Chapter 19 #2
Jewel knew Robert all too well. She understood the exact temperature of his charm, what it truly cost you, and what it concealed.
She recognized how he moved through people, what he took from them, and what he left behind.
She was familiar with what it felt like to believe in him completely and what it was like when that belief was shattered piece by piece until only the memory of having been foolish enough to cling to it remained.
She knew all of that.
But as she looked back at Ashley, who was waiting with her arms crossed tightly against herself in a clearing in the mountains, she didn’t know what to tell her.
“I don’t know if he’s capable of loving someone.
I’ve never seen it in him. But we had a very nasty divorce, which means I’m probably the last person who can be objective about what he is or isn’t capable of.
What I can tell you is that I’ve never seen any true emotion in him.
In all the years I knew him, I never once saw any.
But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist somewhere inside him.
What I do know is when Robert wants something from you, he becomes exactly the person you need him to be. And he’s very, very good at it.”
Ashley seemed to absorb that, but the hope on her face didn’t exactly fade. It just quietly shifted into something more uncertain, which was probably the best she could hope for right now. “Well, at least that’s not a no.”
Jewel took a deep breath. “It’s not a yes, either. And I think you know the difference.”
Ashley looked away. The Appaloosa had calmed completely now, his earlier agitation gone, his nose moving steadily through the grass with the single-minded contentment of a horse that had stopped caring about what the humans were doing as long as he could graze.
She gave her a moment, then decided it was time for Ashley to answer some of her questions.
“Now it’s your turn to tell me everything.
And not the version you’ve been using. Not just the parts you’ve decided I can have.
It’s time to tell me everything. Whatever you know, whatever you did, whatever you were told to do. I need to hear all of it.”
The silence stretched so long that she thought Ashley might step back, might find her footing again behind the wall she’d spent months building. Then something in Ashley’s face changed, and she exhaled slowly through her nose.
“Okay. The horses. The day your horse and the pony went missing. That was me.”
Jewel kept her expression still, but her heart was pounding hard.
Ashley’s voice went flat, reciting rather than explaining.
“Robert told me he was sending someone to collect Sundancer. That he sort of owned her anyway, and that you’d used his money to buy her, and you had no right to her.
I believed him. He asked me to go and get her, so I went up to Cole’s house while you were gone, and I took her.
I planned to ride her out to where he said he’d meet me, load her up, and ride my own horse out again.
At first, she refused to leave the yard, so I had to take the pony, too.
I didn’t intend to leave them out there alone.
The plan was to ride out to the east access road, where Robert was bringing a trailer.
It wasn’t supposed to take long, but then the storm hit, and he said the trailer was stuck and it would take a while.
” Ashley showed the first sign of remorse that Jewel had ever seen on her.
“So you left her tied to a tree.”
Ashley’s face grew defensive. “She wasn’t supposed to be there long.
I let the pony loose, thinking it would find its way back on its own.
My own horse was waiting nearby, and I planned to come back and load her up for him as soon as the trailer was ready.
But the trailer took a while to get unstuck, and by the time I returned, both the pony and your horse were gone.
Look, I know how it sounds. I’m not going to pretend it was anything other than what it was.
But I want you to know I didn’t plan to leave either of them out there in a storm.
I would never do anything to hurt a horse. ”
“What about the person who was watching us? The person we saw in the trees? And the car that followed Sylvie and me?”
Ashley shook her head forcefully. “I’ll admit to what I did, but that wasn’t me. I swear I’ve never hidden in the woods watching you or followed you anywhere. Whatever you think you saw, it wasn’t me.”
“What about the bracelet?”
This time, the look on Ashley’s face was different. More complicated. More personal.
Her voice grew quiet. “I did have it. I borrowed it from Viv. I used to borrow it a lot. She knew, and she didn’t mind.
I wore it the week before she disappeared, and I never got the chance to return it.
” She pressed her lips together. “When you said you’d seen someone wearing it, I panicked.
I thought you were accusing me of being involved in Vivian’s disappearance.
The bracelet was supposed to be in my dresser at home, and after you said you saw it, I went straight to where I’d kept it for months to check. ”
Jewel could see what Ashley was about to say on her face. “And it was gone?”
The woman’s face was pale. “Yeah, it was gone. The box was there. The bracelet wasn’t.” Her voice had gone very quiet. “Someone must’ve been in my house. Someone went through my things and took it. And I have no idea who, when, or why.”
A few birds chirped as they moved from one tree to another. Sundancer had drifted close enough for Jewel to feel her warmth, and she placed one hand on the mare’s neck without looking at her, the familiar, steady warmth of her horse grounding her for now.
If she believed Ashley, then someone else had taken the bracelet from her house—someone who knew it was there and exactly how it would look if it were to appear in Cole’s barn.
She paused for a moment, considering what Ashly had told her and whether she should believe her. She now had more pieces of the puzzle, but they somehow didn’t fit where she’d expected them to.
“Do you know where Vivian is now?”
Ashley looked up. Her eyes were direct and tired, entirely without pretense.
“No. I swear to God, Jewel, I don’t know where she is or what happened to her.
I’ve been trying to find out since the day she disappeared because, despite everything, she was my best friend.
She’s been gone for months, and I miss her every single day.
” Her voice broke on the last sentence. “Whatever I’ve done wrong in all of this—and I know I’ve made mistakes—I’ve never stopped wanting to find her.
That part of what I told you was always real. ”
From somewhere above them, the woodpecker had stopped. The trail behind them carried the distant sound of hooves, another group moving along the trail and then fading away.
She looked at Ashley. At the woman beneath all the pretense, anger, jealousy, and bad decisions. The woman who had lost her best friend and handled it poorly, yet kept going anyway.
“Who has access to your house?”
Ashley blinked. “My neighbor has a key. My mother.” A pause. “And Robert.”
The clearing went quiet again.
Ashley spoke slowly, as if she were hearing it herself for the first time.
“I gave him a key a few months ago. He said it was in case of emergencies. In case I ever needed him and couldn’t get to the door.
” She looked at her with an expression that was forming into something new and not at all comfortable.
“He knew about the bracelet. I told him about it early on, when we first started talking about Vivian. I told him I had it and felt guilty about never returning it.”
She stayed quiet, just watching as Ashley put it together, waiting for it to hit her.
Ashley put her hand to her head. “He took it.”
“We don’t know that for sure.”
“But you think he did.”
She met Ashley’s eyes. “I think we need to consider what Robert would gain from having that bracelet turn up in Cole’s barn.”
“He used me.” Ashley’s tone had that particular flatness of someone who had just seen something they’d been afraid to look at directly. “He used me to get to you. To get to Cole. To get his revenge.”
Jewel didn’t answer. She didn’t need to.