Past Midnight (37 page)

Reggie had managed their software system, worked with the techs, added the user IDs. He knew how each module worked. He would know how to obtain the pertinent data. He probably knew that Yvonne circumvented the password change. Dominic didn’t need to test the theory, he felt the rightness in his gut. “Are they paying you a bonus for our financial data, Reggie?”

“Dominic, I—”

Then Dominic laughed. “Holy shit. The royalty scam on the patent was
your
idea.” He didn’t even make it a question.

Reggie gaped, but couldn’t get a word out.

“I’m sure he knows about Leon and the transducers, too,” Erin added, staring Reggie down. Yeah, Reggie would have assumed their costs would go up, putting them in a deeper bind, but Erin had it under control. She’d implemented a plan.

Dominic suddenly felt a burst of pride completely at odds with the crap they’d been going through personally. He wanted to touch her, hold her hand in solidarity. They’d lost so much, but they still had DKG. He would not let her throw it away.

Reggie was saved from sputtering and stammering by a strutting Garland Brooks making a grand entrance in his slick suit. “Well, the DeKnights. How wonderful to see you.” He didn’t extend a hand.

In her high-heeled shoes, Erin was slightly taller. “Nice to meet you,” she said politely, though she knew of the man’s ethics, or lack thereof.

Brooks pushed his wire rims up the bridge of his nose as if that would help him see better. “I had no idea you were talking to Reggie here about our offer”—yeah, right—“but why don’t we go to my office to discuss the particulars?”

“We’re not here to discuss particulars.” Dominic didn’t give the man the benefit of a smile. “We’re here to tell you that DKG isn’t for sale, and you can sue us over the patent but you’ll lose.” He turned on Reggie. “Isn’t that right, Reggie? You understand since you helped me do the research on it.”

Reggie spluttered. If he was getting any sort of bonus out of backing DKG into a corner, he’d lose it now.

“It’s going to cost you a lot to fight us.” Brooks punctuated the threat with a scowl.

“It will cost you more.” Seeing Reggie in the enemy territory put everything in perspective. WEU knew they couldn’t win, which is why the original patent infringement letter hadn’t come from an attorney. Garland Brooks was blowing smoke. “I wonder what would happen if the other manufacturers paying you a royalty were to learn your patent’s validity is questionable?”

“Well . . . well—” Brooks blustered ineffectually. He was losing confidence.

“Don’t worry.” Dominic waved a hand and gave them a conspiratorial wink. “It won’t come from me.” It wouldn’t have to. Like magic, the industry grapevine would transmit the news. Dominic clapped Reggie on the back. “But hey, Reggie, hacking into a competitor’s system is illegal. You should cover your tracks better.” Al hadn’t pinpointed the culprit, but Dominic didn’t have to be a betting man to know it was Reggie.

Reggie cringed, stammered, nothing came out. Garland Brooks glared, but even backed up by his thousand-dollar suit, the look didn’t carry the punch he wanted.

“Thanks for the coffee.” Dominic drained the last of the brew, crumpled the cup, and tossed it in the trash. Then he drew WEU’s letter from his back pocket. “Guess we can throw this in the old round file as well.” He tore it and let the pieces fall into the trash can, too.

Dominic had won not just the battle, but the war.

“My dear?” He held out his hand as he turned.

Erin put hers in it.

 

 

ERIN DIDN’T KNOW IF THE CLASPED HANDS WERE FOR SHOW, BUT she held on tight. She’d never admired him more. Dominic hadn’t gotten angry. He hadn’t yelled. He stated the situation in good-old-boys terminology, a simple “Don’t mess with me or mine.”

“Do you really think they’ll back off?” She wasn’t sure how stubborn Garland Brooks could get.

“They will. I’m right about the patent. This is over.”

His hand around hers was warm, solid. She’d forgotten how solid he was, how she could count on him. He hadn’t given up on DKG. He wasn’t the type to give in without a fight.

And he’d fought for her for a long time now. She’d shut him out, punished him with her silence and her distance, yet he’d bared his soul to her. She’d been too afraid to give him the same in return. She was still afraid. If only . . . there were so many
if onlys
.

If only they hadn’t let Jay go that day. If she’d gotten him to the doctor sooner. If she hadn’t screamed at him. And even later, after they’d ruined their lives, if she’d let Dominic talk, if she’d talked to him. Maybe she could have at least stopped hurting them both. For a year, she hadn’t thought about losing him. Now, she was actually afraid of it, about what that meant, how it would feel.

If only. Maybe she had some control over that.
If only
she could talk to him? It was just a matter of opening her mouth and doing it. Giving him what he needed instead of considering only her own stuff, her own feelings, her own fears.

She tugged on his hand as he headed to the car. “Walk with me for a minute. I’m not ready to go back yet.”

WEU was at the end of a cul-de-sac, the street tree-lined, the sidewalks edged with flowerbeds now dormant in winter. He followed her, but his fingers tensed in her grip.

She was afraid to talk, but afraid to lose him if she didn’t. She opened her mouth, closed it, started again. “I did blame you,” she said, and the words actually carried a physical ache with them.

“I know.” He didn’t have to ask if she was referring to Jay; she heard the softness of heartbreak in his voice.

“Not for the reason you think.”

“Why then?”

The words stalled on her lips. She’d spent so long trying not to say it, hiding it, hiding
from
it. But Dominic had been right, she’d robbed them both. When that was all they had left, denying Jay’s memory was like losing their son all over again. She needed those memories back. There was only one way to get them. “I blamed you because if you hadn’t let him go, then I never would have said those things to him the day we took him to the hospital.”

A squirrel chattered as it scurried along a wire, and birds twittered in the trees, high tweets, musical chirps, the caw of a crow. And there was Dominic’s hand tight on hers, then his deep, torn voice. “What did you say to him?”

“He was being a pill.” Even now, she could see Jay’s cheeks bright with splotches of anger. “He threw his oatmeal, broke the bowl. Then he started shouting at me. I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I yelled right back. I called him a stupid little asshole.” Later, so much later, when it was too late, she’d learned that the combativeness was a symptom. The knowledge hadn’t made her feel better.

“He could be a pill when he wanted,” Dominic said gently, almost as if the memory were fond.

“Yes,” she whispered. “But it was worse. I was so angry. I punished him by not speaking to him the rest of the morning, while I drove him to school.” Just as she’d punished Dominic by not talking.

Their footsteps had grown to near nonexistent. She no longer heard the birds. She could hear only her thumping heartbeat. She could feel only the tightness in her chest, the prick at the backs of her eyes. “He kept whining that his neck ached, and I still didn’t talk to him because I thought he was playing the sympathy card so I’d forgive him without making him apologize for his behavior.” Later, the school called to say he was sick. “Every mother knows,” she whispered, “that when a child has a neck ache, you take them to the doctor.” She didn’t realize she was crying until she tasted a tear on her lips.

Dominic put his hand to her cheek, brushing away a teardrop with his thumb. “It was already too late.”

She’d hated herself every moment since, every time she woke to the sound of her own words in her ears. She hadn’t kissed Jay good-bye that day. And she would hear the things she’d shouted at him until the day she died.

Maybe, with Dominic’s help, she could also remember the sweetness of her son’s smile, or how much he’d loved to be read to at night, even when he was old enough to read for himself.

This was what she denied both herself and Dominic for that last year, all the sweet things. She wanted them back, even if they were only memories.

 

 

EVERY BREATH FLAYED DOMINIC’S THROAT, EVERY WORD ERIN spoke stripped his flesh from his bones. She had punished Jay with silence, and she had punished him. But for herself, she’d reserved pure torture.

As much as he’d loved and hated her in the last year, he understood why she’d shut him out. “Hating yourself won’t bring him back, and it won’t make the pain go away.” Nothing could.

She raised her gaze from the open throat of his shirt to his eyes. “That’s why I need to start remembering all the good things. I need you to help me do that.”

She had never asked him for anything. Until now.

“We can help each other.” That was all he’d wanted. For them to comfort each other. It wouldn’t end the pain. It wouldn’t even stop the guilt. But it was better than dying inside all alone.

Beneath a bare dogwood tree that wouldn’t bloom for another three months, he pulled her against him. She slipped her arms beneath his jacket, and her tears seeped through his shirt.

“Do you hate me for what I said to him?” she murmured in a child’s voice.

She’d feared all along that he would. But no, not for that. “That’s only a reflection of your own feelings.” He’d hated her for other things, but then you couldn’t love someone if you didn’t sometimes hate them, too.

“I forgive you for letting him go by himself and not telling me.” She waited a beat. “I would have done the same.”

“I would have let him do a cannonball in the hot springs.”

She sighed, sniffed, and finally smiled just a little. “You would have been the first to do it.”

“Yeah.” He wouldn’t ask now, but he knew when he did, she would finally agree to talk to someone with him, a professional. “I forgive you.” He breathed in her sweet, cleansing scent. “And I love you.”

He led her back to the car, but when he drove her away, he didn’t return to work. He took her home. Once there, he carried a box in from his lab, where he’d hidden it away since February. Setting it on the floor of her office, he opened the flaps.

She came down on her knees beside him. “You kept some of his things.”

“I knew someday you’d wish you still had them.”

She pulled out the much-loved stuffed green dinosaur Jay had slept with for so many years until somehow it made its way to the back of his closet. Rubbing the grubby material against her cheek, Erin fingered the tail. Her eyes misted. Then she rummaged through the other favorites, touching each one for a long moment as if she could see Jay in her mind’s eye. She gave the baseball glove to Dominic, dug deeper.

“Noah’s ark.” She traced a giraffe, an elephant, Leon’s painstaking detail. “He was carving the camels.”

For a moment, Dominic couldn’t speak, then he swallowed past it. “Maybe he’d let us have them to put with these.”

“I’m sure he would.” She pulled something else from the box. “My mug.” She wrapped her palm around the ceramic “World’s Best Mom” mug Jay had given her that last Mother’s Day. He had the matching Father’s Day mug in his lab. There wasn’t a day he didn’t drink from it without equal parts pain, guilt, and love. He could still taste the burned toast and the overdone bacon his son had made him for breakfast on Father’s Day. He would take the hard memories because with them came the good ones, too.

“He didn’t burn your bacon the way he burned mine.” His throat ached; his cheeks were wet.

“That’s because I was the world’s best mom.” She laughed, choked it off. “And you were just his dad,” she whispered.

He lifted her hand, kissed her knuckles.

She drew in a breath, held it. “There’s something else.”

His heart pounded. There would always be something else, a memory that would slice him like shards of glass. “What?”

She rose, let him follow. Her computer had finished booting while they’d gone through the box. She opened a photo gallery.

Jay’s face bloomed on the screen in picture after picture. Dominic’s heart stopped beating. He’d thought she’d purged these.

“I believed that if I looked at him enough,” she murmured, gaze fixed on a photo of Jay in his baseball uniform, “that he’d forgive me.”

For a moment, he wanted to hate her all over again for hiding those precious moments of Jay from him, for keeping them to herself for a year. His vision blurred, yet in the next breath, he knew they’d hated and punished each other more than a lifetime’s worth. He needed it to end. “This is what you did every night?”

She nodded. “Can you forgive me for this, too?”

She’d tormented herself with them. They were her penance. “Yes,” he said, “because I love you. And because I can’t do this anymore without you.”

DOMINIC HELD OUT HIS HAND. “COME WITH ME.”

In the bedroom, he cupped her cheek with the most tender of touches, his lips on hers feather light. When he backed off, angled his head the other way, she murmured, “But we have to get back to work.”

“Screw work.” He licked the seam of her lips, her taste as intoxicating as if it were the first time. “I need this. I need you.” He needed all the things he’d craved, her kiss, her touch, her laughter, her voice whispering to him. “Kiss me.”

When her lips parted for him, he held her as close as he could without pulling her right inside his skin. She tasted of sunlight. Up on her toes, she wound her arms around his neck, opened everything to him. He took her with his mouth, his tongue, his need. She took him with her heart. The kiss lasted until he couldn’t breathe, until his pulse pounded and his blood rushed through his veins.

Then he lifted her, tossing her into the middle of the bed. She laughed. Christ, her laugh; it bathed his senses, turned him inside out.