Chapter 19
Nash
“So that’s what the bitch was looking for.”
I look from the brown leather diary on the dining table in front of me to Makhi, sprawled out on the seat beside me.
I’m not the only one. Vonn, Byrdie, and Nance are doing their fair share of staring.
Makhi doesn’t look the least bit apologetic as he crosses his arms. “She was a raging bitch who spent more time searching for that thing than doing a damn thing to clean this place. Stare as long as you want, but I’m not taking it back.”
Byrdie sits perched on Vonn’s lap. She was passing him to get to the empty chair at the dining table when he slipped his arm around her waist and kissed her.
She settled in his lap with her arm slung around the back of his shoulder; she has her head resting against his, happy and relaxed in a pair of sweats and a hoodie.
Makhi looked jealous, and Nance briefly raised an eyebrow.
Nance has seen Byrdie and Vonn kissing, knows they spent the night together, and saw me come down with Byrdie this morning since she caught us kissing in the entryway. She would have known or can probably guess that Byrdie spent the night in my room last night.
But Nance has never been the type to judge. As long as I’m happy and Vonn and Makhi aren’t arguing, she’s happy.
“Why would Lydia be looking for your dad’s diary?” Vonn asks, pointing his chin at it since he has both arms wrapped around Byrdie.
Makhi leans across the table before I can pull the diary away, drags it toward him, and flips it open. “It’s boring. Just…” His voice trails off, and he mutters a curse under his breath.
I slam the book shut before dragging it back to my side of the table.
Vonn’s eyes bounce from me to Makhi and back again as Makhi scrubs a hand over his mouth and sits back in his seat, re-crossing his arms. “Well. I wasn’t expecting to see that.”
“See what?” Byrdie scrunches her nose, adorably confused.
“Nothing,” I say as Makhi says, “His dad was a bigger asshole than I knew.”
Makhi grew up in Massey. We saw each other at school, but a kid who grew up in a trailer park outside of town was never going to be someone my parents wanted me to hang around.
We didn’t become friends until I came back to Massey after college, and I found an ally in someone looking to escape their own toxic parents, and who took me as I am.
After a brief silence, Nance stands from her seat and crosses the kitchen to the refrigerator. She’s wasting her time. She must know as well as I do that none of us are interested in eating. But that’s Nance. She’s always shown her love through food.
I feel Byrdie looking at me, but I don’t turn my head to meet her gaze.
I focus my attention on the book in front of me that I’m reluctant to open. “If money didn’t get him what he wanted, he liked to use his fists.”
“Soup?” Nance calls out from the stove. “I can make mushroom or potato soup for lunch.”
“Who the fuck likes mushroom soup?” Makhi mutters, face twisting in disgust.
“And he used those fists on you,” Vonn says quietly, getting to the heart of why I’m so reluctant to open the pages of this book and dig into a childhood I hated.
I’d be seeing my unhappy childhood through my dad’s eyes.
Through my abuser’s eyes, and I’m not sure I’m ready or willing to do that now or ever.
I nod. “It’s how this family has always been. My uncle is the same. Buy people, and they’ll do what you want. If money doesn’t work, threats and violence always will.”
“But if that book was your dad's, why would your uncle want it?” Byrdie asks quietly.
I lift my gaze from the book, and her eyes are soft with sympathy.
Not pity, as I’d feared. She’s hurting for me, which makes it easier to meet her gaze. I didn’t want her to feel sorry for me.
“They were closer when they were younger,” I explain. “Then my grandpa died. My dad got everything, and my uncle got nothing.”
“A hundred grand is not nothing,” Makhi says with a snort.
I look at him and say plainly. “It’s perspective.
They were twins. My dad was born ten minutes before my uncle.
They both grew up believing that the world owed them everything.
So when my dad inherited this mansion and twenty million dollars, imagine how my uncle felt to know that if he ever wanted anything, he would have to rely on my dad’s charity after all his life thinking he was above everyone. ”
“Twenty million…” Makhi whistles and sits back in his seat, expression clearing. “Damn. Perspective definitely changes things.”
He was around for the will reading, but he didn’t come to it with me. I knew my uncle would be on the warpath once he learned everything would come to me and not him, so I went with the family attorney. Makhi and Vonn stayed at the house.
“It does,” I agree. “But like I said, they were close when they were younger.”
“They ran wild,” Nance says from the stove. “Both of them. Your uncle wildest of all. Nash’s dad settled down a bit once he got married, but he was never a kind man, least of all to Nash.”
Byrdie frowns. “I can’t believe Nash’s uncle could be wild if he’s a mayor.”
“Before he was the mayor, Marcus Gabriel was an arrogant man who took and took.”
We startle in surprise at Nance’s sharp tone.
She abandons fussing with ingredients she pulled from the refrigerator to rejoin us at the dining table.
“There was a maid who worked at the house,” she tells me.
“You wouldn’t have remembered her, Nash.
Your parents had just married, and your uncle was wild.
There was a… situation. Police were called.
Things were hushed up. The girl was sent away with money after signing an NDA. She was pregnant.”
Makhi frowns. “I think I heard something about that.”
Nance continues, “There were whispers that she wasn’t the first to wind up like that and that your uncle had a habit of taking liberties with the household staff.”
Byrdie looks horrified.
Vonn draws her against his chest and wraps his arms tighter around her, as if to keep her safe.
Makhi’s lips twist in disgust, then his eyes widen. “The diary. There’s stuff in the diary about the things they both got up to.”
Nance nods. “Likely a lot worse than anything any of us knows. Your uncle stands to lose everything if the contents of that diary get out. Maybe he can claim it’s all lies, but with names, dates, and places, it would be hard to deny everything.
He’d lose the respect of the town and his job.
If there are other crimes contained within those pages, I imagine he might even go to jail. ”
“My uncle didn’t just want the money when my dad died.
” I speak slowly, feeling my way through my thoughts.
“He wanted the house so he could search it from top to bottom, and find a diary that he would have known my dad had always kept. This diary could end his career, and he would want to destroy it before anyone found it. That’s why he had Lydia chase away all the maids we hired.
And that’s why she spent little to no time cleaning when she had been a decent cleaner before.
She was searching all the rooms instead of cleaning them. ”
“So we’re going to blackmail the guy, right?” Makhi asks.
“I don’t know that blackmailing the mayor is a good idea,” Byrdie says warily.
“If he wants to continue as mayor of this lovely town, then it would be in his best interest to get off our backs about having killed a guy,” Makhi says.
Nance gets to her feet and wanders back to the stove. “Potato and leek soup.”
I study her for a bit, pondering the other death in this house.
Nance doesn’t know that Vonn killed the gardener. When she asked about him, I told her that he’d quit without notice, and since no one had seen him, and he had a longstanding habit of complaining about having to do everything himself, she didn’t seem surprised.
“What do you want to do with the diary, Nash?” Byrdie asks me. “That book probably contains stuff about your dad hurting you, doesn’t it?”
I nod. “Probably.”
She lifts her chin, determined. “Then, your decision matters more than any of ours. It’s your secrets in that book.”
But not just mine.
I could give justice to everyone else my dad—and my uncle—hurt, but that would mean exposing all of my own hurts.
I’m not sure I can do that.
“I’ll think about it,” I say, pushing my chair back from the table.
“Don’t make breakfast for me,” I tell Nance, who looks concerned.
I lift the diary. “I’ll be upstairs thinking about what to do with this, and hiding it too.
If my uncle learned I’d found it, there’s no telling what he would do to get it back. ”