Chapter 23
Andy
December
The smokey, jazzy alto of one of our regular acts coasts above the soft murmur of the club, and if it weren’t for Ian Rivers taking up residence at the otherwise dead bar, I’d be at perfect ease.
His glass sits empty as he flicks his eyes up, arching his brows in a silent request that has me scoffing.
“These aren’t free,” I tell him, polishing the same glass for the tenth time, my bicep sore from my early session in the weight room. Johnny shouts something to a small, over dressed man hunched over one of the tables before grabbing him the collar and dragging him out.
“No family deal?” he asks, a half-hearted smile tugging at his mouth. His usual vindictiveness hasn’t shown itself all evening—and he’s been here for two hours, tapping away at his laptop, peppering me with questions he doesn’t bother explaining.
“We’re hardly family,” I remind him, rounding the bar to check on Johnny.
“You good?” I crane my neck around him to see the guy emptying his guts in a paper bag.
“What do people think this is? A dive bar?” Somehow, even his huff of laughter is accented as it turns into a throaty smoker’s cough, and I smack his back.
I don’t tell him a comedy club that advertises a Jazz Night by using clip art burlesque dancers on the flier is only fractionally less grimy than a dive bar.
He takes pride in his establishment. I do, too, but I’ve also seen kids, whose yearly tuition is triple most people’s yearly salary, vomit into Ming dynasty era vases at department mixers.
People without any respect for other people’s shit will show that disrespect anywhere.
“Andy!” my half-brother shouts from the sticky bar top, shaking his empty glass at me like the entitled asshole he is.
I stalk my way over, barely rinsing the glass out before filling it with soda water.
“So that was actually rum and Coke, but whatever,” he mutters into the glass, swirling his straw around.
“My shift’s almost up.” I shake my wrist out, checking the watch I only ever wear here.
Lends credibility, I read; improves the likelihood that someone will tip me more than a dollar, I’ve learned.
“You’ve got twenty minutes to make headway on your evil master plan, or whatever the hell you’re doing over there. ”
“I…” he dips his head, scrolling until a smirk erupts on his face, “was trying to look for this.” He spins the computer around to expose an outdated website, rows and columns full of names and date of births and…deaths.
“What the hell is this?”
“Death records. Step one to all of this is figuring out exactly what went on the record about Lily’s death.” He continues typing, pulling out a credit card before groaning. “Shit. I can’t do it.”
“Yeah, I would’ve assumed only family could do something like that,” I tell him, furrowing my brows.
“Probably for the best. I mean, Lily had a brain aneurysm…it was random.” I can distinctly recall the way Will’s face hollowed out that semester.
We all said he was going too hard at practice and he’d laugh it off, crack a joke about how the rest of us were gonna be left in the dust when the scouts started coming around.
I should’ve been paying more attention.
“You know what tipped me off?” Ian asks, leaning forward, his head resting on the bridge his hands form. “Wasn’t Ben coming back. Wasn’t Will acting weird.”
“What, then?”
“That he tapped you to keep an eye on him. I thought, why would my father ask this kid from nowhere to buddy up with a Chapman? I mean, how did my father know you in the first place?”
I blink across the bar at him, my blood running cold as the front door chimes and a gaggle of women rush toward a table, just in time for the next act. “That is strange,” I admit, feeling sick.
“Naturally, I started with you. Figured out you were my half-brother almost immediately because when I confronted him about it, he just slapped me.” His gaze drops to the hardtop, his mouth pressing into a line. “I guess he told you shortly after so he could beat me to it.”
“I’m sorry you had to—”
“Please. He hit me. You’re poor. Maybe we’re even,” he says with a small shrug, and it has me pulling in a breath to compose myself.
The middle aged crooner on stage breaks on a brittle belt, his voice the aural manifestation of whatever heartbreak he’s on about, and the women go wild.
“Anyway, it did get me to stop. Until Ben came back. Freaked him out—I could just tell.”
My eyes narrow on him, like his inner thoughts suddenly glow on his forehead, obvious and hard to miss. “You put Liv on that story, just to poke the bear. Why?”
“Because I hate him, Andy. He’s made my life hell for as long as I’ve had memory, and he made my mom’s life worse when she was still here.”
Fuck, I remember someone mentioning that she passed, and I hate that I just walked him to the lake of that probably horrifying memory. He found her, or so I heard.
“Don’t feel bad for me. Pity is like…disgusting,” he complains, his nose scrunching, and I can’t help but laugh. His eyes crinkle at the edges, like making me laugh was some progress toward whatever congeniality we’re meant to have as siblings.
“Fine. I don’t feel bad for you. But I do need to know what the fuck I’m getting myself into, since you clearly know way more than me,” I say on a sigh, wiping down the counter that barely got used tonight.
I peek into my pocket, making sure the twenty-five dollars in tips from this four hour shift are still safely swimming around in there.
“I ask you questions, you keep answering them, even if you think you shouldn’t.” I wince, and he sighs in thinly veiled annoyance. “I know you think I’m fucking your friends over and—”
“I mean, you are,” I remind him with a tight smile.
“In the short term. Do you know how twisted these people’s lives are?
They’re built on secrets they don’t even know they’re being held prisoner to.
What would it mean for Will to be free of his father?
For you to be free of yours?” He pauses, waiting for me to answer.
“Can you honestly tell me Liv would’ve been better off never knowing about Will and Lily? ”
“No,” I murmur, hating the truth. Accepting a lie would’ve been so much easier, far less messier, but a lie, still. “So you want her death certificate.”
“I need her death certificate. I’ll figure it out. Just keep your eyes and ears peeled, okay? Especially about Will. He might remember something and just spill it.” He slides his laptop off the bar, letting it drop into his messenger bag before hopping off his stool.
“Wait,” I stop him, anxiety churning in my stomach like an endless frothy wave. “And if I have questions for you?”
He tilts his head in consideration. “What do you want to know?”
“What’s he want with Sloane?”
Ian’s eyes roll hard as he shakes his head, shifting his stance to cross his arm.
“Honestly, it’s small fish, but I guess he literally has no code of ethics.
” He checks over his shoulder, and I’m reminded that people in this town think Sloane, the grocery store heiress, is a novelty.
“Something happened with a professor at her program. Guy’s a legend, but apparently he does this a lot.
Would wreck his reputation…could be illegal? I don’t know.”
“Oh,” I say, nodding like he didn’t just tell me Sloane did, in fact, run from something in California. “Right.”
“Chin up, Spellman. Not everyone can live up to our dreams.”
Agitation, hot and coarse, rushes down my neck. He turns to open the door but my hand flies to it before he can, holding it shut as I force my jaw to relax. “Insinuate something like that about her again,” I tell him, quietly, “and I’ll expose the fuck out of you.”
He peers up at me, amusement playing at the corner of his mouth that I’d smack away if he hadn’t just confided in me about our father. “Of course. My apologies.”
Conference season is just around the corner, so I’ve been blackballed from any shifts later than ten p.m. The money’s not nearly as good this early in the night, but I’m always grateful by the time we’re running laps at six in the morning, the warm up before the insidious drills Ben has us doing.
Will was insistent as captain, constantly pushing us to beat him, but Ben’s somehow even worse—challenging us to best ourselves.
The dull ache in my shoulder, from where Grant nearly bulldozed me when he was playing offense, pulses at the thought of being up in six short hours, but the brisk wind, chafing across my face, distracts from it enough as I make my way out into the blistering Boston night.
A horn honks, streetlights glint on frosted store windows, and the last of those horse lined carriages jingle in the distance.
I regret the denim jacket I opted for this morning, when the sun was out and the fluffy lining up to the collar seemed sufficient.
Shoving my hands into my pockets, I trek down the sidewalk toward the lot I left my car in, only for a flash of blonde to steal my attention.
Walking towards her isn’t so much a choice as it is an instinct, and I’m in her orbit within seconds, like my body’s forgotten the way she shrugged off our kiss.
She leans against the weathered brick of Boston General, head tipped back as she whooshes out a long, sustained breath of smoke. When she brings her head down to meet the lit cigarette, she goes momentarily still.
“Hi,” she says, blinking before inhaling on the thin stick deftly held between her fingers.
“Can I?” I gesture to the cigarette, watching as she drops it to the ground and crushes it with her black leather boots.
“It’s bad for you.” She crosses her arms, her nose red tipped, her eyes bleary from the wind. I grant myself a quick up and down glance, craving that kiss just at the sight of her, and bite back a smile.
“But not for you?”
She rolls her eyes, scoffing as she glances away, a slow smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth.
I’m nervous, all of a sudden, as I try to ask her something meaningful. “I, uh, texted you back. Don’t know if you got it.”
There’s no audible laughter, but it’s in her eyes; they dance with amusement, softly scolding me. “I did…I guess I forgot,” she says, absentmindedly, sort of bothered. “To be honest, haven’t been thinkin’ about you at all, Spellman.”
I try to hide the hurt, try to school the harsh furrow of my brows, but she notices and sighs, like this is all so tedious for her.
“What are you doin’ over here anyway? Don’t you have like…practice in the morning, or whatever?”
Something about her brutality has me disinterested in perpetuating my lies, so I don’t. She already knows about Carmen, about my mom, the apartment…most of it, anyway. “I just got off work.”
“A job?” Disbelief creases between her brows. “How do you even have time for that?”
“I don’t,” I laugh, watching when she lets her eyes fall shut for the briefest second as she leans against the wall, throat bobbing.
“You doing okay?” I look at the hospital sign, and ask it, despite her distance, despite all the downplaying and her painful avoidance. I ask because I need to know. Her mouth twists anxiously as she tilts her gaze downward. “Is Connie—”
“She’s fine. I’m fine,” she cuts me off, tilting her head in defiance, the way she does. The way she did at the pool table, the warehouse, the party—always. Always so defiant, like any attempt at vulnerability is an attack.
So, I try again.
“And if you weren’t fine…you could tell me. I’d listen, if you ever needed that.”
She shoves off the wall, tired resignation in the dip of her shoulders.
“What about it’s not that deep do you not understand?
” Her teeth cut against each word as she tries, and fails, to be funny or flippant.
Instead, I see the fragile sadness that floats in her gaze, and I want to take her inside.
Hold her while she lets it all out, because I think I could take it.
Think that, with all I’ve kept inside and managed, I could help her manage it, too.
She needs someone, and I scoff at her utter refusal to acknowledge it.
“You know, I wasn’t even gonna bring up the kiss, but sure, Sloane, let’s talk about why you ra—” I push against the invisible shield she’s straining to hold in place, only for her to snap.
Sloane’s eyes harden, turn harsh. “Just forget about it. I have.” It comes out on a puff of frosty air that lands like a punch, and I step back, frustrated.
“Right,” I huff out, bitterness lacing my tone. “Next time I see you, I’ll save you the trouble.” The words fall heavy in my gut, dropping like a stone in a lake.
“Good,” she whispers, sniffing against the icy near midnight wind. Her jaw works, side to side, as she eyes me, and I swear it’s a million things left unsaid lodged in the back of her gaze.
Nodding, I walk past her, desperate for the right thing to say but coming up short.
Like the years I’ve spent playing everything on the surface have created this deficit in me, and I’m incapable of reaching her because of it, incapable of dismantling this performance of herself she’s so committed to.
And she plays it so well, could trick almost anyone into believing that she’s mastered carelessness, that she’s a free spirit and not a broken one.
It feels wrong to see that and keep walking. But it’s what she wants; it would take an act of fate to change her mind.