Chapter 51
Chapter Fifty-One
No one slept in my bed last night.
Well, no one aside from me. This was the first time that happened in three months.
Over the last hundred days, a permanent fixture in my bed had been, as Eden would call it, “one of my hoes.” Dr. Eloise once said I was on a predictable spiral that only arose when a person was trying to fill a void.
And so every night, for three months, I tried to fill it.
Last night, however, I broke the streak.
Coupled with the fact that I’d arrived at my apartment at six o’clock that morning, I simply wasn’t in the mood to entertain guests at the moment.
I hadn’t always been like this.
After Lauren woke up last summer, I waited for her. With all that waiting, it took me a very long time to get to this point. For twelve straight months, I remained faithful to a woman who wasn’t even mine anymore.
It was a weird pact of celibacy that I deluded myself into believing would bring her back.
I refused to get anyone else for fear it would only make the separation more legitimate.
So I waited, getting to some of my lowest points to date.
I was always of the belief that the worst thing someone I cared about could do was die.
It was Lauren that taught me that this wasn’t the case.
The worst thing someone I cared about could do to me was act as if I was dead to them.
Six months ago, I’d finally moved out of Silas’ house.
I was the last person to leave. With Silas in jail and my uncle living in the old safe house in Pembroke Pines, the already gigantic house on the beach seemed to only get bigger.
The place was filled with memories—some bad, some good—though, it was my own bedroom that I couldn’t stand to be in anymore.
The sheets on my bed could have been washed a thousand times, switched out, or even thrown away.
I swore her ghost still slept within them.
Lauren’s continued absence didn’t stop me from waking up some nights, feeling if she was there, hoping that everything leading up to now had just been a really vivid nightmare.
I missed her.
I missed her in ways that made me feel like I was being subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. I didn’t know you could long for someone so strongly that it resonates to your bones. It was like feeling empty was a part of my identity now.
And I withstood it all because the alternative was to take everything I was feeling, and put it on her. Trade in my pain for hers? I couldn’t do it. She’d been through so much already.
However, I learned last night, that even as I did all that I could to protect her, Lauren was still suffering.
That much was clear from the way she cried on my shoulder the night before.
It wasn’t until she brought it to my attention that it dawned on me that there were some things I’d just never be able to protect her from.
But that didn’t mean I didn’t try.
Last year, when I decided I wasn’t going to tell Lauren about the lengths her father would go, I did so with the belief that when it came to Lauren’s wellbeing, her father was the only one I needed to look out for.
Joshua Caplan had shot his daughter, and then leveraged her life in order to get me to stand as a witness for my father’s trial.
Shooting Lauren may have been an accident, but that didn’t mean I was going to take a step back and assume Lauren was safe with him.
A few days after I’d received Lauren’s restraining order last year, I found myself at in a meeting the least likely of candidates.
Joshua Caplan, himself.
***
August 24th, 2016
(Sixteen Months Ago)
Caplan looked haggard. It was days after the scene at the court, and it was my guess that the media attention that came with the spectacle was starting to weigh heavily on him.
The man looked stressed.
“I know you shot her,” I got straight to the point once he sat down.
I didn’t come here to make small talk. Caplan was a seasoned attorney.
It was his job to know how to lie, and do it well.
So when I levied my accusation, of course he got to pleading his own case, getting the outrage in his voice just perfect.
“Save your energy. I know you were aiming for me.”
We were tucked away in the booth of some isolated diner just off I-95, nestled deep within Overtown.
Overtown was one of the rougher parts of Miami, but I liked this community, and this community liked me.
My family had a lot of influence over the residents here.
As property developers made their way in, the look of the neighborhood was starting to change.
It seemed like there was a new high-end apartment building being built here every day.
The real Overtown community was getting priced out of the homes they’d lived in all their lives, and it was my family that kept a lot of these people from being on the streets.
For that, I was always welcomed here. Which was why I liked the little diner off I-95.
It was a good place to have meetings like this.
There were never too many people here, and it was always open.
It was a late night, and as Caplan realized I figured out what he’d done, he looked over his shoulder as if he expected assassins to pop out from the shadows at any moment. He thought this was a set up.
Nah…
I couldn’t kill Lauren’s father no matter how much I wanted to.
She loved this monster. I’d spent an entire summer watching Lauren’s spirit dull with every day her parents made no effort to get into contact with her.
It was true that the summer we’d spent together was beautiful, filled with love at every turn, but Lauren was not the kind of girl who could just up and forget that she had a family.
The sadness in her eyes, which she often tried to hide from me, was a testament to that fact.
“What’s all this for?” Caplan questioned, his head still whipping around suspiciously. He had to have known I had something on him. Why else would he have gotten in his car and driven several miles out to meet me here?
I had thought about what I was going to say at least two dozen times on the drive up.
I thought about the threats I would make.
I wondered if I was going to be able to look this man in his face and keep my hands to myself.
I saw this moment playing out in my head a million different ways, and none of them started out with me asking, “Is she okay?”
But it was the first thing I asked.
He squinted, unsure if this was my way of trying for some elaborate joke. ‘This is what he made me meet him for?’ his eyes seemed to question.
“Is she okay?” I repeated the question, not realizing until I asked it a second time that I desperately needed to know. Caplan may have shot her, but that didn’t stop me from feeling like I shared in some of the blame. It supposed to have been me. I moved out of the way. And so it was her.
The memory of her body weakening in my arms sent a shiver down my spine and lit a match in my mind. I was looking at the person who did it to her, wanting nothing more than to reach across the table, take his neck within the palm of my hand, and squeeze.
But I wouldn’t.
I couldn’t.
“She’s getting stronger,” he said finally, and I noted the air of remorse in his response. “What’s all this for?”
“Would you have really pulled the plug on her if I hadn’t agreed to testify?”
Guilt flashed across his features, and I knew his answer before he said it. Yeah… He would’ve pulled the plug. “We didn’t actually think she’d wake up,” he confessed.
I guess I’d bought Lauren just the right amount of time she needed.
I took it that Caplan’s ‘we’ meant that even Lauren’s mother also would’ve been on board with cutting off her life support.
The realization made me feel an odd mixture of anger and…
relief. I could lose my mind over life’s what-ifs—what if she’d taken a little longer to wake—but thankfully, I didn’t have to.
She was here.
Alive.
That’s all that mattered.
“You know the only thing keeping me from reachin’ across that table is her, right?”
“And the witnesses,” Caplan reminded, motioning toward the diner staff and the one or two other people having late-night meals inside. He thought that meant something to me.
Nah, this was Miami.
Contrary to whatever power he felt like law enforcement had here, I owned this city.
Especially now that Silas was locked away somewhere for a crime he didn’t commit.
“Fuck the witnesses.” I leaned across the table, eyes unblinking as I glared at the older, fair-skinned man across from me. “You’re only alive ‘cause she needs you.”
Lauren would sooner heal from the pain of my alleged betrayal, than the pain of her father’s betrayal.
I wasn’t delusional enough to fool myself into thinking I could ever compete with the love women had for their dads.
Having four sisters taught me a lot about that kind of bond.
In these trying times, more than anything—more than friends, more than doctors, more than me…
More than anything, Lauren needed her family.
“And so what am I here for?” Caplan asked.
“’Cause I understand people like you,” I replied quietly.
“I understand what’s about to happen. You are gonna look at that girl everyday and see her as somebody who ruined your life, not the other way around.
That’s what selfish people are like. She’s your fuckin’ daughter, but I already know you’re not gonna to think about her, about what she needs to heal, about how she sleeps at night, if she’s eating enough, if she’s happy. ”
“You’ve got a lot of nerve to—”