The Proviso (67 page)

Sebastian’s eyes widened and his gut tightened.
“You’ve already talked to him.”

“I have and he’s willing to do that for her. I’ve
been thinking about this for a while now, thought if Jack was her
trustee, that would free you up to pursue a relationship with her.
If all you wanted was to fuck her, I probably could’ve lived with
that if you’d waited until you were finished, but you
humiliated
her and now I just want to protect her from
you
.”

There was that stabbing in Sebastian’s chest again.
He didn’t know what it was or which direction it was coming from.
Eilis—what he’d done to Eilis—Mitch, Knox, Giselle, Kenard. He
watched the Chouteau County prosecutor sit back down calmly and
fold his arms across his chest and prop his feet up on the chair
next to him, as if he hadn’t just ripped him to shreds.

When Knox saw he still stared, he curled his lip and
slammed his fist on the table again and bellowed, “READ!” with an
expression Sebastian had only seen once. In a courtroom.
Questioning a serial killer.

So Sebastian read. And he sank into darkness, a
darkness he had never known.

*

Child (age 5) taken to ER. Broken collarbone

Child (age 13) taken to ER. Spontaneous abortion

Child (age 14) taken to ER. Spontaneous abortion

Child (age 9) taken to ER. Cigarette burns

Child (age 12) taken to ER. Prescription drug
overdose. Suspect suicide attempt. Admission to psychiatric unit.
Update: Suicide attempt ruled out; suspect poisoning

Child (age 7) reported doing well in school, but
withdrawn

Spot check on Reyes family. Child (age 15) laughing
and eating with family

*

Sebastian couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t contain
whatever it was that was happening to him and finally, he shoved
his hands through his hair and stood, bellowing something he didn’t
understand. He picked up a chair and swung it through one of the
frosted glass walls, shattering it.

“That’s right,” Knox sneered. “You go ahead and
throw your little tantrum. You have the luxury of being able to
replace whatever you destroy. Sit the fuck down and shut the fuck
up. Keep reading.”

Sebastian’s chest heaved with anger and something
else that hurt. Really, really hurt. Eilis’s past, her suffering.
His family’s contempt. The fact that everything Knox said was
true.

He sat and continued to read. High school
transcripts. Straight As. College transcripts. Penn Valley
Community College, a business vo-tech school, three different small
and very un-prestigious urban liberal arts colleges. Straight As.
Bloch School of Business. Straight As. MBA.

Married and divorced once. No mention of any more
pregnancies or children.

Court transcripts from Knox’s prosecution of David
Webster.

*

KH: Mrs. Webster, did you know what your husband was
doing to your company?

EW: Yes.

KH: When did you find out?

EW: Two weeks after he moved in with me.

KH: How did you find out?

EW: I found a tiny scrap of paper on the floor by
the dresser and I picked it up.

KH: What was on the paper?

EW: The combination to my office safe.

KH: Had you ever given him that combination?

EW: No. I’d never given it to anyone.

KH: How did he get it?

EW: I don’t know.

KH: What was in your office safe?

EW: The key to the safe deposit box where I kept the
access to the cash reserves.

KH: Didn’t you ever check the statements?

EW: No. I thought they were untouchable so I let
David reconcile those statements and I didn’t ask to see them.

KH: What was your first thought when you saw that
small scrap of paper?

EW: That he’d been in my safe. That he had access to
everything. That there was only one reason he’d want to be in my
safe.

KH: What did you do when you realized this?

EW: I started watching him, hacking into his
computer files, trying to figure out how he was doing it, where it
was going.

KH: How long did it take you to figure it out?

EW: About five months.

KH: Why didn’t you call the police when you found
out he was stealing?

EW: He’d set it up so all the clues pointed to me. I
needed to dig deep enough to find out where the trail began.

KH: Okay and then why didn’t you call the
police?

EW: I only found the proof I needed when he began
the transfer of the employees’ 401(k) plans to a plan that was a
front for his own account. The transactions were going to go
through faster than the police could have gotten to my office, so I
waited until I could block the transaction.

KH: Where were you when you did this?

EW: I was on my computer at home. He couldn’t get to
me.

KH: When did he find out that you’d done this?

EW: When the police showed up to arrest him.

KH: So in effect, you saved the pensions of two
hundred and fifty employees on a moment’s notice?

EW: Yes.

KH: Thank you, Mrs. Webster. Your witness.

RS: Good afternoon, Mrs. Webster.

EW: Good afternoon.

RS: I only have a few questions for you. What had
you done the evening prior to the day you say you locked yourself
in your house to stop these alleged transactions from
processing?

EW: I’m sorry? I don’t understand.

RS: Oh, okay. Let me ask more directly and please
forgive me for being insensitive. Did you not make love with your
husband just the night before?

EW: No.

RS: Oh? Are you saying the deposition Mr. Webster
gave is false? That he was lying?

EW: I’m saying it wasn’t making love. It was
rape.

RS: I see. I suppose you’d consider it that, with
what you suspected.

KH: Objection.

BW: Sustained.

RS: Thank you, Mrs. Webster.

KH: Redirect. Mrs. Webster, do you know what these
are?

BW: Let the record show that people’s exhibit 19a is
entered into evidence. Witness may answer.

EW: Those are medical records.

KH: From what?

EW: From the night he broke my nose and gave me this
scar.

KH: What else do these records say?

EW: That I was raped.

KH: Thank you, Mrs. Webster. And I’m sorry for your
pain.

*

Sebastian read long into the night, Knox sitting
guard, never letting up. Never letting him escape this hell that,
he suspected, he would not have felt if Eilis were any other woman.
Not the woman he loved and was in love with.

“Now,” Knox said, calm, as the sun rose and shone
bright in the kitchen and cast its rays onto the tabletop, “however
deep you feel that is however deep you’re going to feel it. But if
you have any inclination to come down on her for her choices—” Knox
held up a hand when Sebastian opened his mouth in outrage at the
thought. “Sebastian, you give no quarter to the people you love.
You expect us to function on some level of perfection that only you
know and then you turn into a hard-ass motherfucker when we don’t
perform to your standard. I don’t know why; maybe it’s just your
way. If you love her, if you want to stay with her, do not treat
her that way. You treat your clients with kid gloves and they
invariably end up despising you for it.”

Sebastian wanted to curl up in a ball and stare out
the window.

“I’ll take all this with me because you’ll burn it
just to get it out of your sight. If you test me on this—if you do
anything else to hurt her—I’ll give her receivership to Jack and
I’ll hand every bit of it over to Bryce and let him deal with you,
and he’s already not happy with you about this. I think he’s the
last person you want in your face, eh? Of all the people in the
world Giselle chose to bring into this family, it would have to be
one of the only men
in the country
who could actually
destroy you.”

Sebastian dropped his head in his hands. “Just shoot
me,” he whispered and meant it. It wasn’t as if Knox couldn’t or
wouldn’t if he felt like it.

“No. You don’t deserve that much mercy.”

As soon as Knox left with that mess of paper,
Sebastian curled up in a ball on his bed and looked out the window
at the street, trying to block the visuals his fertile mind
tortured him with. A movie, a horror movie. His mind filled in
details.

A child, a girl. He remembered Giselle at ten, busy
swinging in trees and balancing and twirling on high ledges. She’d
wrestled Knox, getting stronger and wilier every day until she
could pin him right before he hit his growth spurt. She’d flipped
through fashion magazines and sighed over all the pretty clothes
she dreamed about fitting into, read
Tiger Beat
, trying to
decide if she wanted to marry Knox, or Bo or Luke Duke. Sebastian
had put a gun in her hand the year before, taught her to use it,
when, where, and why.

Eilis had been raped and impregnated when she was
ten. He let himself feel the pain a small girl must have felt being
abandoned to a foster care system that was criminal at worst and
negligent at best.

Giselle at thirteen had accompanied Sebastian on his
nightly jaunts to collect on his loans and bets, always armed,
always confident, guarding his back—then he would watch her at
church where she drowned in a gaggle of mean rich girls, thoroughly
bewildered and intimidated by the cruel manifestations of jealousy
she didn’t believe, understand, or know how to combat, convinced
that being able to fit into a pair of Jordache jeans would solve
all of her problems.

Shit, Giselle, suck it up.

Giselle at fourteen, and Knox at fifteen, slept in
the same house, down the hall from each other, had discovered how
to kiss with tongue, and that was about all they’d discovered by
that time.

Eilis had been raped at least twice more, had had
two more miscarriages by the time she was fourteen years old.

Broken bones. Cigarette burns. Poisoning made to
look like a suicide attempt. He only had facts, but Sebastian
thought in images.

This was the antithesis of everything he believed
now or had ever believed before he’d turned his back on the church.
No god or goddess Sebastian had ever read of or believed in had
taken care of Eilis Logan and Sebastian loved Eilis Logan.

. . . insofar as you are capable of feeling that
kind of love . . .

How did she live with this?

For that fact, how did Kenard—a man Sebastian most
definitely did not want to piss off—live with his pain? A fire that
killed his four children, a year of agonizing pain in a burn unit,
charges of arson and five counts of homicide, the erased memories,
the scars that ensured that Giselle would be the only woman on
earth who’d find them attractive. Everyone, most
especially
Kenard, knew why he’d been unattached when he’d met Giselle—except
Giselle. All she saw was the god of war, which greatly eased
Kenard’s pain but it didn’t make his ugliness any less obvious to
the rest of the world.

How did Knox live with his pain—and for Knox, which
pain was worse: The horrors he’d had to study to try that case? The
fact that he’d lost that trial and had to see a serial killer go
free? Or the fact that he’d gone out that very night with the fury
of gross injustice and executed a man? He’d only been twenty-five
years old when he’d lost his soul and died, only to be resurrected
as the hated and feared Chouteau County prosecutor.

Sebastian had never known why Knox had defied Fen to
go to BYU, leaving with a law degree but not what he really wanted.
How many other slings and arrows had Knox taken that Sebastian
didn’t know about? And why
did
he always do things the hard
way?

And Giselle? He had
no
idea what pain she
lived with now. No, wait—

Take it from a woman whose man hides his soul from
her.

Sebastian groaned. Knox had been right about why
he’d painted her hurt so graphically, and Giselle
didn’t
know that. Why
had
she consented to become a Ford, knowing
her nude body would be displayed all over the world in
perpetuity?

Mitch Hollander, his best friend, a companion from
his mission when Sebastian still believed but had become
disheartened, disillusioned, and sickened by what ostensibly
honorable Mormon boys did. Mitch, whose naïveté had broken with
those same deeds, who had gone home early and suffered the stares
and derision of not having made it all the way through. Yet now he
was one of the wealthiest men in America, powerful, feared—and had
kept his faith so much that he was a bishop of a ward and on the
short list for stake president.

Sebastian dropped his head in his hands.

But Eilis! What Sebastian had done to her . . . Oh,
Eilis!

You treat your clients with kid gloves and they
invariably end up despising you for it.

He wanted to weep, but he couldn’t. He didn’t know
how.

* * * * *

59:
FREEWILL

“Giselle, I don’t want to do this.”

Giselle watched Bryce as he paced the kitchen
floor.

“It’s done. I already told him we’d do it and we
will.”

Bryce had come inside from his current stone project
for a drink of water and overheard her on the phone making plans
with Knox. Since this required Bryce’s cooperation, too, she’d
informed him of it the minute she hung up.

He was furious.

“
We
don’t have to do anything. It’s not
our
problem; it’s his. That’s my point. Knox is a grown man.
He can figure out how to—” Bryce waved his hand in the air,
searching for the word.