A Love So Deadly (18 page)

Now it’s my turn to scowl. “That’s not fair, Isaac. It’s been a tough year, but the kids are doing great in school, and so am I. And if Sherry’s worried, she hasn’t said anything to me. She seemed fine when we hung out last weekend.”

“She’s afraid to upset you,” Isaac says. “It’s me she calls when you forget to show up for a coffee date, or blow off dinner without calling to reschedule.”

“I’ve done each of those things exactly once,” I say, propping my hands on my hips. “And I told her I was sorry. I got busy studying and spaced about dinner, and the time I missed coffee was the day I had to sign the kids up for swim lessons. I was in line longer than I thought I would be, and didn’t have cell service to call and let her know I—”

“Make all the excuses you want,” Isaac says, cutting me off. “But I know something’s not right with you. You haven’t been yourself since you started dating Gabe, and it’s only gotten worse since you lost the baby.”

I flinch. We never talk about the baby. We never talk about anything that happened between when I started dating Gabe, and the day Isaac moved to the island. That parcel of time has been mutually declared off limits. Isaac doesn’t want to hear about it, and I don’t want to share the private memories of my time with Gabe with anyone, not even my best friend.

But Isaac is more than my best friend now. He’s my boyfriend, my lover, and I should be able to trust him with every piece of me, but I don’t. And that is part of the reason I’ve been so long coming back to myself. Standing here, looking up at him, seeing the judgment on his face, I realize that I’ve been living up to his opinion of me. Every day, I see a reflection of the fragile girl Isaac thinks I am in my partner’s eyes, and that reflection is as unhealthy as living in the past, longing for a man I’ll never see again.

Both of those things have to change, or I’ll have to end it with Isaac. Not because he might one day catch me doing something illegal, but because he won’t let me be the person I am now, instead of the overwhelmed girl I was when we were growing up, or the broken woman he found when he first stepped off the plane last fall.

We’re going to have to have a long, hard talk and decide whether or not we can give each other room to breathe, grow, and change, but not this morning. I’m too tired to face that kind of talk, and I need to get the younger kids up and ready for Friday morning swim lessons.

I’d like to talk to Sherry before I approach Isaac, too, and see what she thinks. No matter what Isaac says, the last time we had dinner in Paia—the cute hippy town where Sherry lives with her boyfriend, Bjorn—I didn’t sense that she was upset or worried. If anything, she’s been the one who’s been distant, so obsessed with her first true love that she barely has time to come to dinner at the house anymore.

I make a mental note to call Sherry while I’m sitting in the bleachers watching Sean and Emmie splash around in the pool, and step past Isaac into the house, not bothering to address his last statement.

“So that’s it?” he calls after to me as I move into the kitchen and grab a bottle of water from the fridge. “Aren’t we going to finish this conversation?”

“I am finished,” I say in a tone I haven’t heard come out of my mouth in a long time. It’s a strong, grounded tone, and I know what I did tonight is partially responsible.

By stealing that hard drive, I helped save a young woman’s career and put her future back in her own hands. As soon as Mimi has the incriminating pictures in her possession, she’ll have more than enough material to tell Skip Munroe that their affair is over, and that he’d better keep his distance if he doesn’t want erotic photos of him and his buddies leaked to the press. She will never again have to put up with being blackmailed or used by a man who once swore he loved her.

I know how free she’s going to feel because it’s the same way I felt last summer, when Gabe and I made our third deposit into my college fund and I realized I was going to have enough money to get a college education, and break the cycle of poverty that had plagued my family for generations. Pulling jobs isn’t just about the rush I feel when I pick a lock or get in and out without getting caught, it’s about the rush of knowing I’m helping someone the law has let down, tipping the scales of justice back in the favor of those who wouldn’t have a fair shake any other way.

“Great,” Isaac says, his tone making it clear things are anything but great between us. “Then I’m going for a run, and don’t expect me back anytime soon.”

I turn to tell him he should enjoy himself, and stay gone as long as he wants to, but he’s already slamming out the back door. I watch him storm across the yard through the window above the sink, with a sigh. I have a feeling I’m going to be making Isaac mad a lot in the next few weeks, but I’m not going to back down.

I don’t want to be the girl made of glass anymore. I want to be strong—the woman Gabe was certain could handle anything life threw in her path.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Caitlin

“Do you think Isaac is going for good?” Danny asks, sticking his head into the kitchen from where he’s obviously been eavesdropping in the hall.

I shake my head. “No. He’s just upset. He’ll be back by dinner time.” I put the cap on my bottle of water and stick it back in the fridge. “Could you go wake up Sean and Emmie?” I ask, turning back to Danny. “We have to be at the pool by seven, and I want them to have time to eat and let their food settle for at least thirty minutes before they get in the water.”

Danny snorts. “That’s not even a real thing. I ate two cheeseburgers ten minutes before I went surfing yesterday, and I was fine.”

“It is so a real thing,” I say. “And you’d better wait at least twenty minutes next time. No one else is allowed to die on my watch, okay?”

The smartass twist to Danny’s lips flattens into a tight line. “Okay. Do you want Ray up, too?”

“No, he can sleep in. You’re going to be at the house until you and Sam leave for the movies this afternoon right?”

Danny nods. “And Ray can come with us if he wants. Sam’s little brother is coming. Her parents are gone all day on some crater hike, and they don’t want her leaving Erick alone.”

“Cool,” I say, proud of the person Danny’s becoming. “I bet Ray would like that.”

“Whatever.” Danny shrugs. “Gotta get him out of the house every once in a while. No one should spend that much time reading inside when there’s a beach ten minutes from their house. It’s like, against the natural order of the universe.”

“I appreciate your devotion to the natural order of the universe,” I say with a smile. “And I love you a lot.”

Danny rolls his eyes, but as he leaves the room, he mumbles that he loves me, too. His voice is soft, but loud enough to hear, and it makes my smile stretch a little wider. It’s been a hell of a year, but when the going gets tough, Danny and I are still there for each other. We’ve made it through a lot of hard times in the past without much help, and if we have to, we can make it without Isaac.

I love Isaac, but in the long run it might be less hurtful to end things now, instead of a year or two down the road, when I’m fed up pretending to be someone I’m not, and Isaac is miserable because I won’t stay in the box he wants to put me in. The thought is a sad one—I’ll never love Isaac the way I loved Gabe, but I doubt I’ll ever care about another man the way I care about Isaac—but I put it away for now.

Sufficient to the day is the misery thereof. It’s something my grandmother used to say, and a bit of wisdom I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Taken all at once, the misery of the past twelve months might break me, but if I take each day’s challenges one at a time, I can make it through, and maybe even start to heal the bruised places on my heart.

As Danny moves around on the opposite side of the house, waking Emmie and carrying her into the hall bathroom to use the potty before she gets her swimsuit on, I cross to the kitchen table and open my laptop. I always mean to take it upstairs to my desk, but it ends up hanging out next to me for almost every meal. It’s amazing how much studying I can squeeze in while shoveling salad and tuna poke into my mouth.

I open up my email, wanting to make sure that swim lessons aren’t cancelled the way they were two weeks ago when Emmie’s teacher called in sick, and am greeted with a string of new emails, all three from Chuck.

My stomach transforms into a stress knot at the center of my body and I suddenly wish I’d skipped the email check until later in the day. A bunch of emails from Chuck never mean good news, and I prefer not to manage correspondence from my father until I’ve had at least two strong cups of coffee.

The last time Chuck sent a string of messages, it was to tell me—in three epic emails filled with so many spelling mistakes it was clear they were written while he was three sheets to the wind—that he wouldn’t be flying in to spend Christmas with the kids, after all, due to some bullshit with Veronica and her daughter. The time before that, he sent me a handful of messages, most of them featuring links to websites devoted to dealing with grief, and one email in all lowercase letters musing that maybe it was for the best that Gabe’s baby joined his daddy in heaven so that I didn’t have to be a single mother raising a kid on my own.

That particular email made me hurl my phone against the wall, and only the super tough case Sherry had bought me, when I ruined my first phone at the beach our first week on the island, kept it from shattering to pieces.

Isaac insisted that Chuck had meant well, but I knew better.

I could see the smug grin hidden between his consoling remarks and lazy, lowercase letters. For whatever reason—an intense dislike of Gabe, or his own selfish desire not to be saddled with any more grandchildren—Chuck was glad I lost the baby. Aside from giving me the house, the kindest thing Chuck has done in the past year was to keep his distance. If I never see him again, I wouldn’t shed a tear, and if I never have to open another email from his
irisheyesrsmiling
address, I would consider my life the better for it.

I almost shut the laptop and postpone my torment, but in the end I decide I’d rather take my punishment and know what Chuck’s up to rather than have Unknown Awful hanging over my head all day.

I click on the oldest message to find another long, lowercase ramble filled with typos. I skim the email, gathering from the mess that Chuck has something weighing on his mind, something he needs to explain and get off his chest before he goes to the hospital.

The mention of the hospital is unexpected, but I’m not worried. Chuck’s been in the hospital before, usually because of some drunken tumble down a set of stairs, or the result of passing out on the street between the bar and home, and getting frostbite by the time he woke up the next morning.

I click on the second email to see only six words—I’M SO SORRY PLEASE BELIEVE ME—all in caps as if he’d tried to make up for using only lowercase in the first email. I sigh, wondering what he’s sorry for this time, and open the final and latest email, expecting to find the mystery solved and Chuck’s latest sin spelled out.

Instead, I find a message from Veronica—

Hi Caitlin,

This is Veronica, writing from your dad’s email, because I don’t know how else to reach you.

I’m really sorry to tell you bad news like this in a letter, but your daddy is dead. He had a heart attack two days ago, and then another one this morning in the hospital, before they could get him into surgery. I know he was real upset about something and wanted to talk to you about it, but he didn’t have your phone number and we couldn’t find it on the Google.

Again, I’m sorry. I know you and Charles had your bad times, but he loved you, and was real proud. He was sad he wasn’t a better dad to all you kids, but proud of all of you, just the same.

I think we’ll try to have the funeral sometime in the next couple days. Let me know if you and the kids are going to come. I’ll just be getting the cheapest stuff they have unless I hear you want to chip in.

Real sorry,

Veronica

I freeze, my hand hovering over the mouse pad, my stomach sinking until it feels like it’s going to fall straight through the floor. It looks like my wish from a moment ago came true—I’m never going to see my father again.

Heart in my throat, I close the laptop, cover my face with my hands, and cry as hard as I cried the day I lost the baby.

Gabe and Caitlin’s story concludes in

A Love So Deep

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About the Book

Warning: Hold on tight for the red hot, adrenaline fueled conclusion to the To the Bone series.

What we have is sacred, a bond forged by pain and pleasure, suffering and passion, and Gabe is right—nothing will tear us apart again. This is forever, for keeps, for the rest of our lives, no matter what the future holds.

We just have to outsmart the powerful people determined to keep us apart.

I’m prepared to fight our enemies, but I’m not prepared for
him
. For a monster wearing a friendly face, or the nightmare he’s determined to unleash.