DEFENSE (29 page)

A large grandfather clock chimed in the corner of Roland’s office, pushed away into a dark corner where I’d never noticed it before. The light from that sole desk lamp glinted dully off of the glass front of the clock, and if I squinted hard enough, I could faintly discern the pendulum swinging inside. It was so quiet in the office that I could hear that thick tock with each passage, especially now that I knew where to focus my attention.

My heart was beating nearly three times as fast as that pendulum.

“Beauty?”

I studied the amber liquor in the heavy, cut-crystal glass I was clutching, the thought crossing my mind that, if a person had to, she could cause a lot of damage with this glass. If she were cornered. If she were angry.

I banished the stray thought from my mind and lifted the glass to my lips. The world was already tilting because of the bourbon, but now it was upside down. Could drinking more of this smoothness help right it? There was only one way to find out; I choked down the liquid burn in two painful gulps. At least that was something else to focus on, something else to take my mind off the disconcerting bomb the man sitting across from me had dropped.

“Beauty?”

My vision swam a little bit, and I grabbed for the crystal snifter again, refilling that heavy glass. Roland didn’t stop me, even though it was his snifter, his bourbon, his office, his company, his fault my parents were dead.

I took another drink and tried blink myself back into reality. With the way my eyes were foggy, it almost seemed like Roland was a whole person, one whose face wasn’t split in two by an ugly scar. I’d wondered before how he got that scar, why he hid himself away in a darkened office—away from the eyes of other people—but kept the dead tissue there for his eyes only.

I’d wondered before, and now I thought I knew. I’d stumbled upon the answer over glasses of bourbon, late at night in my boss’s office.

His drink was virtually untouched, his hand gripping the glass that was sitting on his knee. How far did that scar go on his body? Where did it end? Like a serpent, it slithered down his neck and disappeared, hidden by his shirt. If he was really that gung-ho about maintaining that thing, he could go around shirtless.

“Beauty?”

My thoughts weren’t making sense anymore. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe I didn’t want to make sense out of any of this. What was I doing here? I’d stayed late to finish up some work, and here I was, more or less drunk, in front of my acerbic beast of a boss.

“Beauty?”

“What?” I spat, nearly spilling my drink with my sudden ferocity. “What do you want?”

“I want to know if you heard what I said,” Roland said, his face as calm as he could probably make it with that scar twisting parts of it into expressions he probably couldn’t control.

“You said you killed my parents,” I repeated dutifully. “Even though that doesn’t even make sense. They died in…it was a car wreck. I know how they died.”

Why was he doing this? Why in the hell was Roland Shepard, the president of a very successful retail and media company, bringing this up? None of it made sense, especially since I’d been there—apparently. I didn’t remember anything. I’d woken up in a hospital, thoroughly concussed and hungover, a passenger in my drunken best friend’s car.

I knew exactly how my parents died, and I was quite certain that a billionaire wasn’t behind it all. It had been my fault, my decision to go on the joy ride.

“Will you let me explain?” Roland was speaking so calmly, so compassionately that the tone of his voice shocked me more than what he was talking about. The hoarseness of his voice when he shouted at me or insulted me for being an idiot or for messing up softened to more of a rumbling purr when he was talking normally.

Talking to me like I was a person deserving of his attention. Talking to me like he had something really, really important to say.

None of it added up, and I didn’t want it to.

He took my silence to mean I was ready and willing to hear something I still couldn’t grasp.

“I was visiting Houston…visiting…I used to be engaged.”

“Houston” said aloud gave me the same shudder it always did. It was the place I was born and where I’d lived, at least on the outskirts. It was the sprawling star of a city I used to navigate around, and now the star I always kept to my back, to get away from.

So violent was my instant reaction to Houston that I nearly missed the last part of Roland’s sentence: engaged. It was as hard to imagine him engaged—that another person would love someone who was angry and mean all the time—as it was to imagine his face whole again. Then again, it was obvious the two states of being were related. I was sure that he was a different person before that scar.

“Her people were from Houston,” Roland continued, studying the liquor in his glass before taking a small sip. “We met when Shepard Shipments was just getting started, back when we were just an online retailer, and not one of the better ones. It just made sense, right away. I don’t know. When you know, you really do know. We’d only been dating for three months before I asked her to marry me. We were in Houston so I could meet her family.”

I wondered where this woman could be now. Had his scarred face been too much for her to handle? I was a living example of just how much a person could change after a tragedy. Maybe, whatever Roland thought he’d done, maybe it had changed him into the miserable human being he was today, the one who crouched in darkness and shouted at people for the littlest things.

“We’d spent the evening at her parents’ house, and I’d been nervous,” he said. “I wanted to impress them, but didn’t feel impressive. I’d drank a bit too much, trying to reach some kind of comfort zone before we told her parents what we were preparing to do with our lives. It worked out, but by the end of the night, I was too drunk to drive. Mina…she was driving. She hadn’t drunk a drop. Getting it right with her parents…that was too important to her. She was upset at me.”

I was squinting my eyes minutely, making that twisting scar go away on Roland’s face with my blurred vision, imagining a younger man flush with the possibility of a happy marriage. Knowing him, having suffered as a victim of his rages…that Roland had been happy at some point of his life was the most unbelievable part of this narrative.

“We were arguing. She hadn’t been to Houston in years and years, and we found ourselves out in God’s country, without a clue of how to get back,” he said, sighing heavily before putting his glass on the side table with a thud that made me jump. “My phone wasn’t working, and I was giving her directions just based on my gut. I had no idea where we were. We found ourselves good and lost, and Mina pulled to the side of the road to get out her phone and get us back to civilization when we hit a rock or something and popped a tire.”

I didn’t want to know the end of this story. That’s when I suddenly understood. I was starting to leap ahead, to guess the twists and turns of the narrative, and I realized I didn’t like where it was headed. I didn’t want to listen anymore, but there wasn’t a good way to extricate myself. It was obvious that Roland felt he had to tell me this truth, and I couldn’t escape it.

“The fight, at that point, got ugly,” he said, examining the palms of his hands as if they held the answers. “Lots of accusations, lots of blame tossed back and forth. We could be like that sometimes. Meteoric. But that was the thing, really. No matter how angry we got with each other, we knew that it would get better. That we loved each other. That there would never be a fight that would end it all for us because the love there was too strong. The love would eventually overtake the anger and we’d laugh about it.

“But there we were, on the side of that shitty little road, a popped tire, both of us lost and at each other’s throats. A car happened along and stopped—a godsend. Neither of us knew our way around changing a tire. And when a man and a woman got out to help us, even better. If it had been a couple of guys meaning to rob us, I don’t know how well I would’ve done at defending us. Instead, it was your parents.”

I shook my head quickly. I didn’t want to hear anything else. I didn’t want to listen anymore, but Roland had closed his eyes and was plunging forward in his tale of woe, and I couldn’t stop him.

“I learned all this later, of course,” he was saying. “When the drunk driver hit, I lost a lot of blood. This scar…” He mimicked its path with his finger, taking care not to actually touch it. “I got it from the impact, glass and sharp metal. Mina, your parents, they died instantly. I didn’t wake up until later, my brother looking at me like I was some kind of monster. And I guess I was…I am. If I hadn’t gotten drunk at her parents’ house just because I was nervous about our marriage, we would’ve never gotten lost, never gotten the flat, never been out there for your parents to discover in the first place, and you…you would still have your parents. And I would still have Mina…and not just this fucking scar.”

My pulse hadn’t slowed since Roland started in on this subject. I was struggling to keep up, struggling to understand.

“I…I saw the police report,” I said, my voice sounding like it came from some faraway place. “It just said…I didn’t know about…”

“My brother thought it would be best to take our name out of it, and Mina, by extension,” Roland said. “He threw a bunch of money at the cop writing up the report to take out the information. It was bad press for the company, unwanted scrutiny on us at a time we didn’t need it.”

How was this happening? If he’d been there, he should know the exact circumstances. Didn’t he know?

“The driver…the drunk driver,” I tried to say, but I couldn’t find the right words for him. I’d never talked about this with anyone.

“It was just some kid, and she died, too,” Roland said. “I killed her. I killed Mina. I killed your parents, too, Beauty. And somehow, I’m still here. I’m the only one alive out of that entire mess, and I deserve to be alive the least. I would give up everything to have them all alive again. I would give away my money, this company, this building, this life, my life. I would give it all up to see them walking this earth again. Yet, all I can give them is my face.”

He mashed his finger into the scar tissue in his cheek so hard that the surrounding skin turned white, and I realized that the scar was the same kind of penance for him that my own exile had been for me.

And then, in one awful, sickening rush, it hit me.

Roland wasn’t responsible for my parents’ death. He hadn’t killed them.

I’d killed them. My parents. Caro. Mina. Roland’s future.

I’d killed all of that.

“Will you ever forgive me?” Roland asked, a single crystalline tear dropping from his eye, getting lost in that twisting scar.

The same scar I’d given him.

I felt physically sick and knew it wasn’t just because of all the bourbon I’d tried to drown myself in. I was the cause of this man’s singular torment, the reason why he refused to get his face fixed, the purpose behind his self-exile, and his hermitage in this dark office.

The reason why he hated the world.

A sudden, clear thought cut through my fog of horror. I could tell him. I could tell him everything. That I’d been in Caro’s car, that I’d been there, that I’d caused all of his heartache, that I’d been the only other person to walk away from the wreck virtually unscathed, all because of some stupid kind of luck.

Because my special hell was walking around, blemish-free, forced to go on after losing people I’d loved.

I opened my mouth and closed it again. If I told him the truth, would it relieve some of his burden of guilt? Would he redirect the anger he felt at himself for putting Mina in that situation through the decisions he’d made? It had been my decision, after all, for Caro and I to be out on the roads at that time of night and in that state of being. He could loathe me from now on instead of himself, and I would deserve that. Yet another piece of penance I had to endure. I had to be punished for what I did.

But then I closed my mouth, suddenly protective of myself. It wasn’t fear. That wasn’t it. I was well aware of Roland’s temper, of just how badly he was capable of making me feel.

I just didn’t want him to hate me, for some reason, and I knew that if he understood that I was the one who ruined his life, who took away the woman he loved, he would hate me with every breath in his body.

I couldn’t handle it if Roland hated me. I didn’t dwell on the thought, I couldn’t; I was in too much shock and horror. The wretchedly scarred but somehow beautiful man in front of me…I was the root cause of all of his suffering, and yet I couldn’t tell him that. I wouldn’t.

“I’ll understand if you won’t forgive me,” he said, not bothering to chase that tear down. His scar was going to see to that. “But I also hope you understand that I need to do this for you. I need you to let me do this.”

“Do…what?” My voice was strangled. He had no idea. Somehow, he had no idea that I’d walked away from that tragedy. He had no idea the integral part I’d played in robbing him of his happiness.

“I had Daniel track you down after I’d…recovered, somewhat,” he said. “I wanted to offer you an internship with Shepard Shipments, give you a foot in the door somewhere because I knew it would be hard to get a career started without the support of your parents, and I’d taken your parents away from you.