12. Reva
CHAPTER TWELVE
REVA
Morning comes too early. I didn’t sleep badly…I’m just not entirely sure I slept at all.
At some point, just before dawn, I slide out from under Nash’s arm. He is asleep on his stomach, one hand still reaching for the place I was. Even unconscious, the man is possessive. It should annoy me more than it does.
I mean…it does annoy me.
It also does other things to me, which is deeply inconvenient and even more annoying this early in the morning. I want coffee.
I find my leggings on the floor, drag them on, and then grab Shiloh’s hoodie from where Nash tossed it last night. I grumble soundlessly the entire time.
This is also ridiculous and annoying. I came to New Orleans with a duffel bag and a death wish, not a capsule wardrobe, and I am now rotating through stolen men’s clothing like an emotionally unstable raccoon.
I need clothes. Actual clothes. Underwear, more T-shirts, a few more pairs of leggings.
Clothes that do not smell like one of the men currently dismantling my life and putting it back together with sex and secrets.
I creep out before Nash wakes up enough to ask where I’m going.
Maybe that’s cowardly. Maybe it’s survival.
Maybe I just need five minutes where no one in this house looks at me like they can see all the places I cracked yesterday.
It kinda feels like that’s beginning to be an everyday occurrence, though.
I set the coffee pot to brew, then step out onto the patio.
The flagstones behind the kitchen are wet with early humidity, the sky just starting to lighten beyond the trees.
The marsh beyond the property sits low and silver in the morning haze.
I have yet to see an alligator, but I bet one’s out there, lurking just beneath the surface of the water.
My phone feels like a lead weight in my hand. I’ve been staring at Cal’s name on the screen since I stepped outside.
My thumb hovers over the call button. My three rubber bands are back on my wrist, and I flick the top one against the sensitive skin of my inner arm.
Snap.
The sting is sharp and immediate. Necessary.
I need to be grounded before I talk to the only man who has ever called me daughter in my adult memory, because right now, I’m pretty sure he’s also the man who has been lying to me for fifteen years.
Sighing, I press the call button.
The buzz of his ring tone cuts through the quiet morning.
One.
Two.
Three.
I almost hang up. Then the line clicks open.
“Reva?” Cal’s voice is rough with sleep, filtered through distance and old habit. “It’s early, kid. Everything okay?”
No. Obviously no. I roll my eyes. There is no version where calling your guardian at dawn from a crime-family mansion in Louisiana says everything is okay. But I can hear the concern under his voice, the immediate shift from sleep to readiness, and that hurts worse than I want it to.
I swallow hard, then force my voice to harden. “I saw her, Cal.”
Silence, except for a swift inhalation, as suddenly cut-off. It’s not a confused silence, or a surprised one…it’s just…silent.
A tear leaks from my eye and I swipe at it with my sleeve. That tells me more than shouting ever could have. Cal draws a breath to speak.
My hand tightens around the phone. “Don’t.”
His breath moves once against the line. “Where?”
I close my eyes. One word to make the world tilt on its axis.
“You knew.”
“Reva—”
“You knew Delia was alive.”
Another pause. Measured. Careful. Cal choosing where to step because the floor between us is a minefield now.
“I knew she survived,” he says at last.
The air leaves my lungs. For a second, I am back in the Hart house with my hands on dusty floorboards, looking for proof that does not exist.
I grip the balcony railing. “And you chose not to tell me.”
“Yes.”
The word is calm, which somehow makes it worse. I want him to sound guilty. Frantic. Cornered. I want him to give me something I can throw my anger at without it bouncing back and hitting me in the face.
Instead, he sounds like Cal. Steady as ever. A little wary. Sorry in a way he has no intention of allowing to weaken him.
“You kept her from me. You let me mourn her for fifteen years.”
“I kept you alive for fifteen years.”
I can’t process that right now. My eyes burn with more tears I won’t let fall.
“You let me think she was dead!”
“I let you think a lot of things that kept you breathing.”
“Oh, good.” My laugh comes out thin and ugly. “Excellent. We’re doing noble lies before breakfast. My favorite.”
“Listen to me, Reva—”
“No.”
“Reva.”
“No.” I straighten, because if I don’t, I might fold right over the railing and let the marsh have me. “You do not get to use the dad voice right now. You lost dad voice privileges somewhere around letting me build my entire life around a lie.”
He exhales, and in that breath is a lifetime of patience.
That’s the thing about Cal. He can go deadly when he needs to, but with me, he has always been patient first. Patient when I screamed. Patient when I refused to eat. Patient when I broke three mugs in one week because grief kept making my hands stupid.
His patience feels different now, though. Less like love and more like strategy.
“I know what you’re doing down there and who you’re chasing. I didn’t confirm it was Deacon who killed your family,” he says, “because it wasn’t.”
I freeze. The correction is quiet, but it cuts clean.
“You always swore there was a man with a rosary mark,” Cal continues. “Which tracks…for many reasons. Any such man would be very dangerous, and you needed to just stay away. But you couldn’t just stay away.”
My throat tightens. “You needed to be honest with me.”
“It wasn’t safe. For you or Delia.”
The railing digs into my palm. “That’s not fair. I deserved to know, damnit.”
“Fair, deserve…they have no place in any of this.”
“God, Cal.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t get to know.” My voice cracks on it, and I hate that.
“You don’t get to be calm and sad and reasonable.
You knew Delia was alive. You knew Deacon was connected.
You knew there was more to this than the story I had, and you let me grow up with half a truth sharp enough to cut myself on. ”
His silence is heavier now. When he speaks again, his voice has changed. Lower. More careful.
“Deacon and I made an arrangement.”
The words move through me slowly, like my brain refuses to take them in all at once.
“What arrangement?”
“He made sure I could get to you. Keep you safe. I made sure you disappeared.”
My fingers go numb around the phone.
“He gave me to you?”
“No.” Cal’s voice hardens for the first time. “No one gave you to anyone. But you were supposed to be—”
He breaks off, and impatiently I fill in the blanks. “Dead, I know.”
“Okay, dead. So we had to make sure you continued to stay dead, yeah? But you were a child. You were scared out of your mind. The official channels would have exposed you within a week if the wrong person looked too closely. Deacon understood that. So did I.”
I press my free hand to my stomach. “Go on.”
“After the house. After the police. After the first round of questions. Before anyone important realized the wrong child had survived.”
The wrong child. Even knowing the truth already, my fingers tighten around my phone.
Cal hears the change in my breathing. “Reva.”
“So Delia was…the right child. And I was..the wrong one?”
“It’s more complicated than that, but...”
“But yes.”
“It’s what they would have meant.”
“The Syndicate.”
They. The people who took Delia. The people who ordered whatever happened in that house. The people who knew enough about two little girls to decide one should live and one should not.
My rubber band snaps against my wrist before I realize I’ve pulled it.
Cal’s voice sharpens. “Stop that.”
I look down to see a red line rising on my skin. Even through a phone, from a thousand miles away, Cal still knows the worst things about me.
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
“Then don’t make me worry from this far away.”
“I’m in Louisiana, not a war zone.”
His laugh is quiet and humorless. “Kid, from where I’m standing, there may not be much difference.”
I swipe at my cheek with the heel of my hand. “You’re not surprised I saw her.”
“No.”
“Did you know where she was?”
“I had my suspicions.”
I turn away from the railing and look back through the distant set of glass doors toward the bedroom.
The bed is out of sight, but I can picture Nash in it, all hard lines and sleep-warm skin, one hand still reaching for a woman who is currently standing on his patio learning her entire life was a group project in deception.
“This is not a phone conversation,” Cal says.
That makes me laugh, an unamused, weak cackle.
“That is such a violently unhelpful thing to say.”
“It’s also true.”
“Then start talking in person in my imagination and we’ll call it fixed.”
“Reva.”
There it is again. The dad voice. The thing I trusted so completely I never thought to check whether it was tied to anything solid.
“I’m coming down there,” he says.
My spine straightens. “No.”
“I’m not asking.”
“I’m still telling you no.”
His voice goes very calm. “You are standing in the middle of something you do not understand, surrounded by men who have their own reasons for every move they make.”
“Pot, kettle, Chicago.”
“I mean it.”
“So do I.”
“If Delia has surfaced, if Deacon is close enough for you to look him in the eye, then whatever they were trying to keep buried is moving. Fast.”
My heart kicks once.
“You know more than you’re saying.”
“Yes.”
At least he does not insult me by denying it.
I close my eyes. “Cal.”
“I am trying to keep you alive.”
“God bless America, I am so tired of that sentence.”
“I don’t care.”
That is the problem. Cal’s love has never been soft.
It has always been steady, functional, occasionally bossy, and heavily armed.
He would lie if the lie kept me breathing.
He would take a bullet and call it Tuesday.
He would break every trust between us and still believe the math came out right if I lived.
Maybe that is love. Maybe that is the thing that’s going to ruin us.
“I’m coming to New Orleans,” he says. “I’ll straighten this mess out.”
“No. I don’t want you here.”
“You are not in a position to veto me.”
“Oh, I am absolutely in a position to veto you.” My voice steadies, which surprises both of us. “This is my problem.”
“It’s not your problem, Reva. That’s just it.”
“Isn’t it?” I ask. I stare out over the marsh. “I think I woke the gators in the bayou, Cal. Everything was probably sleeping ‘til I did.”
Silence.
“I am the one who came here,” I continue.
“I am the one Delia saw. I am the one Deacon has been circling. I am the one they tried to erase, hide, collect, whatever word of the day we’re using.
You had fifteen years to decide what truth I could handle.
You don’t get to fly down here now and take the wheel because I finally started driving. ”
Cal breathes through his nose.
I can picture him exactly. Sitting on the edge of his bed, one hand over his eyes, old scars pulling when his jaw tightens. He probably has a gun within reach. He always does.
“You sound like your momma,” he says quietly.
For a moment, I forget how to breathe. Cal goes still on the other end.
Too still.
My fingers tighten on the phone.
“What?”
“I just said you sound like her.”
No. That is not what he said. Not exactly.
Something about the way his voice softened around the word momma made the air shift, but when I reach for it, it slips away.
I don’t know if it’s because I’m tired, or maybe I’m just not ready for whatever he’s holding back. All I know is that he’s holding something back. Cal is better at almost-truths than anyone I have ever known.
“I have to go,” I say.
“Reva—”
“No. I’m done for now.”
“Do not shut your phone off.”
“Then don’t get on a plane.”
He doesn’t answer.
“Cal.”
“I won’t come today.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“It’s all I can give you.”
I laugh under my breath. “You people and your little negotiated truths.”
“Keep your phone on,” he says. “Stay close to Blackwood and Rousseau. Lafitte too, when he isn’t being a jackass.”
Despite myself, something in my chest tugs.
“You know Shiloh?”
“I know enough.”
“Of course you do.”
“Reva.”
I wait.
His voice lowers. “Don’t trust Delia blindly just because she shares your blood.”
My stomach twists.
“And don’t hate her for surviving.”
The line goes quiet between us. For one second, I think I might cry. I don’t. I’m out of tears, apparently.
“Goodbye, Cal.”
I hang up before he can say anything else. Then I stand there with the phone in my hand while the sky turns brighter over the marsh.
I thought calling him would give me something solid. Instead, I have a new list of questions, a father-shaped hole in the middle of my chest, and one brutal little certainty sitting underneath both.
Cal knew. Not everything, but enough to be a liar.
Whatever I decide to do next, I am going to have to do without pretending Chicago was ever clean.