Baby, Be My Last (The Fairfields Book 3)

by Piper Lennox

  “Sit.” She pats the foot of the bed. I want to remain standing just to spite her, but my legs feel weak and my head’s spinning. So I sit.

  “Here.” Mom opens her nightstand and pulls a small lockbox from it. She retrieves the key from underneath a lamp, opens the box, and passes me an envelope.

  Inside is a stack of money.

  “What is this?”

  “That,” she sighs, flopping beside me, “is all the money you gave me since July.”

  I push it at her like a bomb. “Mom, no.”

  “Yes.” She pushes it back. “As soon as we knew your father would get his raise, I decided enough was enough. It wasn’t fair to take your money. It was never fair.”

  “I’m twenty-two. Call it rent money, or something. People my age that live at home pay rent and utilities and groceries, just let me do that.”

  “You’ve been paying far more than that for way too long, and we both know it.” Mom closes her hands over mine, making me hold the envelope. The chill of her fingers reminds me of when I was little: she was always cold, sick or not, and I loved holding her hands against my face when I came inside from playing. “I’ll warm you up,” I always told her, “and you cool me down.” She laughed every time.

  “Where’s Dad?” I sniff. The tears are out, now. There’s no stopping them. But maybe I can talk sense into Dad, since I clearly can’t talk it into Mom.

  “He’s a little upset with me, right now.” Mom rolls her eyes.

  “So he doesn’t want to sell the house?”

  “No, he does. It was his idea, actually. He realized, if we filed Chapter 13 and got a motion approved to sell this place, the debts could potentially be discharged before the new year. I was thrilled he finally got on board—I’ve wanted to file for years.”

  “Then what’s he mad at you for?”

  “This,” she says, laughing under her breath as she taps the envelope in my hands. “I told him everything.”

  My eyes widen. “You didn’t.”

  “I had to. He just wanted to downsize the house, and I needed to convince him the bills were bad enough to warrant bankruptcy. We need to just...start over, and he thought there was more money coming in than there was, because I was working more. I had to tell him the money he thought I brought in before was mostly yours.”

  “I’m willing to bet he’s way more than ‘upset’ with you.”

  “He’ll get over it.” She waves her hand. “To be honest, I think he suspected it all along. But you know how he is. So prideful, he’d never admit he knew, because then it’s like saying he ‘allowed it’ to happen.”

  I have to nod at this. Dad didn’t even like Mom having to work, as worried about her staying in remission as I was, but taking any help whatsoever from his daughter? He’d sooner lose everything than let that happen.

  Well, I think, looking around their half-bare room, they kind of are.

  “We’re going to be fine, Cami.” Mom scoots behind me and works a tangle out of my hair with her fingers. She starts braiding, and again I’m reminded of when I was little. The more hair she lost from chemo, the more time she’d spend styling mine. When I asked her once if she missed her hair, she said it was more fun to do mine, now that she didn’t have to do hers.

  I knew she was lying, but I didn’t cut my hair for three years after that. If combing and braiding my hair really did help her, even a little, I wanted to have as much of it as possible.

  “I thought you guys.... I thought things were okay again.” The words break apart in the air in front of me. I pull my knees to my chest and bury my face, feeling the tears seep through my leggings. “I thought things were going right.”

  “They were. They are. I know it’s going to be tough for a little while, adjusting to the changes—but when it’s over, we’ll have our lives back. All of us. Remember when you left Somerset? You and Brynn made all those plans to move in together. You can do that, now. You can travel, you can go back to college.... There’s so much life you haven’t lived yet, Cami. I don’t want to hold you back from it anymore.”

  “You didn’t. I wanted to stay and help.”

  “I know you did, sweetheart. And you did help us. But now it’s time for us to…to take a different path, and you can start on your own.”

  Mom keeps braiding my hair, and I keep crying. We hear Dad directing the haulers in the basement on how to lift Jeff’s busted fridge properly.

  She rubs my back and kisses my temple before she leaves to help him (or rescue the haulers from his criticism). I let the voices from the vent tangle around me as I stand in front of their closet mirror and undo the braid, strand by strand and pin by pin.

  “Everything okay?” Silas asks when I come outside.

  I tell him all of it. But I don’t cry. Even my voice feels robotic, the details coming out on their own.

  “Whoa.” He unclips Arrow from his leash when we wander inside. Without missing a beat, Arrow sniffs from room to room to survey the changes and take stock of the hauling crew. Silas follows me to my bedroom and shuts the door before asking, “How are you feeling about all this?”

  “I don’t know.” In my head, there’s a spinning calendar of the last few months. Specifically, the last six weeks: all the shifts I didn’t take, the money Mom hid or pushed back at me. All the decisions she and Dad made behind closed doors. Every sign I encountered that things weren’t going right, after all. I couldn’t see a single one.

  “This isn’t your fault,” Silas says cautiously, like he can read my mind and doesn’t like what he’s seeing. “And it’s not necessarily a bad thing, right? Your mom seems happy about it.”

  I nod and sit at my desk. My work schedule is printed neatly on the open notebook in front of me.

  “I should, uh...I should get ready for my shift tonight.”

  Silas leans against my door and studies me. I think of the night he stayed for dinner. How, after he left, I stood in that exact spot, so overcome with desire I couldn’t even make it into my bed before touching myself, pretending my hands were his. It was the first time in my adult life I’d ever wondered what I was missing—not just as a virgin who rarely gave virginity a second thought, but as...me. The girl who worked every spare minute she was awake, because she didn’t know anything different. Meeting Silas, I wondered if I was missing even more than I’d realized.

  Because of this, I think, looking around my room as though it’s been stripped as bare as the others, when my parents haven’t disturbed a single item. Even so, the feeling lingers: this exact situation is what I worked so hard to avoid.

  And then, suddenly, there was Silas.

  “I’ll go, then,” he says, hesitating. “You sure you’re okay?”

  “I think so.” I blink and try to cast the numbness off as he moves closer, bends down, and kisses me. My boyfriend, I tell myself, hoping the thought will carry the same giddy high with it that it did last night.

  “I’ll call you tonight.” Silas rights my earring, the way he did this morning, and lets his hand linger along my jaw. Slowly, he cups my chin and tilts my head up for another kiss.

  This one breaks through the numbness like an axe into ice. I put my hands on the back of his head, holding him to me as long as possible, and remind myself that it will be okay. Life might still go right, even if it feels wrong.

  And if it doesn’t, at least I have him. I can lose it all—but I won’t lose this.

  21

  First thing Monday morning, while I’m still waiting for the coffee pot to start, I get a phone call from Tim.

  Not that I know it before I answer; I don’t have his number. Telemarketers like catching me early, so I answer with a curt, “Hello?”

  Silence. I look back at the screen and check that the call’s still connected. “Hello?” I say again.

  “Uh...hi. Hello.” Even in a stammer with a spotty connection, I recognize his voice. “It’s me. Um....”

  “Tim,” I finish for him. Maybe he was about to say s
omething else, “Dad” or “your father,” but the hell if I’m going to fill in the blank that way.

  He pauses. “Yes. How are you? I didn’t wake you, did I?”

  “No.” I pour what little coffee has brewed so far into a mug, add too much milk, and sip. “So. What’s up?”

  “Are you free today, at all? I’m going to be at the Acre all day, but I was hoping we could talk.”

  “I think we’ve talked enough.”

  “Silas, please. I don’t want to leave things the way we did, and...and I would like to be involved in your life.”

  I catch my reflection in the coffee pot, distorted and faint, but filled with tension.

  I don’t want to see him. But if nothing else, maybe I can get rid of some of my anger. Yell at him again, call him on his shit, and finally accept that Timothy Fairfield is the asshole so many people have always told me he is.

  “I can leave work a little early,” I say, after a minute, “but I still won’t get into the city until five or so.”

  “That’s fine—like I said, I’ll be here all day. My office is on the second floor, at the end of the hall. It’s easy to miss because it looks like a regular suite, but—”

  “I know,” I interrupt, so eager to end the call, I don’t care about revealing I’ve been in his stupid hotel. “See you then.”

  “Looking forward to it,” he says, and sounds like he actually means it. I’m so stunned, I can’t even hang up first, the way I’d wanted.

  * * *

  Tim’s office at the Acre is almost identical to his office at the estate: rich colors, worn leather. A small library crawls up the walls of the converted suite’s entryway; the sunken living area boasts an enormous desk that could seat a family of eight for dinner.

  He stands when I enter. I ignore the handshake he offers.

  “Glad you could be here. Can I get you anything? Water, brandy? I’ve got cigars, if you smoke.”

  “I don’t,” I say flatly. I sit back, staring him down. “Why did you want to meet?”

  “Come on, Silas, you know why. That night at the estate—”

  “I’m tired of hearing you spin the same shit different ways. You said all that stuff about not being in my life to keep Jeannie and Caitlin-Anne, then turned around and admitted it was because you were afraid of looking bad and losing your business deals.”

  “You wanted to know why.” He sits back, too, clasping his hands, and I realize he’s mirroring me. It’s a psychology and business tactic I’ve read about online. Seeing it in action from him fuels the rage in my stomach. “I gave you every single reason, in no particular order. They weren’t ranked.”

  “Right. Like I’m too stupid to know which was more important.”

  “Not stupid,” he corrects, narrowing his eyes on mine, “just not me. No one but me knows what I’ve gone through and why I made the choices I did. So think what you want, that I was just covering my ass—I know I wasn’t.”

  “Then what was the most important reason? Because I could understand choosing your family over me.” I sit forward and refuse to take my eyes off his. Uninterrupted eye contact is probably another slick business trick of his, something to pry people into doing what he wants, so I’m not going to be the one who looks away first. “But choosing your business over me—over everyone and everything else? That, I can’t understand. And I never will. So if that’s what you asked me here for, just tell me. I can walk out now and save us both the trouble.”

  “That’s not what I asked you here for,” he says, voice reeking of fake calmness. He does look away first, but it’s just to adjust his watch.

  “Look: yes, protecting my reputation and business was important to me. It still is. But that doesn’t mean I don’t regret my decision, letting your mom keep me out of your life.”

  Tim pauses and swivels back and forth. I hear him click his tongue at the back of his mouth.

  “I wouldn’t do it over again,” he says. “If I could go back in time, I’d do whatever it took to be in your life, while staying in my daughter’s. If it cost me the business, my reputation...even if it had cost me Jeannie. I shouldn’t have let fear keep me away from you.”

  “So why did you?”

  “I was young. Stupid, selfish. Take your pick. And knowing what I know now, I’d trade everything to go back and do it differently.”

  Tim stares at the desk. “But I can’t, so I do my best to accept things as they stand, right now. I guess, to you, it comes across as me not caring, or not being sorry enough—but I do care. And I am sorry. But I also know I can’t change what I did, so I don’t dwell on it.”

  “Good for you,” I snap. “I don’t have that luxury. Your choices shaped my entire life. So I’m glad you can accept the fact you were—and are—a selfish prick, but I don’t want to.”

  I get up and start for the door. Tim’s chair doesn’t creak; no floorboards pop. I should’ve known he wouldn’t follow me this time, either.

  “Huh,” he says, when I reach the library. Then he laughs.

  My neck aches as I throw little more than a glance over my shoulder. “What?”

  “‘Don’t want to,’” he echoes. I hear crystal clinking. When I turn back, he’s pouring himself a drink from the decanter at the edge of the desk. “I think it’s funny you said that, instead of ‘can’t.’”

  “Why?”

  “Because a lot of people confuse the two. They think you have to want to do something to be able to do it. They treat ability and motivation as the same component.”

  Slowly, my body turns with my head. “And?”

  “And,” he says, drinking half the glass in one sip, “that’s the very first thing I learned, when I was shadowing my great-grandfather, and then his son. They told me to never confuse ‘can’t’ with ‘don’t want to,’ because that’s the number one thing that holds people back. In business, personal life—everything. I learned a lot, shadowing the two of them. More than when I shadowed my father later on, in fact. When my great-grandfather gave advice, you always knew it would be good. But that one...that one stuck with me the most.”

  I don’t know why I levitate back to the desk. My feet don’t even register the drop-off to the living area. “Bourne,” I say quietly. “Right?”

  Tim nods. “You look just like him, you know. That portrait right there is my favorite.”

  The wall to the far left, where a bedroom would go if this were a normal suite, is covered in huge oil paintings and black-and-white photos. Even from here, I see which one he’s talking about, but I get up to see it more closely, anyway.

  BOURNE FAIRFIELD: 1909, the plate on the frame reads. He looks completely different from the image I know, so serious and dated. This portrait has him clean-shaven, almost baby-faced, with just the hint of a smile.

  More than ever, it feels like I’m looking in a mirror.

  Tim steps up beside me and says, “He was nineteen there. Fairfield Industries wasn’t even a thought, yet.”

  “Yeah,” I scoff, “a real by-the-bootstraps story.” It’s an undeniable fact the Fairfields were one of the first families in this area, and that their tobacco plantation forever launched their legacy. For generations, the Fairfield men worked eighty-hour weeks from age thirteen until they died, growing their empire one venture and buyout at a time.

  It would actually be an impressive legacy, if it hadn’t been built on the backs of hundreds of slaves and, later, grown in their own neighbors’ misfortune.

  “I learned about Fairfield Pharmacy in history class, one year.” I put my hands back in my pockets and nod at a newspaper article. “You guys sold it to VitaCare Pharmacies in the 1980s.”

  “Yep. I didn’t want to let it go—lots of good memories attached, from when I was a kid—but it just wasn’t viable anymore.”

  “Ruthless.” Either my sarcasm goes over his head, or he doesn’t care. “We also learned that Bourne Fairfield bought the pharmacy from his friend because it was failing, back in...what was it, 1
912?” I glance at him. “It was his best friend’s family business. They’d owned and operated it since the day they came to this country.”

  Tim slides his eyes to mine. He sets his jaw. He sees exactly where I’m going with this.

  “Bourne could have saved the pharmacy for him. He had plenty of money—he could have gone in as a partner, even. But instead, he drove his best friend out of his own business and took over completely. Caught him in a tough spot, so he couldn’t refuse the offer.”

  “Yes,” Tim says, and I can’t hide my shock at his honesty. He reaches out to level the frame. “Bourne made plenty of mistakes. We all do.”

  “But not everyone’s mistakes have that far of a reach. A mistake that only hurts yourself is one thing. Doing something that hurts someone you care about....” I catch his reflection in the glass. “Not sure how a man lives with himself, after that.”

  “Same way anyone in this world lives with themselves,” Tim says, right on the tail of my sentence, and finishes his brandy.

  He wanders back to the desk. I don’t know why I follow and take my seat.

  “Being a broke Fairfield,” he says, chuckling as he pulls a cigar from the box on the shelf beside him, “probably wasn’t easy for you, huh?” I stay silent as he snips and lights it. A wreath of smoke forms between us. “All the expectations and rumors attached to the name, none of the money or rewards.”

  “Yeah. It wasn’t exactly a party.” Without asking, he pours me a brandy. This time, I take it. “I tried to go by McIntyre, Mom’s maiden, but everyone already knew. There wasn’t much point, until I moved to Hillford.”

  “So why didn’t you change it legally, when you were old enough?”

  “I thought about it,” I confess. The brandy bites inside my chest when I swallow. “My whole life, Mom told me being a Fairfield would ‘open doors I didn’t even know existed.’ Guess I kept hoping, one of these days...she’d be right.”