Chapter 6
CASSANDRA
Dad’s lips moved, but no sound came out.
“Dad!” Chelsea shouted. “You’re muted.”
“Ow,” I said, moving away from her. She’d yelled right in my ear. “He can hear us just fine!”
“Yeah, Chels, damn,” Jude said on-screen, making a show of taking out and reinserting his earphones.
It was Saturday evening, a full five days from when I’d made the deal with Blake Harrington. And an hour before we were supposed to meet him and Lila for dinner. Lila, his non-wife. Blake, not a married man.
I still couldn’t quite wrap my head around it.
If I was being honest with myself, I still felt like I shouldn’t believe him.
But somehow, I did. I saw the way he flinched when he mentioned his dad leaving his family.
I recognized that flicker of pain. Even though it wasn’t him who’d been cheated on, he had been betrayed.
I knew the look that had danced across his features.
What was wrong with me? Why wasn’t I enough?
He could still be lying, but I didn’t think he was.
Still, I’d trusted before and been burned.
So mostly, I maintained a sense of caution.
I’d wait until I saw the new contract; the private one between us that only my lawyer would see.
Blake and I had emailed back and forth a few times on the terms, and he was bringing the final version to dinner tonight.
Nerves shot through me at the thought of seeing him again. I should have been getting ready, but instead, I was waiting for my dad to set up his technologically impaired butt on this call.
I’d just gotten out of the shower twenty minutes ago when my phone buzzed on the counter.
It was Dad, texting me to say he needed the five of us to call him urgently.
He’d sent a cryptic text the day before; a question I hadn’t thought much about relating to the east wing.
I thought he was doing more research for this history book he’d been plugging away at in earnest since Mom died. But today’s text had alarmed me.
DAD: Get everyone together—urgent.
I’d hurried to pull on my sweats, then ran across the hall to bang on Chelsea’s door.
Between the two of us, we managed to get ahold of all three of our brothers.
Jude was home and able to join the call from the millionaire mansion he rented up on the other side of town.
Eli was out at baseball practice, but on his way back.
Griff told me straight up that he wasn’t going to join the call.
“It’ll be some bullshit, Cass, you know that.” Griffin didn’t have a lot of time for Dad’s flightiness. He was probably right—the chances of it being actually urgent were not high. Dad had absolutely gone off the rails when Mom died, and Griffin wasn’t quite over it.
“There’s a chance it isn’t,” I said.
“Then you’ll let me know.”
He wouldn’t budge.
Concern had tugged at me as I’d set up the video call, though the moment Dad picked up, it slipped several notches.
Dad was at some kind of beach bar. There were palm trees swaying behind him, and though he was muted and hadn’t told us what the emergency was, he appeared to be alive and well.
And sipping a drink with an umbrella in it.
I leaned back on the couch next to Chelsea now, annoyed that Griff had been right. “Dad, this better be good,” I said. I knew he could hear us even if we couldn’t hear him.
Dad picked up his phone, skewing the view behind him so for a moment all we saw was bright blue sky, then he angled it so his camera gave a vertical upshot of his face; specifically, straight up his nostrils and the forest of his nose hairs.
“Oh my God,” Chelsea said, laughing.
I laughed too, despite my quickly growing irritation.
“Dad, gross,” Jude said.
The only good thing about Dad texting like this and freaking me out was it was a distraction from the anxiousness I’d been feeling all day about dinner tonight. But now that the worry about Dad had abated, nerves skittered through my stomach.
Finally, Dad’s voice came through. “Hello?”
“Yes!” I said. “It’s working.”
“Where are your brothers?” he asked.
“Eli’s supposed to be coming,” I said. “Griff… I’m not sure.” I couldn’t exactly tell him his son blew him off.
“Hey, I’m here!” Jude said.
“Where’s my grandson?” Dad asked Jude.
“He’s at the babysitter’s,” Jude said. Jude, arguably the least responsible of all of us, had a three-year-old son, Jack. Granted, it was because of his irresponsibility that he had a son in the first place, though he was now the apple of his—and all of our—eyes.
“Dad, what’s the emergency?” I asked.
“I need all of you there first.”
“Are you hurt?”
“No. Nothing like that.”
Now the annoyance scrunched up in my stomach. I hit the mute button. “You know,” I said to Chelsea, “if we had pulled this kind of thing on Dad when we were in college, he’d have lost it.”
“He’s different now,” she said.
“You’re being charitable.” Really, it was deeply painful for me to see Dad like this.
He’d always been the one I came to when I needed a sensible take on things as a kid.
Mom was good for that too, but she’d always been so busy running the hotel.
As a stay-at-home dad, it had been Dad who put the bandages on our knees and gave us the pep talks we needed.
Dad had been the one to talk Mom down when Eli and I told her despite both of us going to business school, neither of us wanted to take over the hotel.
Still, I turned back to Dad, who was just giving the waiter another drink order, and unmuted us.
“How’s Majorca?” I asked when he was done.
“I’m in the Canary Islands.” The tone of Dad’s voice was so casual I had to fight to keep the anger out of my voice.
“You said you were going to tell us when you were going someplace new! We have to know where you are.”
Dad waved his hand like he wasn’t a seventy-year-old backpacking around the world. “You act like I’m some frail old man.”
I bit my cheek to keep from snapping at him. He wasn’t frail, but Mom hadn’t been either.
“I love the Canaries,” Jude said, leaning back in his chair and threading his hands behind his head.
I sighed, resigning myself to Dad not getting how hard this was on us. Or maybe just me. “Don’t you have to get ready?” I asked my brother.
Jude looked down at his shirt—a coral-colored t-shirt with sweat still ringed under his armpits. “I’m dressed!”
Jude would look good—and continue to have women falling over him—if he wore a paper bag. But he knew he couldn’t wear that to dinner—not when it was a business meeting, and our high-end restaurant had a dress code. He saw me scowl through the screen. I know, because he laughed.
Just then, my apartment door banged open and Eli appeared, flanked by his best friend since childhood, Seamus Reilly.
“Finally!” I said, even though it had only been a few minutes since we started the call. I shifted sideways to make room for him.
“Hey Seamus,” I said.
“Hey Cass,” he replied, standing awkwardly at the door. I couldn’t help notice the way his eyes darted over Chelsea, as if trying not to linger. “Chelsea,” he said, before glancing away.
Chelsea was already dressed for dinner—she took events seriously, given it was her job. I realized she looked gorgeous sitting there—her purple blouse offset her green eyes perfectly. Even if those eyes had dark shadows under them, only partially concealed with make-up.
Worry danced over me at my little sister’s behavior once more. She’d been like this ever since Mom died. She’d actually been there when Mom died—Chelsea had discovered Mom on the floor of her office.
Heart attack, Chelsea had said to me over the phone from the ambulance, her voice sounding high and lost and entirely not hers. That’s what they think, because she’s already gone. That’s how I found out.
“Don’t touch us,” Chelsea said now as Eli flopped down on the couch next to us. Both he and Seamus were in sweaty, dust-coated t-shirts.
I forced myself to push my worries aside for now. Not much I could do about it here, and she seemed to be in good enough spirits most days, anyway.
“I’m just here for water,” Seamus said. “I forgot my water bottle—Eli said he’d give me some at his. Er, yours, I guess, Cass.”
“What’s yours is mine,” Eli said, to me or him I didn’t know.
“Of course!” I ignored my brother and gestured to the kitchen, which was open to the living room where we all sat. “Help yourself.”
It was strange being polite with Seamus.
Given how inseparable he and my twin brother were when we were kids, he’d been like just another of my brothers growing up—just as annoying and smelly, anyway.
But that was years ago, and we were adults now.
While Eli had kept in touch with him, before this year, I hadn’t seen him in 15.
“Wow, living the hard life, huh, Dad?” Eli said under his breath. Dad and Eli didn’t always get along, though I thought it was because they were practically the same person. That is, if you didn’t count Dad losing it and taking off on a plane. They even had the same smile.
While Eli talked to Dad, Seamus set his phone down on my kitchen counter to pour himself a glass of water. While he chugged it down, I glanced at my sister, who was looking intently at the screen with Dad, though I saw her eyes dart toward him.
I glanced at my watch once more. Our dinner was in under an hour now.
Absurdly, stupid Blake Harrington’s face flashed in my mind—the one on those back steps, where he’d looked at me so intently while slipping on his suit jacket.
I thought about the photo on their website once more.
I’d pulled it up again last week and noticed the smallest detail: they weren’t actually touching.
It was a minuscule thing—only an inch between them, but I found myself reading into it, as if that tiny fraction of non-proximity would prove he was telling the truth.