Chapter 23
SEAMUS
The window on the work trailer was slick with rain, the sound of it peppering the metal rooftop.
“Alfie swore yesterday,” Gray said over the top of his laptop. “Like really swore. Called his toy truck a fuckhead.”
Chris snorted on the other end of the trailer. He was on hold with the Mayor, of all people, for some building permit issue he was trying to iron out.
“Wait, isn’t he like, three?” I asked, pulling on my raincoat.
I was meeting Lucy, Graydon’s wife, on the other end of the massive construction site.
Graydon had erected a giant, closed-in tent for her close to the water.
She was the designer on this project, and there wasn’t room for all her mood boards and fabric swatches in the cluttered trailer we occupied as our HQ.
“Four,” Gray said.
Chris tsked, shaking his head, the phone still at his ear.
“Like Roxie’s perfect!” Gray glared at his best friend and co-owner of Grayscale Consulting.
“Of course she is,” Chris said. “The perfect cherubic child.”
Gray lifted a brow. “Even that time she drew Peppa Pig on that client contract?”
Chris threw a pencil at Graydon, who ducked expertly, laughing. “Oh, hey Will,” Chris said, turning his back on us. Apparently, he was on a first-name basis with the mayor.
“Sorry we’re so professional, man,” Gray said to me.
I zipped up my jacket. “Seriously, you two should know better.”
Gray let out a burst of laughter as I gathered up my papers. “You’re coming to the barbecue on Friday, right?”
I glanced out the window once more. It had poured like this the whole month of April, and now that it was nearly May, it didn’t look like it was going to let up anytime soon.
“I promise it’ll be sunny,” Graydon said. “Okay, I can’t promise that. But you know the inside of my place is nice, too.” I did. I’d spent plenty of evenings there with the family since I’d moved onto their property.
“Yeah, I’ll be there.”
Gray gave me a fist bump and a grin. Chris turned at the sound of the door and I lifted two fingers to him before heading out into the rain.
A barbecue would be good in theory, even though it meant risking someone flirting with me.
At me, more like, given my skills. But I’d tried not to say no to too much since I’d been out here, even though it felt against my nature.
I had to say no enough anyway, like when I drove back to Vermont every couple of weeks to check in on Sarah, who was our new hire prepping the Rolling Hills project, and Dad, to touch base on business stuff.
Saying yes had worked out well—except for the one time Chris’s wife Sadie had tried to set me up with one of her friends. That had been an easy hell no, though I’d phrased it nicer than that.
As I ducked my head against the rain, I wondered, not for the first time, why I hadn’t said yes to that one.
Sadie had shown me the woman’s photo—she was pretty.
Sadie promised she was nice, too. But the woman didn’t have that sparkle in her eyes.
She didn’t have a smattering of freckles across her nose.
She didn’t have that wild chopped-off hair that somehow looked sexy or that scar across her face that made me feel all the ways.
The truth was, she wasn’t Chelsea. And I couldn’t stomach the thought of looking at another woman even now, almost six months since the last time I’d seen Chelsea Kelly.
It was only a five-minute walk along the lakeshore past the length of the building site to the tent.
It was normally a beautiful stroll we all made multiple times a day, but now I wish I’d driven.
My feet were dry in my steel-toes, but rain was already seeping down the neck of my jacket, and straight through the legs of my pants.
I’d had to tuck the papers inside my coat, and on top of getting soaked, trying to keep them in place while I walked was a pain in the ass.
But I hardly noticed, because my mind, once more, had turned to Chelsea.
I clenched my jaw. I worked hard to keep that from happening, especially since last weekend, when I’d been back in Quince Valley.
The first time I’d come back, a couple of weeks after the party, had been the hardest. I’d gone back to my place to get Sarah set up there.
She’d been booked to stay at the Rolling Hills while she looked for a place to live long-term, but seeing as I needed someone to look after my girls, and I could stay at Dad’s anytime I was back in town, we arranged for her to stay there, at least for a few months.
While I walked around my place showing Sarah the ropes, every time I turned around, I saw Chelsea.
That first day, out on the ridge. Sitting at my kitchen table, orgasming over a burger and later washing dishes by my side.
That first night, after the poker game.
It was stupid because I lived there. It should have reminded me of me. But all of Quince Valley seemed imbued with Chelsea Kelly. The place I’d grown up in, where I’d lived my life with its dizzying highs and terrible fucking lows, was all entangled with my feelings for her.
That night at the party, I’d thought about going back on my promise to give her space a thousand times.
But I knew she didn’t have the same feelings for me, or at least, they weren’t as clean.
And I meant what I’d said: I knew she needed to be on her own, and not take me on, too, not when she was trying to live her life truly independently for the first time.
When I watched that slideshow, I hadn’t grieved Kevin all over again.
I realized I’d never stopped grieving for him, from the moment he’d called my name for the last time and shifted from my big brother to a jagged hole inside of me.
It was Chelsea who helped me see that I couldn’t spend my life blaming myself for his death.
But in that moment, watching all those old images go by, I knew that losing Kevin was like the mirror image of my love for Chelsea.
With Kevin, the depths of my feelings stretched to their very worst extreme, and with Chelsea, to their most exquisitely beautiful.
Maybe if I didn’t know the abject pain of losing Kevin, I wouldn’t have known how far I could love Chelsea.
Letting Chelsea go had hurt like a motherfucker.
It still did. But I knew how strong I was now.
And I knew if she wanted to be with me, she’d want to do it on her terms, and I would too.
But there I went, getting melodramatic as fuck.
That’s why I didn’t stay long whenever I went back to Quince Valley. It was cleaner that I stayed here as much as possible.
I jogged past the beginnings of the hotel we were building. Right now, it was a massive structure of concrete footings, and a hive of activity. Trucks belched as they geared through the mud, and workers in yellow rain slickers like mine shouted at each other to be heard over the rain.
I’d asked Sarah and Dad to come up here next weekend to check out our progress.
This project was going to serve as a proving ground for the Rolling Hills project, which was still in the permit application phase.
When I’d shared some progress pics with the two of them on my last visit, over dinner at Dad’s place, he’d finally looked impressed rather than overwhelmed by the direction the business was going.
I think he was relieved, mostly, that Sarah and I were leading the big projects while he was sticking to the familiar—the fine house builds and restorations he was known for.
I think he’d also been distracted by Sarah. He was acting strange around her, kind of stiff and over-accommodating. When she finally went to the bathroom, I gave him a sidelong glance. “Isn’t she a bit young for you?”
I’d pegged Sarah, a pretty, reserved woman, at around my age. But Dad had huffed, “She’s my employee, for God’s sake. And she’s not even forty years old.”
I’d lifted a brow but hadn’t said more. Dad was still young, as far as dads staring down retirement went: he was turning 56 this year. But I was imagining things, though, obviously. He’d barely dated in the decade since Mom passed, and would never consider crossing lines like that.
“Anyway, I’ve got something for you.” He’d set two notebooks on the table; the first a basic spiral-bound dollar-store type number, the second leather-bound and old, yellowed at the edges.
“The cipher,” I said, looking at the one on top. I knew the newer one would be Dad’s notes. “Did you crack it?”
Dad frowned, and I knew he had.
“Well?”
“Jude’s going to be disappointed.”
“Why?”
“It’s not a personal diary. It’s more like… corporate espionage, I guess. From what I can tell, the person who wrote this, J.E.Q., was a wealthy businessman’s driver.”
“A chauffeur?”
“Yes. And it seems as though he was angling to take down his boss, who sounds like he was embroiled in several illegal activities.”
“Well, that’s interesting, I guess?”
“Sure, but Jude said there was some kind of murder in that room, right? None of the information in that book hints at that. Unless that’s how the chauffeur planned on taking his boss down.”
“No. I think there was some kind of love story involved.”
Dad nodded. Then he furrowed his brow, as if remembering.
“There was one thing. This guy made a few observations about his boss’s wife.
Said stuff about how she looked ‘fetching’, and how undeserving his boss was of her.
” Dad had sat up, tapping a finger on the book.
“And he said something about his ‘personal records’, which he’d kept in a…
”—he flipped through his notes—“‘nearby locale’.”
“So, a personal diary, stored somewhere else?”
Dad shrugged, snapping his own notebook shut. “I dunno. If so, who the hell knows where? Did they find anything else in that room?”
I’d seen the room. I was there just after they’d found this book in the walls. I wasn’t sure if they’d looked more closely for any more clues.