Chapter 29
Twenty-Nine
Carly rested her head on Brian’s shoulder.
“Do you think it’s over for now?” He ran a damp paper towel over her forehead. “We can take a later flight if you don’t feel up to going.”
“That should be it for today,” she said, weak and depleted after a vicious bout of vomiting.
“How long did you say this went on with Zoe?”
“Three full months.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I wish I was.”
“I feel so bad,” he groaned. “I wish there was something I could do for you.”
“Just hold me, Bri. That’s what I need.”
He tightened his arm around her and ran his other thumb over her sparkling new wedding ring. “What you need is ten days in Jamaica.”
“Are we really married or was yesterday a dream?”
“Married, pregnant, the whole nine yards.”
She reached for his hand to study his new—plain white gold—ring. “It’s a dream come true.”
“Even the vomiting?” he asked with a chuckle.
Running her fingers gently over the bandage on his wrist, she said, “I’d rather be sick for ninety straight days than spend one more minute of my life wishing for all the things I have now.”
He brushed his lips over her curls.
“I meant to tell you,” she said. “It was nice of you to apologize to Luke and invite him to the wedding.”
Brian shrugged. “When I’m wrong, I say so. He was a good friend to you when I wasn’t here.”
“Yes, he was.”
The TV in the gate area was tuned to one of the network news programs, which had run nonstop coverage of the events in Granville over the last week.
Carly and Brian watched, transfixed, as a broken-looking Matt Collins was led into his arraignment wearing an orange jumpsuit, a bulletproof vest, leg chains, and handcuffs.
Eventually, they would have to testify against him. But the trial was months away, and they had agreed not to spend their time thinking about him or the realization that the only reason he had told them everything he did was because he’d planned to kill them and skip town.
“I look at him, even all these days later, and I still can’t believe it,” Brian said, his eyes fixed on the television. “That my brother is dead because of him.”
“I wonder if your dad will ever be able to get past it.”
“He was telling me how Matt went out of his way during the investigation to ‘discover’ things about the perp that made them all sick—like his need for respect from his victims, for one thing. With hindsight, Dad can see he was showing off—he wanted them to know why he killed some of them and let the others live. He wanted to be sure they knew he did that carjacking, too.”
Carly shuddered. She had trembled for three full days after the encounter with Matt. When she thought about what those other poor girls had withstood at his hands . . . Well, it was better not to think about it, because when she did, the trembling returned.
“It’s a bitter pill for Dad to swallow, that’s for sure. All those years he spent working with and confiding in a psychopath. Oh, look, there he is now.”
Michael appeared on the courthouse steps, still wearing a sling over his left arm.
The reporters chased him down, and he stopped to answer a few of their questions.
Carly winced when she saw the chief’s face pinched with pain that she knew was both physical and emotional. “I still can’t believe I didn’t do something with Matt’s gun when I had the chance,” she said.
“Are you serious? You were like freaking Wonder Woman in there. Don’t obsess about the gun, honey. He got off a lucky shot, considering he was still blinded by the pepper spray and fired erratically. We’re lucky he didn’t take Dad’s head off.”
“I just keep seeing it over and over again, the blood on your dad’s back . . .” She shook her head to clear her mind of yet another image that would haunt her forever. “All I could think about in that moment was what am I going to do if we got through this nightmare only to lose him?”
“Fortunately, we don’t have to think about any of it for a while. We can focus on each other, our baby, our new house, my new job.”
“Yes, you’re right.” Carly smiled with contentment. “I don’t know if I’ve mentioned recently that Carly Westbury loves Brian Westbury.”
“And you said it wouldn’t roll off the tongue as easily as the earlier version. I have to say I disagree.”
She laughed, and when she looked up, an older heavyset woman sitting across from them smiled at her. The woman wore a bright red Hawaiian shirt.
“You two are so cute,” she said. “You have to be newlyweds.”
Carly cringed as she lifted her head off Brian’s shoulder. “Are we that obvious?”
The woman clapped her hands with delight. “I knew it! Tell me everything. How did you meet?”
“We, um, we went to high school together,” Brian said.
“Oh, that’s so wonderful, and now here you are, back together and married.” She nudged her husband, who pretended to be bored by the whole thing. “Isn’t that something, Lou?”
He grunted in agreement.
“Let me guess: You met up again at a reunion, and all the old sparks were still there. Am I right?”
Carly smiled as she looked up at her handsome husband. “Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly how it happened.”
Thank you for reading The Wreck!