by Claire Kent
“Kelly, I know it’s terrible for there to be no way to get justice now, but isn’t it better to know?” Reese was clearly grasping for any comfort she could. “Isn’t it better to know one way or the other? Isn’t that what you set out to do in the first place?”
“Yes. But now it feels…worse.” Her hair was falling all over the place, shielding Kelly’s face like an ineffectual curtain.
Reese kept stroking her. “Why is it worse now?”
Kelly’s whole body was convulsing, and tears, sweat, and snot were smearing her face. “Because it felt like there might be some meaning to it with someone to bring to justice,” she choked out. “It felt like there was a purpose.”
There was no purpose now. No answers left to find. No justice left to seek. No way of understanding the murder of her father.
Just a good man dead on the ground when he shouldn’t have been.
She’d thought she’d gotten to the lowest point before, but this was so much lower than anything else she’d experienced.
Kelly wasn’t sure she could survive it.
“It’s all…just…meaningless.”
The sobs kept coming, ripping, ripping her apart, ripping through her from her gut to her throat.
Reese scooted over on the floor until she was holding Kelly’s upper body in her lap. It sounded like Reese was on the verge of crying too. “Kelly, please. I don’t know what to do.”
There was nothing to do. No help. No fix. No answer.
Just the absolute injustice of the universe.
Kelly no longer had the energy to sob, and her throat was unbearably sore. She just rocked herself in a ball, whimpering.
Reese scrambled to her feet and returned with a damp cloth and pulled Kelly’s head into her lap.
Reese seemed to be more in control now that Kelly’s sobs had gotten less frantic. Stroking her hair and wiping her face, Reese was saying soothing words that Kelly couldn’t quite process.
They were in the same position several minutes later when there was a knock on the door.
Kelly hardly registered the sound, or the fact that Reese had gotten up to answer it.
When she returned, however, Jack was with her.
“Sorry,” Reese mumbled. “I called him. I was scared. Please don’t hate me.”
Kelly didn’t have the energy to hate anyone.
“Kelly,” Jack murmured, the handsome, grizzled face tightening as he sank down beside her. “Can I help?”
“No,” she managed to say.
He gathered her into his arms and lifted her up without any show of effort. He carried her over to the couch.
And she let him.
He laid her down with her head in his lap. “I can’t do much,” Jack admitted, in response to her last feeble comment. “But I took care of things, so nothing will be publicized through my guys.”
There were more tears now. “Okay,” she forced out, not able to articulate anything else.
She wasn’t really close to Jack, but he was more of a friend than anyone in her life except Reese. He knew the whole story. He was warm and strong and solid. And she needed him.
Needed something.
Her weeping built up in momentum again as she recovered from her first wave of exhaustion. “Oh, God,” she gasped, holding her stomach tightly as if she could somehow force the pain back. “Oh, God, I miss him. My dad.”
“I know,” Jack said, pulling her up a little so he could wrap his arms around her. “The whole thing is just one fucking nightmare.”
Reese had cleaned up some more, but now she came over to Kelly with a glass of water and something in her hand. “It’s a mild tranquilizer. If you want it. It might help a little…for a while.”
Kelly just couldn’t stop sobbing, and she would be grateful for anything that might help.
So she took a few sips of water, and when she saw that she could keep them down, she managed to swallow the pill as well.
She fell back on top of Jack, and eventually she fell into an uneasy sleep.
Kelly didn’t know how long she slept, and when she woke she was completely disoriented.
She was still on the couch, and Jack was still beside her. She blinked rapidly over her swollen eyes. Felt fuzzy, heavy, aching, and her head felt like it might pound her into the ground.
“Hi,” she croaked stupidly, trying to focus up at Jack’s face.
Jack had been relaxing back against the sofa, but at her voice he straightened up and looked down at her. “Hi,” he said softly.
Her eyes burned again, but she didn’t seem to have any tears. “Reese?”
“She ran to the store,” Jack explained. The sun was coming in through the window, which meant it must be morning. “She thought you might want some ginger ale or ice cream or chocolate or something. So she went to stock up on provisions.” He gave her a small half-smile.
Kelly almost, almost smiled back. “Thanks for coming,” she said, her throat still painful and dry. “I think I might have had a breakdown.”
Jack nodded. “I guess things kind of fell apart for you.”
He wasn’t prying, wasn’t presuming to demand answers she might not want to give. And because of this she was able to reply hoarsely, “Yeah. I’d thought…I’d thought I’d gotten over a lot of this. At least the worst of it. But it’s like an old wound was just ripped open, and it hurts more than it did at the beginning.”
It still did. Hurt so much. With no hatred or apathy or drive for revenge to shield her from the bitter truth of it, the loss of her father hurt more now than it ever had.
Jack was quiet for a long time.
Then he finally said, “I can’t imagine how much it must hurt. But maybe…maybe…” He paused. “Maybe it’s like you were saying before, when you decided to go back to him.”
“I don’t remember what I said.”
So he told her. “Maybe this time the wound will heal clean.”
—
One of the strangest things about life was you eventually started to feel better.
No matter how torn apart Kelly was, no matter how much it felt like the pain would actually kill her during the night, she felt a little better the next day.
Not good. Not anything close to good. But just a little better. Enough that she could take a shower, get dressed, and drink some coffee.
Jack hadn’t yet left, so the three of them sat around Reese’s small living area with their coffee, with a kind of bleak exhaustion that was at least a little better than the traumatic grief of the night before.
When no one said anything for a while, Kelly told Jack, “You need to shave.”
He rubbed his chin, the bristles making a rasping sound in the quiet room. “Yeah. I guess I do.”
“So what now?” Reese asked, looking from one of them to the other. “What happens now? Are you going to expose what you know? I mean, the whole story. I know you’re not going to put the story out there that Caleb did the killing.”
Kelly sighed and closed her eyes. “I’m not going to expose anything. I know Caleb and Moore were wrong. Obviously they were. But I just…” She cleared her throat. “I’ve been wrong too. And it doesn’t feel right for me to punish them, when I’m just as guilty as they are.”
“You’re not—” Reese began.
“Yes, I am. I know I am.” She stared down into her mug at the black coffee. “You don’t get to play with other people’s lives the way I did and claim you did something good. The truth is good. Knowing the truth is worth doing. But the way I got it…It doesn’t feel right to me. Not any more right than what Caleb did back then.”
She could still see Caleb’s face—how utterly broken it had been. She’d done that to him. She’d loved him, and she’d still broken him. “I don’t get to claim I did something good.”
“So no justice at all,” Reese murmured. “Are you going to be okay with that?”
Kelly shook her head. “Who could be okay with that? If there was justice available for me, I
think I would take it. But the person who is really guilty is dead, he’s beyond justice now. And all that’s left would be…would be a gesture that accomplishes nothing.”
She could still hear Caleb’s voice on those old tapes—how horrified he sounded, how young and upset he’d been. He hadn’t taken any pleasure in her father’s death. It had twisted something in his heart that had never been untwisted.
Actions had consequences, even if they were never addressed in the criminal justice system. Caleb hadn’t been untouched by his sins.
Neither was she. She was paying for them even now.
“We can put all the evidence away,” Jack said. “But I think you’ll need to talk to your mother. She knows what we learned yesterday. I called her last night to tell her we weren’t going through with it, but I’m not sure…” He cleared his throat. “You need to talk to her. I’d do it soon.”
Kelly felt a flicker of anxiety, a sharp emotion that was almost a relief as it slashed through her chilly numbness. “You think she’ll go ahead with our original plan? Publicize the evidence that makes it look like Caleb did the killing?”
“I think it’s possible. She’s a lot angrier than you ever were. And she’s a lot less reasonable.”
Kelly knew Jack was right, and the knowledge propelled her to her feet. “Shit. This thing is never over, is it? Where is she? Do you know?”
Jack stood up too. “She’s in hospice care,” he said. “She’s not been doing well.”
She was dying. It shouldn’t matter that much to Kelly, since her mother had abandoned her a long time ago and she’d done nothing to make up for it.
But it did matter. It made Kelly’s stomach twist with feeling. Like here was another sad story that was about to reach its end.
—
An hour later Kelly was walking into her mother’s room.
She was shocked by how frail her mother had grown in just a couple of weeks. She was dying of cancer. She’d had a prognosis of three months almost three months ago.
She didn’t have much time left.
She was awake, though, and fully alert when Kelly entered the room.
“Jack said he called to tell you what happened,” Kelly said without greeting or preamble. She and her mother were way beyond the niceties.
Her mother nodded. “He told me. It doesn’t make a difference.”
“It does make a difference. Caleb isn’t guilty of this after all. Our whole plan to seek justice can’t go anywhere now. I told Jack to call the whole thing off.”
“I know you did.” Her mother’s voice was thin and brittle. “But you’re not the only decision maker here.”
“I know that.” Kelly sighed and rubbed her face, feeling so tired she could barely keep her eyes open. It was like the last three months, the last seventeen years, had finally caught up with her, leaving her with no energy at all. “I don’t want to do anything, though.”
“That’s because you fell for him, like a silly girl, but I’m not so blinded by feelings or hormones or whatever it is. Caleb Marshall has never been anything but a cold, selfish bastard, and I can still make him pay for that.”
“He didn’t kill Dad. I heard the phone calls. It was Earnest. And he’s dead—beyond the scope of our vengeance now.”
“Someone has to pay for it.” That had been her mother’s refrain all along. It had turned her into this driven, obsessive, pitiless creature. She hadn’t always been like this. Grief and injustice had twisted her into it.
Kelly released another long breath. “Someone has paid for it. You and I have paid for it. For way too long now. I’d like to…I’d like for us to stop, and only we can make that happen.”
Her mother met her eyes across the distance. Kelly didn’t expect anything to change. Her mother had hardened herself so much to this battle she’d lived to fight that nothing was going to soften her. Not her daughter. Not her death. Not the truth.
But something did change in her mother’s eyes. Not softness or sympathy—but something that looked almost like understanding. “And you think it’s that easy. You just let go. Release. And we finally stop paying.”
“I don’t know. But I want to try. I’ve done everything I could to make this change, and there’s nothing left for me to do but let go. So that’s what I’m going to do. I really want…I really hope you’ll be able to let go too, if only so you can have some peace at the end here.”
“I want justice. All I ever wanted was justice.”
“I know. Me too. But what we have instead is the truth. It’s going to have to be good enough. If you expose Caleb as the killer, when we both know he’s not, then you’ve taken the truth away from us, so we’ll be left with nothing again.”
Her mother was silent for a really long time. “What are you going to do?”
Kelly gave a little shrug. “What I should have done a long time ago? I’m going to live my life and not keep reopening old wounds.”
“And Caleb?”
“That’s his choice to make.”
“Are you going to go back to him?”
“He’d never take me back, but my choices aren’t dictated by his. I know that now. It’s not a happy truth, but it’s the only one I have. I’m still going to live my life.”
Indecision and bitterness twisted on her mother’s face for a few moments, until it finally resolved into an exhaustion that was akin to what Kelly felt herself. “Okay, then.”
“Okay what?”
“Okay. So you live your life.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to die.”
And that was the answer, Kelly realized. Her mother was too far gone to embrace forgiveness or reconciliation. But in her own way she was letting go too.
It was the best she could hope for.
Chapter 11
Two weeks later Kelly waited in the lobby of the Vendella building and wondered if Caleb would agree to see her.
She figured there was about a fifty-fifty shot. He’d made it clear he didn’t want her in his life again, so it was possible he would simply reject her request for a few minutes with him. On the other hand, however, he was naturally curious, and he would want to know what she wanted, showing up at his office out of the blue like this.
He might let her up just to see what she was doing here.
As she stood, twisting her hands together nervously, she wondered what she was doing here herself.
For the last two weeks, she’d done what she’d told her mother she would do. She’d lived. She’d finished up her in-progress jobs, tried to round up a few new clients, had dinner with Reese and breakfast with Jack, and actually thought about getting a dog.
She’d also thought a lot about Caleb. So much so that she knew she wouldn’t be able to move on without making one more attempt to see him.
She was starting to feel a little better about her father, but the thought of Caleb was still like a twisting knife in her heart. She didn’t know what could come of this—not after all of the lies and manipulations and false pretenses from both of them—but there had been something real underlying all of that, and she wondered if it was something that could survive even the kind of breaking they’d been through.
There was only a slim chance of it. Caleb wasn’t the kind of man to forgive and forget. But she’d finally realized she wouldn’t be able to move on unless she tried.
So here she was. Waiting in the lobby of his building. Wondering what he would say.
“You can go up,” the receptionist said, after calling to see if she’d be allowed up to the executive suite.
Kelly swallowed hard, a wave of both fear and relief rushing over her. Then she stepped onto the elevator and pressed the button for his floor.
She watched as the digital numbers increased on the display above the doors, and she told herself that either way she’d be better off at the end of this conversation.
If Caleb rejected her, then he rejected her. He would have every right to do so. At l
east she would have tried.
She was filled with an unnatural kind of calm as she walked off the elevator, down the hall, and into his suite. His assistant eyed her coolly but said politely enough, “You can go on in.”
And that was it. Kelly walked through his office door.
Caleb was standing by the window, the way he’d been when she’d shown up in his office just a few Sundays ago to play a sexy little game and then sneak into the storage room.
It felt like a lifetime ago. Like it was someone else who had done that.
Not her.
Not Kelly.
He turned around as she entered, and she closed the door behind her.
He looked older, somehow, and tired, but he was as handsome and controlled as he’d always been—with the exception of that one terrible night. He wore one of his expensive business suits, and his gaze was utterly cool.
“I’ve been standing here,” he said, not waiting for her to make the first move, “in the time it took you to come up, trying to figure out what you could possibly want from me.”
She swallowed so hard it hurt her throat. No niceties here. She shouldn’t have expected them. “I just wanted to talk, and I thought there was a better chance you would see me here, in your office, than if I’d shown up at your place in the evening.”
“I haven’t been staying at the house lately anyway. I wouldn’t have been there.”
“Oh. Okay.”
They stared at each other, and she saw his eyes lower to scan the length of her body—in her flowing skirt and lace top, the slightly bohemian style she always wore for her work—before his gaze traveled back up to her face.
Finally he asked calmly, “So what did you want to talk about?”
She sucked in a slow breath and gave a little shrug. “I didn’t like how we’d left things. It’s been nagging at me. So I thought it was worth trying to…”
He gave her a bitter little smile. “To make peace? To become friends?”
For some reason the words and the smile hurt her chest more than the coolness in his manner. “I never expected to be friends. No. We were never really friends. Were we?”
“No. We weren’t.”