by Anne Malcom
He flinched again, but he didn’t splutter or cry. His eyes evened. Cleared. Turned cold and calculating like that of the uncle who was more recognizable. I found comfort in that. “It wasn’t me,” he said, voice firm.
I regarded him. Tasted his words. Waited for him to say more, give excuses, explanations, protests, even to blow up on me for accusing him. It’s what a guilty person would do. They wouldn’t be comfortable in the silence where a lie could be found. Well, a true professional like Jacob could do so, but not many others.
Abe stayed silent.
I nodded once and stood, walking to the bar and pouring him a drink.
He took it when I handed it to him.
“We’ll get them, Charlotte,” he said. “Whoever did this to Molly.”
I drained my drink. “Oh, I know.”
I filled my water glass up once more.
Abe clutched his, eyes focusing on my hands. The blood on them. His own hands shook as he put the glass up to his mouth and took a long drink.
I did the same. My hands were not shaking.
“We should put a protection detail on your mother,” Abe said after a long silence.
I glanced up from my inspection of the floor. “Why?”
He furrowed his brows. “Because Kershaw is targeting your family, trying to hurt you. She could be in danger.”
I smiled. It unnerved him, I could tell. “If he was trying to hurt me, he would not touch my mother. If his intel on me is as good as I suspect it is, then he’d know leaving my mother alive while killing Molly is the worst thing he could do. If he hurt my mother, he’d be doing me nothing but a favor.”
Abe gaped. “She’s your mother, Charlotte.”
I tilted my head, surprised by his shock. “No, she’s not. My mother died the same day as my father did. When her cracked psyche finally shattered as she stabbed him to death.” I sipped my vodka.
It didn’t burn going down.
I walked to the sofa, sitting because I wasn’t sure how much longer my legs would hold me.
Jacob watched.
Said nothing.
I looked at Abe. “Maybe there’s bits and pieces of her floating around that prickly and black pit of thorns that we can call her mind, but not enough. Shreds. Fragments that will never fit together to make her a person. He would be doing me a favor by killing her, and he doesn’t want to do me any favors.”
“Something went wrong with you,” he said, taking a sip of his drink. No, a gulp was more accurate. His hand was shaking, but now his voice was not. He was slowly regaining control. I never lost it in the first place. “I don’t know when it was, but it went wrong. Something was taken from you.” He leaned against the bar. “Maybe it was all given to Molly. All that feeling, all human emotion. It was all taken from you at some point and now you’re barely a human beyond winning, beyond collecting power, influence, revenge.”
“See, if I was a man, these qualities wouldn’t be listed as something that was wrong, they’d be something to make me right. Make me better. Or make me the same as all the rest.” I drained my glass. “But I’m meant to be soft-hearted with a kind soul, otherwise I’m wrong, broken, empty? Maybe I’m all those things, but it doesn’t matter right now. I’m focusing on the long game. And if you’ll remember, you’re in bed with the man who had my sister brutally murdered. I’ll trust you to show yourself out.”
Abe didn’t heed my dismissal. “I wasn’t in bed with him,” he bit out. “I was angry at you for making what I thought was the wrong business decision.” He gripped his glass. “And now I see that it was the right one. If only I’d seen it earlier, maybe...”
“There’s no time for maybes in reality,” I cut him off. “There is no maybe about what I found on your computer.”
“No,” Abe agreed. “But I’ve been around the world trying to gather what I can to help us acquire his companies under shell corporations, or at the very least stage a hostile takeover.”
I raised my brow, quietly impressed and surprised. My uncle was a good businessman, so it stood to reason he’d have the same idea I did. “I don’t think you understand what being fired means.”
He gave me a long look. “I don’t think you understand what family means.”
He was right.
“My brother was a good man,” he continued. “Different than me in a lot of ways. Better than me in every way.” His eyes had a faraway look, not seeing me or the penthouse. “A good father. Husband.” He blinked away the past. “He was to me what Molly was to you. And I know the pain of losing him. Now we’ve lost Molly in the same way. This world seems to think taking the better parts of our family is going to ruin us. And it will. It already has. But it will not beat us. Fired or not, I’m going to do everything I can to fight for my remaining family. I’m not going to ask you to trust me, because I know you well enough that under the best of circumstances you hesitate to trust anyone. This is far from the best of circumstances, therefore, you’re going to trust no one.”
His eyes flickered to Jacob.
There was a knowing in them that surprised me.
“Almost no one,” he added. “But I don’t need you to trust me in order to help you.”
“I don’t need help,” I said immediately.
“I know. But I’m going to give it to you anyway. For my brother. For my niece. And for you.”
His voice was resolute. Brokered no argument. Usually, there was never a time I would have let him take such a tone with me. But I was tired.
So I sighed and nodded once.
I filled my glass again.
And then I tried to get comfortable with an empty soul.
19
The next day was the same.
I woke up at five.
Jacob was in my bed. I didn’t remember getting there. My entire body ached with the loss of her, my limbs screaming and nerves exposed to the root. An animal part of me ached to cower under the covers, cower from the world.
I threw them off me instead.
I went for my run.
Jacob was beside me.
I had my shower.
Jacob fucked me in that shower.
I dressed myself in my armor.
And I went to work.
Ralph hugged me. Murmured apologies. There were tears. I responded appropriately to everything he said.
If he registered surprise at the fact he was still driving me to the office, I didn’t notice it.
There was a difference when Jacob entered the car.
He did not sit across from me.
He sat beside me.
His hand circled mine and he rested it on his thigh. He didn’t say anything else. I didn’t pull my hand away, though I should’ve.
I made it up the elevator, happy that it was only Jacob and I, and I didn’t have to see anyone. Abe had emailed me everything he’d found, and it was a lot. Almost enough to prove he didn’t have anything to do with Kershaw beyond those emails.
Not enough to make me trust him.
He was right last night. The only person I would trust without question was lying on a metal slab in a morgue somewhere.
And maybe one more stood beside me in the elevator, holding my hand. It wasn’t by choice that I trusted him. Like everything with Jacob, it was by force.
He let go of my hand as we stepped out of the elevator and I felt the loss, only slightly, since most of me resembled the human-shaped slab of ice that all of my employees believed me to be.
As they always were at this hour, the offices were empty.
Well, almost empty.
It wasn’t unheard of for Vaughn to be here at this time, but I didn’t expect him. He’d only left my apartment after midnight, and he had drunk less vodka than me, but that wasn’t saying much at all. I hadn’t wanted him there in the first place, but he hadn’t given me much choice, either, turning up with tear stained makeup and two bottles of Grey Goose.
To his credit, he’d only made me suffer through one long embrace b
efore he’d sat in my living room with me, drinking and hardly speaking.
Vaughn stood up, blinking at me as I walked past him. “Char, I didn’t expect you in today.”
“Why? Because my sister was murdered yesterday?” I asked.
He flinched.
“She’s going to be dead whether I’m here or at home,” I said. “I’ve got work to do, this is an important day and it can’t be rescheduled for a death in anyone’s family. I think I even made that rule. It wouldn’t be proper for me not to abide by the rules I made, would it?”
I didn’t wait for his answer.
“Get the board members on the phone, confirm with each of them that the meeting is going ahead as planned, in case any of them has some kind of idea I wasn’t going to be here.”
Again, I didn’t wait. I walked into the office, closed the door and got to work.
I once traveled to Serbia on a business trip. A security contract, I think it was. Such things weren’t unusual. I had a company jet for this precise reason. I had been to a lot of different places in my work. War-torn, some of them. I’d been to Bosnia, seen the scars on the city, cut by a neighbor that on this visit seemed absent of any wounds.
I was walking somewhere when I saw it. Amidst the rest of the perfectly formed concrete structures, sat a ruined and half standing building. It couldn’t have been large, especially when I was used to being swallowed by sky scarring buildings in New York, but it was big enough to tower over my head. Half of it was missing. A chunk ripped out from a bomb in the long-buried war.
It still stood, though. Even though it had been years since destruction tore through it, and most likely should have been torn down.
It was still there.
I remember it striking me, how the building looked perfectly intact everywhere else, could have been serviceable, inhabitable, if not for the huge chunk exposing its skeleton to the world. To the elements.
I didn’t really understand how it could still be standing, with half of it ripped away.
The wind whistled through the graveyard and then whipped through the open and exposed part of me.
Now I knew why that building still stood. How it could still stand. Because I was that building. I had something ripped away from me. Torn brutally. The part that would make me whole. Inhabitable.
Now I just stood there, watching the casket, the priest in front of it speaking. The concrete stones, stark against the too green grass.
I was the building that would stand, maybe out of habit, maybe because no one wanted to tear it down. Maybe because the reminder needed to be there. Of horror.
Of the blood that might be able to be mopped up, bullet holes plastered over, but it would always be there. The one building that could neither be torn down or used again. That lived half in this world and half in the next.
In the worst sort of limbo because it was dead and it was alive and it was both or neither.
Or maybe that building was just there. Nothing else could explain why. It just was. And it wasn’t.
Whatever the reason, I was that.
It was the cheese in the fridge that did it. It wasn’t the funeral. It wasn’t the photos her friends had put together for her. It wasn’t any of the many moving speeches that various people said.
It wasn’t even watching the coffin containing half of my sister’s cremated remains being lowered into a grave.
No, I kept my composure through all of this.
I didn’t shed one tear.
I did what was expected. I signed checks for funeral directors, for the grave plot. I greeted mourners. I answered emails.
Jacob was by my side the entire time. He didn’t hold my hand, didn’t placate me with empty words like everyone else did. He was silent. But he was there.
And he was there, in my elevator as we rode it up on the day that we buried my sister’s coffin.
That’s what today would always be.
And the next day would be the day after we buried her.
Every day after that would be the same.
I wouldn’t be counting time in Mondays, months, years.
I would be calculating it to the proximity to this day. To how long my sister’s ashes had been inside a grave.
“You don’t have to come in,” I said as the doors opened to my apartment.
There were flowers everywhere.
Deliveries likely accepted by my housekeeper.
Meaning well.
I’d have them picked up and donated in the morning.
He didn’t answer.
I turned to face him, to look at him for the first time I had today. I’d done everything I could to avoid making eye contact.
Because I was afraid.
Even though I was so sure that I had nothing left to be afraid of. I was afraid of him. Meeting his eyes and having to face the truth in them.
I was proud of the fact I didn’t react to the pain that speared through me with his gaze.
“I need tonight to be...” I trailed off.
Alone.
That’s what I was. Whether he was present or not, whether I was in a crowded room, a city teeming with people, living on an overpopulated earth—I was alone.
“You don’t need to stay,” I said. “I don’t want you to.”
It was a lie.
I wanted him to more than anything.
Precisely why I didn’t want him to.
Why I couldn’t have him staying.
His jaw was granite as I spoke, his hands fisted at his sides, not taking his eyes from me.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I continued. “On our run.”
He still didn’t speak.
“Jacob,” I said his name like a prayer. But my voice only cracked slightly. A hairline fracture.
A muscle in his jaw ticked and he nodded once, stepping back into the elevator.
I exhaled in relief or disappointment, preparing for the doors to close. They started to, then a large hand attached to a muscled arm shot out, stopping them.
In two rapid blinks, he crossed the distance between us, gripping the back of my neck and yanking me into a brutal kiss.
I didn’t intend on responding. But with Jacob, I didn’t have a choice. My mouth moved against his, matching his violence, never surrendering to him. It was all the words he hadn’t said since it happened, all the words he wouldn’t say, poured into that kiss. It speared at my soul, sparked all those nerve endings I was so sure had died with Molly.
I was in his arms, my clothes being torn from my body as he slammed me against a wall. A resounding crash echoed through the apartment as the wall in which Jacob had slammed me sent a mirror shattering on the marble.
I barely noticed.
My body reveled in the pain shooting up my back from the impact, from Jacob’s fingers pressing too hard into my soft skin. I wanted more of it. Blood trickled over my hands as I raked my nails through his flesh.
He let out a hiss, releasing me from the kiss and yanking at my hair to expose my neck. His teeth grazed the skin.
“I know you’re in too much pain for me to take it away, so I’ll give you more, because I want to give you something,” he rasped.
“Give me everything,” I demanded, my voice a rasp.
And he did.
Enough pain to forget about the rest of the world.
For a while at least.
I forgot what I’d even been looking for in the fridge once my eyes touched that single packet of cheese.
My hand went out and touched the plastic hesitantly. It was shaking.
This was the last time I’d ever see a packet of cheese in my refrigerator again. One that Molly had bought. Touched. Soon the world would be absent of things that she had touched while alive.
Apart from her art. That was her.
But ordinary things. Her clothes would stop smelling like her eventually. Her apartment would be rented out by someone else.
I didn’t know how many of those mundane things I’d run throu
gh my head. I must’ve blacked out, because I was on the floor. The same floor that I’d crumpled onto after a nameless thug left me beaten but not broken.
I was broken now.
I found myself wishing, clutching that packet of cheese, that he had killed me that night. That he had smashed my head against this cold marble, crushed my skull and left me to die. Because if he had, then my sister would buy more stupid cheese, she would wake up at noon in an apartment full of chaos and Chinese takeout boxes. She’d paint great art. She’d live.
If only he’d killed me.
I’d been so fascinated with my own death for a long time. I’d never really wanted to die. I didn’t even want to die now. I wanted to die then. When my death would’ve made a difference. When my death would’ve saved her. I didn’t yearn for my death anymore. I needed my life in order to devote it to revenge.
He found me on the floor.
Clutching cheese.
Wishing for death and planning revenge.
I didn’t know if he said anything. If he did, I wasn’t in a place to hear it.
All I knew was that I was in his arms, on the floor of my kitchen, he was holding me like the time I’d been beaten but not broken.
He was holding me now I wasn’t beaten but broken. Shattered. Destroyed. Pulverized.
His lips touched my hair.
I clung to his jacket, letting the cheese fall to the ground.
And I cried.
I wept.
For the first time in years. Likely for the last time too.
He didn’t let me go.
I stared at the array of colors linked together in a mosaic. It didn’t make up an image. Not a conventional one at least.
“I don’t want to paint what everyone else sees. I want to paint what I feel when I see what everyone else thinks they see.”