#1-3--The O’Connells

by Lorhainne Eckhart

  “What do you want me to say, Karen, that I’m sorry? That’s not why I called you. I think you know you’d be the last person I’d call if there were another option for me.”

  There it was, exactly why she didn’t understand why he was calling her now. She just shook her head, looking at a man who’d crushed her and broken her heart into a million pieces, so much so that she hadn’t thought she’d ever be whole again.

  “I don’t want to rehash the past,” Jack said, “because that’s not going to get me out of this fucked-up situation. Don’t think it’s lost on me how convenient it was that all of this went down now, and I’m stuck in jail until I can go before a judge on Monday morning. Just get me out of here. I don’t want to rehash something that’s done and over.”

  The dismissal in his tone was another reminder of how he seemed able to shut his feelings off with a flick of a switch. All it did was bring that long-buried hurt back, the hurt she thought she’d somehow made sense of. Apparently not. She let her arms fall to her sides, feeling that overwhelming sense of unreasonable anger.

  “You know what?” she said. “You were right about something in what you said to me: This relationship of ours has run its course. Now this, here, you calling me to come and…what, get you out of jail and off a murder charge I don’t even know anything about? No. Find yourself another lawyer. Although I empathize, I won’t help you. I will not allow you to break my heart and fuck me around again. Remember the restraining order you managed to get against me? Well, it still exists, and here I am, breaking it. I still have it in my drawer at the office, kind of a reminder of how stupid I was. All you did was make a call, say I threatened you. Yeah, maybe I did in one of those hundreds of messages. Yet here you are, calling me. You killed someone? I don’t get this.” She took a step and then another, taking in the door and wanting nothing more than to get the fuck out of there.

  “Karen, you don’t get it. You have every right to hate me, and I know I hurt you—but no, I didn’t kill anyone!” he yelled.

  She turned, feeling his anger. At the same time, she just didn’t understand. Why her? Why had he walked away? Why had he done what he’d done? That was the one thing he’d never shared with her.

  He pulled in a breath and ran his hand through his thick dark hair, the soft waves. How could she forget wanting to run her fingers through his hair? “That was the only thing I could do at the time to see that you stayed away from me,” he said. “I think you know me well enough to know that I don’t do something without a reason, and I certainly wouldn’t be calling you for help, but the thing is that you’re the only one who can help me and who I can trust.” The passion in his voice was so direct. Yeah, passion and heat had never been their problem.

  “You’re wrong,” she said. “I don’t really know you. How can I be the only one who can help you? That makes absolutely no sense, Jack. What is this, this game? Is this just something else to fuck with me, to fuck with my head? It’s been a long time, and I’ve got a good thing going for myself. Why are you here, trying to mess with that?” She was leaning forward, breathing in and out. She hadn’t realized she’d been yelling back at him.

  He shut his eyes and exhaled. “Please, Karen, I’m not trying to mess with you. I wouldn’t do that…” He inhaled roughly and glanced to the side. “This may sound absolutely crazy, but when I was arrested and heard the charges, the who, why, and where, all I could think of was calling you—even though I knew the best thing for you would be for me not to call. Please, Karen.”

  He lifted his gaze, and all she could think was that the look in his eyes was raw and real. Maybe he was messing with her, but at the same time, she knew what she was going to say the minute she opened her mouth, and she tried to will it away.

  “I hate you, Jack.”

  He nodded as if he understood. “And you have every right.”

  “Fine. I’ll see what I can do to get you out. No promises. Then you find yourself another lawyer.” She put her hand on the door and pounded with her fist. “Let me out,” she snapped, and the door opened.

  “Karen…” he called out as she started out the door and the deputy stepped inside. “Thank you.”

  She took in the motion as he was cuffed. She didn’t know a damn thing about what had happened. Instead of saying anything back, she just nodded and kept walking, knowing her brother was standing and waiting outside, and she’d just done the one thing she’d promised herself she wouldn’t do: help a man who had destroyed her and broken her heart.

  Chapter Three

  Owen wasn’t waiting outside the police station. In fact, he was in the glassed-in waiting area at the front of the cop shop, and his eyes connected with hers as soon as she stepped out from the back.

  Her heels clicked on the floor, and she said nothing as she walked straight for the doors without stopping, pushing them open. She couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Very aware that her brother was right behind her, she strode down the concrete steps to the sidewalk, and she barely made it off the last step before she ran as fast as she could in her heels to the bush. Her stomach pitched, and from out of nowhere, she vomited.

  “Oh, man…” Owen said from behind her, his hand on her back as she spit and rested her hands on her knees, again pulling in a breath, shaky, trembling. When she stood up and pressed the back of her hand to her mouth, she couldn’t avoid looking her brother’s way.

  “Come on,” was all he said, and he somehow ushered her to his van, which was parked two stalls over.

  She didn’t allow her gaze to connect with a passing couple, who she knew had seen everything. Owen pulled open the door, and she climbed in the passenger seat of the older-model van. He stood there a second, taking her in, and she didn’t know if the shock on his face meant he was going to lecture her or start in with all the questions he’d never asked.

  Instead, he said, “You okay?”

  She pulled her hand down over her mouth again, feeling the ache in her stomach and wanting water to rinse her mouth and maybe settle the queasiness, which she knew was just nerves. “I’m fine.”

  He swore under his breath and then closed her door and walked around. She reached for the seatbelt and fastened it, glad now that her brother had insisted on driving. He was right: She wasn’t in any condition to drive.

  He took his time putting his seatbelt on, putting the key in the ignition, and then starting it. “So I’ve been sitting out here, trying to wrap my head around the fact that you’re married…”

  “Was married, past tense.” She wouldn’t let him finish. “If you can call it that. Not sure it even counts, considering a job interview lasts longer.” She didn’t look his way, but she didn’t need to. She could feel him watching her. Thankfully, he put the van in gear and backed up.

  “Wow, seriously? Whether you were or still are married is just semantics, Karen. That’s not the kind of thing you keep secret, and that’s him in jail, the guy you were married to…” Owen’s voice dripped with sarcasm as he pressed the gas.

  Karen gripped the strap of the seatbelt over her shoulder. “Jack is his name. Yes, the very same. He’s in jail and wants me to help him after everything.” She knew it wasn’t laughter, the rude sound her brother made. At the same time, she was still reeling over what she’d agreed to do. “I don’t know if I can do this, Owen.” She turned her head, pressing her cheek into the seatback.

  Her brother was on edge, of course, but he had nothing on her.

  “Please don’t tell anyone in the family,” she said. “Not Mom, Ryan, Marcus, Suzanne, Luke…I don’t want anyone to know. I’m not exactly proud of what happened, and then there was how I reacted.”

  “I think maybe you need to start at the beginning and tell me what the fuck you did. When, where, how…? I just don’t get it. Like, what the hell? I don’t understand, Karen, but I’m thinking some pretty bad things. Who is this guy?”

  She shut her eyes for another second, hoping it would steady her, but it didn’t. “It
was one of those things, you know. I don’t even know how it started, but it just did. It was during law school, at the beginning, and there he was. He was so big. He knew what he wanted. He was smart, brilliant. He had passed the bar and been offered a position at the DA’s office. I don’t know. We spent every minute together. It started as hot courtroom sex. He was on the other side, and I was interning under the public defender. The first time, it was, like, a closet at the courthouse, his car in the parking lot, a…”

  “Whoa, stop, for Christ’s sake! I don’t want to hear about your sex life. No details,” Owen said, cutting her off.

  It was too late, though. Every one of those memories flooded her, the memories she hadn’t allowed herself to think of in so long. As she relived those moments, the passion and the way he had touched her, kissed her, fucked her, it both saddened and angered her. It had been hot and dangerous, and he’d been like a drug to her. She had craved him, dreamed of him, loved him. How she hated him now.

  “I never thought it was possible to love someone so much that I obsessed over him. You know, I can say it now. It’s taken me how long…?” She took in the darkened highway, glad that she could sit and consider without the light of day making everything about what had happened that much worse.

  “I don’t know how long, Karen, because you didn’t tell us—didn’t tell me. Why not? Seriously.”

  She turned her head to her brother again, hearing how pissed he was and how personally he was taking this. “Because it was over as quick as it started. One minute we hadn’t even dated. It was just sex, great sex. Then we were on a road trip in Georgia, a backroad place, and he suggested getting married. Next thing, we were standing in front of a justice of the peace, and he was slipping this ring on my finger, you know the fake metal and glass kind? He picked one up at the corner store.

  “Then two days later, he was walking out of his apartment with a suitcase and telling me to fuck off. What the hell was I to think? I thought he was crazy, messing with me. But it was the way he looked at me, with such hate. I mean, I loved him.” She pressed her hand to her chest.

  Owen rested his left arm on the door and rubbed his hand over his face, his other on the wheel.

  “He got a restraining order against me, considering I didn’t handle it too well,” she continued.

  Owen darted his gaze to her, shocked and speechless. “What the fuck? Oh my God, you’re serious,” he said. He was shaking his head.

  All Karen could do was sit there, trying to explain something she couldn’t, because no part of the situation would make sense to her. “He told me it was over, but I just wouldn’t let it go. I called him over and over, filled his voicemail to the point his mailbox was full, over and over and over again. I didn’t stop. I kept phoning, feeling absolutely gutted. I mean, who does that, marries you and then walks out on you and refuses to talk to you? Well, you know me. I wasn’t taking that. I don’t even remember the content of my messages, but next thing, I was served a restraining order, because I apparently threatened him in one or more of the hundreds of voicemail messages. Worst of all was that it was Sheriff Bert who paid me a visit and gave me a sit-down, a dose of reality. He said Jack didn’t want to be contacted, that I’d made my point, and that I’d gone too far. It was humiliating.”

  “And Marcus doesn’t know?”

  She breathed in past the ache, feeling that moment from so long ago, sitting there in a chair with Bert giving her a look that let her know she’d really fucked up. She wished she could go back and undo what had happened. “He had just started, you know. He was still a green deputy. Bert promised he wouldn’t say anything. At the same time, he made me promise to stop calling Jack, or I could find myself behind bars, and the law degree I’d given everything for would be gone. Jack had changed his number, so it was an easy promise to make. I couldn’t call him anymore, because I didn’t know where he was or how to get a hold of him. So I swallowed it, and…”

  Her brother was pulling his hand over his face again, shaking his head. Yeah, evidently, he was having some trouble getting his head around this. “So Marcus has been with the sheriff’s office going on eight years.”

  “Just over.”

  Her brother nodded. “You were just a kid then. You’re saying it was that long ago?”

  She shrugged, because the problem was that although it was so long ago, it still felt as if it were yesterday.

  “Wow, that sounds totally fucked up, Karen.”

  Yes, and her brother had no idea how much. “I know,” she said, “especially considering I have to go back and see him.”

  Her brother slammed on the brakes and swerved to the side of the highway, and she jerked forward, grateful that it was dark in the cab between them. “You just finished telling me that this guy fucked you over big time and has a restraining order on you, and you’re going back to—”

  “Just one time, Owen, just to get him out if I can, and that’s it. I told Jack that’s all I was willing to do. Then he has to find himself another lawyer.”

  Owen put the van back in gear and pulled back on the highway, shaking his head again. “You know, Karen, sometimes you can be your own worst enemy.”

  She turned her head, looking out into the darkness, feeling the sting of his words. She felt a tear slip out and then roughly wiped it away. “You think I don’t know that? But what kind of lawyer would I be if I couldn’t put personal feelings aside?”

  “Well, you just keep telling yourself that, Karen. I guess I just don’t understand why you married him, why he walked out, why you have a restraining order against you. He didn’t want to see or talk to you, yet here he is, calling you, and you go running. The whole thing sounds so totally fucked up.”

  Of course it did. She just settled into the seat. “How am I supposed to explain something I can’t even understand myself? God dammit, now I sound like one of my clients.”

  She realized in that second that if she’d heard the same story from another woman, she’d have told her to get her head right—but how could she? She didn’t even understand what she’d done to make him basically cut her off and out of his life. Her rational mind jumped in and told her that reasonable people stayed and talked.

  “You get anything to eat tonight?” Owen said. So he was done talking about it.

  “You’re doing it again, Owen, trying to father me—but I’m a big girl, and…”

  “And you just had the rug yanked from under you. You were puking your guts out over a guy who, by the sounds of it, has totally and completely fucked you around. I don’t understand any of it. You should eat, and you need to tell everyone. No more secrets, Karen. I mean, do you know the details of what he did? Maybe he’s guilty and you shouldn’t be helping him. Talk to Marcus, get him to look into it, and stop going through all this alone.”

  She just took in the brother who had been there for all of them. At the same time, it seemed no one ever thought to check in on him and see how he was.

  “Not yet,” she replied. She knew she was being stubborn. “And how about we stop talking about me and talk about you? Before Jack called, you showed up at my office, and I can’t help wondering if there’s something going on with you. You sound off, or you did.”

  He made another rude sound and shook his head, but he didn’t pull his gaze from the road as he drove. “We’re talking about you, Karen, your problem. Don’t start spinning this and shining anything my way, because we aren’t done by a longshot. You’re in over your head. I don’t know this guy, none of us do, but either you tell Marcus or I will.”

  There it was, the tough love. Owen had stepped in too many times after their dad had left, after her world had fallen apart. But now, there was just something about having her back to the wall that didn’t sit right with Karen.

  Chapter Four

  An image of late nights and bad coffee while working an impossible case was what Karen had always associated with being a big-city lawyer. Maybe that was the reason she’d decided to go it
alone as a one-woman show in the small town of Livingston, where she could be responsible only to herself. Or maybe, if she was being completely honest, this was a choice she’d made to protect her heart from the festering unhealed wound created by Jack Curtis, which he had reopened the night before.

  Here she was, doing the one thing she’d sworn she’d never do: helping the man she’d given her heart to, the same man who, in one blinding moment, had sucker punched her, crushing her without a thought. She was a living, breathing woman, one now filled with doubts about her worthiness and who she was. A part of her would always belong to Jack Curtis because he had scarred her so deeply. Maybe that was why she put herself through the kind of misery that no sane, rational person would.

  She heard the buzz of her cell phone as she worked her espresso machine. It was over the top for a single person and had cost her a pretty penny, exemplifying the kind of expensive lifestyle Jack Curtis had lived and breathed back then. She yawned from the four hours of sleep she’d somehow managed, considering she hadn’t been able to shut down the self-talk, the worries, the what-ifs running through her head.

  She felt as if her carefully hidden secrets were now out in the open for everyone to see. She was fallible, imperfect, flawed, human. She stared at her phone and the text from Owen: Call Marcus this morning!!

  “Stop pushing, Owen…” she muttered as she looked around her condo. The morning light spilled through the kitchen window, reflecting off the gleaming white cabinets and countertop of her open-concept kitchen. The walls were white, and the furniture, though costly, wasn’t flashy but instead practical. Her condo was neat and tidy except for the dust she could see coating the flat-screen TV. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d turned it on.

  The light blue sectional was still covered with a throw blanket, in a heap from where she’d fallen asleep sometime before dawn, still holding her notepad and plan of action. She didn’t have a clue what Jack supposedly had done to land himself behind bars. Who was he charged with killing? What was his motive? Why did the police suspect him?