The Cowboy's Convenient Wife

by Joanna Bell

  I guess Jackson Devlin knew his family – and his brother – better than I thought, because he didn't require any further convincing. He believed what I was saying right away.

  "Where are you?" He asked. "I mean where was Cillian before he left? When did he leave?"

  "I'm at the hotel – the Rocky Mountain Inn. He just left like two minutes ago. Maybe more like 5? I don't know! Should I call the police?"

  "No," Jackson replied, and I could hear that he was running. "No. Do not call the police. I'm going to the ranch right now. Are you still at there – at the hotel?"

  "Yes," I replied, not at all sure not calling the police was a good idea. "Yes. Wait. Are you – you're here? You're in Sweetgrass Ridge?"

  "Uh-huh," Jackson said. "Yeah. I'm on my way to the ranch right now. Listen – did you hear me? Don't call the police. I'll – just let me take care of this OK?"

  I wasn't convinced. Not after hearing the coldness in Cillian's voice. Not after seeing the determination in his eyes. "I –" I started, hesitating.

  "Do not call the police!" he yelled. "I am on my way right now! Just – just stay where you are. OK? Can you do that?"

  "Yes. I can stay –"

  He hung up.

  He hung up and I wandered back into the hotel room, unable to close the door behind me because it was hanging off its hinges. Jackson Devlin said not to call the police. I pulled out my own phone anyway and stared down at the screen, going back and forth. On the one hand, maybe the police could prevent Cillian doing something he would regret for the rest of his life. On the other, it was probably already too late for them to get to the ranch before Cillian – or Jackson.

  I put my phone down and got up. A minute later I picked it up again, and then put it back down again. I wanted to jump out of my skin. Why did I show him the photos the way I did? With no warning? Why did I just hand them over? Why didn't I argue with him when he assumed his dad must have had them taken? Because that didn't make any sense at all – did it? Why would his own dad have compromising photos taken of his son years before that son ever met the girl Jack took such a quick dislike to?

  It didn't make sense. But no other explanation made sense either. If not Jack Devlin – then who?

  ***

  Sometime later, after two unanswered calls to Jackson Devlin and a lot of pacing and hand-wringing in my hotel room, there was a quiet knock at the door.

  "Astrid?"

  It was a woman's voice.

  "Yes?" I called out, half-hoping someone in the hotel heard the commotion and called the police themselves.

  "Can I come in?"

  It wasn't the police. It was Hailey Devlin, Jackson's wife. It was the woman I saw outside the hospital in Los Angeles months and months ago.

  Chapter 38: Cillian

  Blind rage.

  I've heard that phrase used before. I didn't realize it was literal until that night.

  Rage – real rage – is like a physical thing. It fills your lungs and your throat and your belly until you can't breathe with being full of it. It spreads across your eyeballs, blocking your sight.

  I don't even know how I got to the ranch. I don't know how I didn't drive off the road. I didn't, though. And the fact that I didn't seemed to be a sign of sorts. A signal from the universe that the time had come to right wrongs. To mete out justice to those who had gone so long without it.

  Jack Devlin was going to die.

  My fury was total. It was impervious to reason or bargaining or cajoling, impervious even to Astrid's screamed pleas. The photos she showed me in that hotel room were the spark to a pile of tinder that had been building up inside me since before my mom died. And once it was lit, the flames reached to the sky.

  He tried to ruin me. My dad. My only remaining parent. The one person who should have had my back. The man who asked me to destroy my relationship with my older brother – and then accepted my help as if it was his due. He tried to ruin me, too. And he did it behind my back, just like he did with Jackson.

  His own children. His own sons.

  That was all I could think, those were the only words in my head as I brought the truck to a halt in a shower of dust and gravel outside the main house.

  His own sons. His own sons. His own sons!

  I took the front steps in two adrenaline-fueled leaps, aware I didn't have much time. Any second I expected to hear the sound of sirens, summoned by Astrid.

  Darcy must have heard me storm in because she suddenly appeared in the hallway in front of me, her eyes wide with shock.

  "Cillian!" She exclaimed, seeing me barreling towards her. "It's late. Why are you here so –"

  "Where is my dad?" I bellowed.

  Darcy didn't answer. She just stood there blinking, sensing something was very wrong.

  "WHERE IS MY DAD, DARCY?" I shouted again.

  Bed. It was past midnight. My dad was in bed. I doubled back down the hallway to the stairs and raced up them, my hands itching, burning with the anticipation of being smashed into Jack Devlin's face.

  "Cillian!" Darcy shrieked up the stairs after me. "Cillian what's going on!? Jack! Jack!"

  My dad, hearing his wife screaming, was on his feet when I walked into the bedroom. He looked up at me, confused only very briefly and then, in spite of his having no clue why I was there, sneering.

  "What the fuck's gotten into –"

  That's as far as he got. As far as I was concerned, those were my dad's last words on earth. I brought my hands up to his neck, wrapped them around his throat and began to squeeze. He struggled, trying to use his body to push me back towards the wall, but I outweighed him by too much. I watched, pleased, as his face grew red and his eyes bulged, as the cords and tendons in his neck worked beneath my fingers.

  "You fucker," I hissed, leaning in close as Darcy came running into the room and immediately started screaming – really losing her shit – when she saw us. "You bastard. You... fucking... bastard. Fuck you, dad. I know what you did. I know you sent those photos to Astrid. Fuck you. Fuck you."

  I didn't allow any words to escape my dad's throat. He was silent, his hands scrabbling at my hands. After all those years of refusing to hear what anyone else had to say, finally – fucking finally – Jack Devlin was the one being silenced.

  It felt good. In the moment, it felt like the ultimate catharsis, the ultimate justice, the instant when a person who has spent his whole life getting away with everything finally pays the price.

  I remember feeling something snap in his neck. A bone or a tendon or whatever it was in my dad that refused to break. I broke it. And when it broke, I squeezed harder. I was going to break the next bone in his neck, and the next and the next until every goddamned bone in his body was broken. And then I was going to kick whatever was left of him to pieces. For my mother. For Jackson. For Uncle Dave. For my brothers. For all the people my dad fucked over and ruined and never thought about again.

  Something suddenly hit me on the side of my head. Something very heavy. Heavy enough to make me stumble and let go. Darcy was behind me, holding a heavy crystal vase in her hand and preparing to hit me with it again. I knocked it out of her hand and sent it crashing to the floor, where it exploded into shards. My dad was doubled over in front of me, gasping and choking.

  "Cillian! Dad!"

  It was Séan, yelling out from some other part of the house, undoubtedly headed my way. I was dizzy from the blow Darcy dealt me but the murderous rage boiling up inside me hadn't gone anywhere. I pulled my dad up by the collar of his nightshirt, forcing him to look me in the eyes. Once again, he tried to shove me away and once again, he was too weak to do so. I yanked him away from the bed and slammed him back against the wall.

  "Cillian! CILLIAN! What – what the fuck are you doing?!"

  It was Séan, come to save our asshole father from his own richly-deserved fate. He jumped on me, but not before I could get my hands around my dad's throat again and decline to let go even as a series of blows began to rain down on my head
.

  It was chaos. My brother and my stepmom were screaming at me to stop, my dad was clawing at my hands and some kind of weird, guttural sound was coming out of my own mouth.

  "You fucker," I growled, panting with exertion and pure, murderous hate as Séan continued to try haul me off. "I know – I know what you did, dad. I know what you –"

  Suddenly, there was an extra body in the mix. Jackson. He didn't start screaming and yelling, he just wrapped his arms around me from behind, joining the frenzied efforts to get me away from my father. Séan began punching my arms – straight-up punching my forearms trying to get me to loosen my grip. It worked. One hand slipped off my dad's throat and the sound of his hacking, choking breaths filled the room.

  "Get his hand!" Jackson yelled. "Get his – grab his hand!"

  "Let go of me," I bellowed, twisting to try to look my older brother in the eye as he and Séan finally managed to get one of my arms pinned behind my back. "Let go of me! You know – you know he deserves this!"

  "No!" Jackson barked. "No! Don't do this. Don't do this. Don't ruin your own life, man. Don't do it."

  And then, from the background, another voice: Uncle Dave.

  "Jackson's right!" He shouted as Jackson managed to force my second arm behind my back. "It's OK, man. It's OK. We're here. We're here for you, Cillian. We're not here for him. He's not worth it. He's not worth it."

  I recall actually contemplating my uncle's words, even as I thrashed and struggled to free myself and finish the job.

  I was thinking about listening. Thinking about letting them get me out of there. And then, just as I was about to give in and stop fighting, I heard Jackson's voice ring out:

  "Darcy! NO!"

  And then everything went black.

  Chapter 39: Astrid

  Jackson and Hailey Devlin's home is beautiful. All simple lines and huge windows and airy space. Not that I was in a position to appreciate any of it that night. Hailey led me into the kitchen, where an older woman and a child who looked so much like Cillian I couldn't help doing a double, triple and then a quadruple take sat around a long, heavy table.

  "Mom!" Jackson's wife exclaimed. "Brody – why are you two up? You should –"

  "Where's Daddy?"

  "Oh my God," I whispered out loud as it dawned on me.

  The child. The child Cillian and Jack tried to keep from being born.

  "Is that –" I asked breathlessly –"is that your son? Is he Jackson's –"

  "Yes," Hailey replied, ushering me towards a chair and gesturing for me to sit down. "Yes this is Brody, my son. Jackson's son."

  It was him, right there in front of me, as real as any one of us. He existed. And his parents were together.

  Something about the child's presence finished me off. I held it together up until that exact point. And then something, some kind of almost hysterical relief at seeing the proof of someone else's happy ending just snapped the last threads of my forbearance. I buried my face in my hands and began to weep.

  I wept for a long time, my shoulders shaking and the tears leaking out between my fingers and spilling down the backs of my hands. I wept until Hailey asked the older woman – her mother – to take Brody back upstairs to bed.

  "I'm sorry," I cried as she pulled another chair close to mine and sat down, reaching out to place a hand on one of my shoulders. "I'm sorry! I'm really sorry."

  That was all I could say. I was too distraught, too worried about Cillian, too convinced the whole thing was my fault.

  "It's alright," Hailey said quietly. "It's OK. Jackson won't let anything happen to him."

  A few minutes later, maybe more like 10 or 20 minutes later, when the panic was all cried out of me and Hailey was making us tea, I finally looked up.

  "What do you mean?"

  Hailey turned to face me. She was very pretty, in that dark-haired, dark-eyed way some women are. "What do I mean about what?"

  "What you said just now, about Jackson won't let anything happen to him. To Cillian? I thought Jackson hated him?"

  "Do you want sugar?" She asked, opening the fridge. "Cream?"

  "Just plain is fine."

  Hailey Jackson was wearing nice clothes – I recognized her black Jil Sander sweater from my mom's own wardrobe – but there was something about her, some humble vibe to the way she spoke. I liked her right away. She is one of those people who is easy to be around, especially in a crisis.

  "Jackson and Cillian made up," she said, placing two cups of tea down on the table and sitting back down.

  "Did they?" I asked, shocked. Nothing Cillian ever said to me about his brother made me think they would rebuild their relationship.

  Hailey nodded, her expression ambiguous. "Uh-huh. Just recently, actually."

  "You're not happy about it?"

  She shrugged. "I don't know. I mean, I don't know how much you know about everything that happened but –"

  "I know," I told her. "I know what happened."

  It was Hailey's turn to look doubtful. "Really? I'm surprised he told you."

  "He didn't," I replied. "It's a long story. I haven't even talked to Cillian for almost a year. Not since I saw him in Los Angeles."

  Jackson's wife's eyes clouded over at the mention of the city where her husband almost died.

  "I'm sorry," I started. "I didn't mean to –'

  "Oh it doesn't matter," she waved her hand in the air. "I'm fine. But – yeah, I guess Jackson and Cillian are going to try to work it out. He does seem – I don't know, he does seem different somehow. I mean, I'm the last person on earth who owes Cillian Devlin the benefit of the doubt but who knows? Jackson changed – why not his brother?"

  "You think Cillian changed?" I asked quietly.

  Hailey looked out the window, out into the dark night. "I don't know. I really don't know. Are you hungry? I have some leftover chicken soup in the freezer if you are?"

  "No," I replied. My stomach was empty, I hadn't eaten a single morsel of food since I'd been in Logan airport hours and hours ago. But I wasn't hungry. "Thank you, though."

  Hailey went to check on her son, leaving me alone in the kitchen. I looked around, trying to distract myself from my own anxiety. The refrigerator door, covered in Brody's drawings and letter-magnets and grocery lists, was like something out of a 90s movie. My parents never put my drawings on the fridge, firstly because we had a few different fridges and secondly because we hardly spent any time in the kitchen. That was the cook's domain.

  One drawing in particular drew my eye. It was a simple line drawing, a landscape I thought, or, as I got up to have a closer look, perhaps the curves of a woman's body as she lay on her side.

  "You like it?" Hailey asked, returning from checking on her boy.

  "Yes," I replied. "Your son didn't do this – did he?"

  Hailey smiled and shook her head. "No. I'm afraid Brody has – so far – not inherited his mother's interest in art. Maybe he'll come around when he gets older."

  "You did it?"

  She nodded as we both sat back down at the table. "Yeah, that one's mine. The fire-breathing dinosaurs are Brody's."

  "It's very good," I said, looking at it again. "It's really – it's actually really good."

  I blushed, afraid Jackson Devlin's wife would think I was trying to suck-up – but she didn't seem to take my compliment as manipulative.

  "It better be good," she commented. "It paid for this property – and most of the house."

  I almost smiled, assuming she was joking. But then I remembered hearing a conversation between my mother and her friends a few days before I left for the Boston. They were doing that thing that my mom and her friends do of talking about their latest acquisitions and consumer triumphs.

  "Wait," I said, looking at Hailey Devlin a little more closely. "Wait. Are you Hailey Mickleson? The artist?"

  "Nickerson," she replied. "And yes, I am. I'm Hailey Devlin in my day to day life but I'm still Hailey Nickerson professionally."

  "Really?"
I asked, my mouth falling open. "I – really?"

  "Yup," she nodded. "I'm from here. I grew up in Sweetgrass Ridge."

  "That's crazy," I said, being careful to keep my voice low. "One of my mom's friends bought one of your pieces a few months ago and my mom almost died of jealousy. She's been calling galleries for weeks trying to get her own."

  "Yeah," Hailey replied calmly. "I'm definitely the flavor of the month in the art world. It'll be someone else next month – I'm just trying to be smart with it, you know? With the money and the attention."

  "You're hardly the flavor of the month," I replied. "I think my mom's –"

  I stopped talking at the sound of tires skidding on gravel outside. Hailey's eyes met my own and we both jumped up.

  ***

  Cillian looked terrible. His face was swollen and there was a particularly nasty-looking bruise, already a deep purple, on one side of his face.

  "Oh my God!" I cried when I first laid eyes on him, rushing towards the two men half-carrying him towards the house.

  "Ashtrid," Cillian slurred, smiling through the painful-looking bruising, somehow able to see me through his almost swollen-shut eyes. "Ash–"

  I reached out to touch him when he got close enough and then yanked my hand away, afraid any touch would only cause him more pain.

  "Who did this to him?" I started, pressing one palm flat against my chest because it suddenly felt like I couldn't get enough air into my lungs. "Who did this to him!? Did Jack do this to –"

  "Let us get him inside," the man who could only have been Jackson Devlin said. "He needs to rest."

  "He needs to go to a hospital," I replied at once. "Look at him. He needs to –"

  "We just came from there," the other man, older and shorter than both Devlin brothers, replied. "Don't worry, we got him looked at. Doc says he needs to rest for 48 hours – got a list of symptoms to watch out for, too. Why don't you come on inside and help us get him settled?"

  That's what I needed, in the midst of my anxiety at seeing Cillian in so much pain. Just someone to tell me what they wanted me to do. Me and Hailey followed the men into the house and then gathered sheets and blankets to transform a sofa into a makeshift bed.