thanks for taking my call and talking to him. I’m sorry it ended that way. I shouldn’t have let him watch your reality show. It stirred all kinds of feelings in him.”
My stomach sinks. I shouldn’t press, shouldn’t ask, but it’s really bothering me. “How much does your dad know about what you did?”
She lets out a breath. “Everything, but not from me. One of his so-called friends told him I was going to go to jail, and you were the one putting me there.”
Fuck. I close my eyes. That hurts. “Did you explain to him why that wasn’t true?”
“Of course I did. I’m not a monster. Despite what you think.”
“I think you stole money from kids with cancer to buy a new Tesla.”
“I didn’t steal that money. I was set up. Which I will prove at trial. I only wish you had a little faith in me.”
I bite my tongue. My faith in her was never the problem. If anything, I believed in her too much. But I’ve seen the evidence, including money going from FTW’s charity account into an account under a company name she’d registered in Delaware. Not to mention that we’ve learned during the investigation that she also stole from her former employer.
Stone is waving me down like a jet crew on the tarmac of a naval destroyer.
“I gotta go.”
“Wait,” she bites out, and I can tell she’s annoyed with my dismissal. “Are you sleeping with her—Yolanda? Is it as good as you remember from that night your dad passed?”
What the fuck? Shaken, I disconnect before I can hear another toxic word. I curse, realizing that last bit was likely the real purpose of the call. She wanted to get in that dig, that barb, and she struck hard. Did she convince her father to call?
Maybe.
I’ll never know.
“How the hell does she know about your history with Yolanda?” Stone says.
I get back under the bar for another rep. “My journals.”
He processes that for a moment before scratching at the side of his head. “You let her read them?”
I lower the bar. Holding the three-hundred-pound bar against my chest, I take a moment to psyche myself up before the next rise. “She said we should have no secrets.”
Stone’s eyebrows go up to his hairline. “And that wasn’t a red flag?”
Maybe, it would’ve been for most people. But for me? What little I knew of love, I learned from one night with Yolanda, and that was almost a decade before I’d met Cecily. I push the bar up, decide I’ve had enough, get up and wipe my spot down so he can take his turn under the bar. “Maybe relationships aren’t for people like us.”
He looks at me sympathetically before positioning himself under the weight. He wraps fingers around the bar. “People like us?”
“People who are seen for what they have to offer and not who they are.”
Stone comes from the kind of money that few people can even imagine. Not private jet money, but multiple private jets that whisk you to Dubai on a whim. The kind of money that shields you from a lot of the world’s ills. The kind of wealth that distorts reality and often priorities. The fact that he is who he is is all due to his mom, Martha “Marty” Jackson. A social worker in New York, she allowed Stone access to all the good her ex-husband’s wealth had to offer, while grounding him in reality and her love.
Stone snorts in disapproval as he lifts with a, “Don’t let Cecily blacken your heart. That’s not you.”
“Fuck that. It’s who I have to be.”
Metal plates clack as he lowers the bar. “You sound like my dad, bitter and obnoxious.”
Ouch. That’s one of the harshest things Stone has ever said to me. His father, Pedro Ruiz Jackson-Rodriguez, manipulates governments and laws for lunch. His criticism stings enough that I do what I do best: deflect. “How is your old man?”
“He wants me to move to Spain and join his firm. As if. I grew up in New York and barely know the pendejo.”
Bitterness doesn’t only run one way, my friend. Of course, only a dick would say that. I say, “Plus, your Spanish sucks.”
He laughs, the bar wavers, and I wait to see if he’s going to need my help on the push. He doesn’t.