I nod, because what else can I do? But I shift my position so I have a full view of the beach and can watch their body language.
At first they’re busy pouring the champagne. Then they turn and toast me ironically before tossing the bubbly back, like it’s a shot. During their second glass, though, the drinking slows as the conversation intensifies. Tucker has set up the chairs, but neither bothers to sit. There’s a heated back and forth as I hold my breath—the heat mostly on Liv’s side. Then Tucker slumps into a chair, looking sullen, as Liv makes her way back to the hut.
“Yup,” she says when she arrives. “He put Cynthia up to it. He admitted it all.” Liv bends to set her cup inside a cloth bag. “Boy, I needed that drink. I think my nerves have finally stopped jangling.” She stands and adjusts the hem on her shorts, the straps on her tank top.
“And?” I say, when she can no longer avoid looking at me.
“And…” She takes a deep breath. “I told him he’s done interfering in my life.” A dimple appears in her cheek. “I told him I hope he gets Zika.”
I blink. I gape. I blink and gape simultaneously.
“Zika’s pretty bad,” she says defensively. “You can end up in a wheelchair.”
When I fold my arms over my chest she throws her hands up in exasperation. “Well, what did you want me to say, Finn? Want me to cut him out of my life for something that’s ancient history? Would that satisfy you?”
I raise my eyebrows at her.
“Do you have any idea how much I owe that man?”
“What do you owe yourself, Liv?” When had she become someone who settled for so little? I remember her in her mom’s house, overwhelmed with the dogs, overwhelmed with work, overwhelmed with “stuff.” There was still part of her that hoped—that knew—she’d have a better life one day. I don’t understand her willingness to go backward. “We’d be together now if it weren’t for him.”
“Would we?”
I’m about to argue—to explain once again how Tucker’s interference always came when I was about to beg her forgiveness—when the bleakness in her challenge finally registers. I force myself to take a deep breath. “Wait. You’re saying you wouldn’t have forgiven me if I showed up, hat in hand?”
She shakes her head at me. “Did you not listen to anything I told you last night? For the last time, Tucker is not the problem. This is about what I did.” She thumps her chest for emphasis. “Me.” Thump. “My loss of integrity.” Thump. “My actions.” Thump. “But while we’re on the subject of Tucker, I’m getting effing tired of you both making everything into a contest about me. It needs to stop. I effing picked you a decade ago and I effing repicked you last night. Either you stop acting so insecure about him or you can just—” she flaps her arms “—go to hell.”
I fall back a step. Her ferocity is shocking. As a rule, Liv doesn’t swear. Liv doesn’t raise her voice. In fact, the only time I’ve ever seen her let go, despite ample provocation, is the day she thought I was cheating on her.
She’s not backing down, either. Her chin is set at a mutinous angle and she huffs out a breath as she flops into the chair.
I stagger out of the hut, needing some space to think.
The sun is at an angle over the water that forces me to shield my eyes against the brightness. Down the beach, Tucker is slumped in a chair, one arm thrown over his eyes. While Liv and I have been dueling over our relationship, he fell asleep. The champagne bottle lies on its side in the sand. Beside it, his discarded paper cup rolls in a listless semicircle, teased by the breeze.
I don’t listen. Liv thinks I don’t listen. My biggest complaint about my father—the barrier that kept us apart all my life, and that nearly took down his company—was his inability to hear anyone’s opinion but his own. Now she’s telling me I’m acting like my old man.
I could dismiss her words, but she did try to get her message across last night. And Yolanda warned me I’d be going down the wrong route if I made this about Tucker. Why have I been so determined to make him the fallguy? Because it’s familiar? Because it’s easy? Because I thought it was a hack and would get me where I wanted to go fast?
I turn to look at the man I have been treating like a nemesis.
I won Liv the first time simply by being with her and loving the people she loves—or if I couldn’t do that, by at least treating them well. So that’s my answer. Being with her means accepting that sulky lump of humanity not only now, but from this moment forward. Can I really do that for her?
Can I?
I take a few minutes, and when I think I have myself back in hand, I reenter the hut.
Liv has turned in the chair, so that her head is on one arm rest and both legs are slung over the other. Her expression is one of acute misery. When she sees me, her face blanks and she swings herself upright. Her eyes widen as I sink to my knees and seize her hand.
I clear my throat and take a moment before I begin. “You’re the best person I know, Liv, and I want you to be happy, with or without me. You need time? Okay. I don’t like it, but I’ll respect it. However long it takes. But when you’re ready to deal with whatever this mistake was, if I can help, let me be a part of it. You need a lawyer? Consider it done. If Tucker needs one, I’ll pay for that, too. Whatever it is, we’ll face it together, all three of us.”
Her face is softening, and I’m starting to feel my chest loosen, because damn it, it actually feels good to let go of my resentment. I decide to keep going. “Speaking of Tucker, if it means that much to you, I’ll make nice with him. I’ll drive to Ohio and barbecue ribs with him Friday nights—at least the Friday nights that’s possible. I’ll guarantee him lifelong employment at Wakefield’s.” Even if I have to put him in the mail room. I take a deep breath. “I’ll—”
“You hate ribs,” she says.
I laugh without humor. “Yeah, I do. I really really do.” As far as I’m concerned, they’re the equivalent of greasy dental floss. “But I’ll choke ’em down for you, babe. Just—” I swallow and my voice wants to catch. “You’re a person who doesn’t quit on anyone. Please—” I feel my eyes prickling and have to look down to where my knees meet the sand, so I don’t start bawling. It’s a good while before I can look up again. “Please don’t start quitting with me.”
Miracle of miracles, an answering moisture rises in her eyes. She swallows and squeezes my hand. Her tongue comes out to wet her lips. Her mouth opens.
And then a shadow falls over us as Tucker looms in the doorway. “Nice pitch, Finnegan. Too bad you’re so lousy at the follow-through.” To Liv, he says, “Don’t listen to him. He’s an Olympic gold medalist in unreliability.”
I feel like saying, What’s it to you? You’ll be taken care of no matter what happens. But I finally know why I came here today and I won’t be side-tracked. I bite my tongue and look at Liv, letting what I feel for her shine through my eyes, hoping it’s enough.
Liv stares right back. The edges of her mouth slowly creep upward.
“Kibble?” Tucker says, and his voice is the most uncertain I’ve ever heard it.
Maybe that’s what catches Liv’s attention, because this time her head rotates in his direction and she drops my hand.
“Come outside with me.” Tucker’s voice grows more authoritative. He smiles coaxingly. “I figured out where he hid his stash. I would have spotted it earlier but I was tired. Needed my afternoon nap.”
A line forms between her brows. “Don’t do that,” she says flatly.
“Don’t do what?” He blinks and for probably the first time in my life, I feel sorry for Tucker. I’m not sure he’s ever met the Liv I met a few moments ago, but I think he’s about to.
“Don’t call me Kibble,” Liv says. “I hate that.”
Tucker blinks. “It’s a term of affection. You know that. Jeez, why—”
“You always use it when you’re trying to make me feel small and I hate it.”
“Okay, okay.” Tucker puts up his hands. “Just don’t fall f
or Finn’s line. He said he loved you before and—”
“I’m not qualified for my job,” Liv blurts out.
It takes a minute for her words to register, because for one thing she’s looking at Tucker, not me, and for another, she said it so quickly, it sounded like a foreign word. Like something you’d say in Lithuanian when somebody sneezed. I’mnotqualifiedformyjob.
Then she jerks her head back to me. “My diploma is fake and so was my reference letter when I got hired. Everything’s fake. All fake. I’m a faking faker.”
And now a verbal torrent is unleashed, at times incoherent, at other times scrambled, but always drifting in the same direction.
At the lowest point in her life, at a time she will forever regret, Liv cheated. It’s true she was under stress, she tells me, but that’s no excuse. Ada was close to hospitalization, they were nearly out of money, and Liv had no time to study during her last year of college because of the pressing need to work. She’d spectacularly blown a final exam in one class, she was sure of it, and her non-attendance had alienated a professor who had previously volunteered a reference letter. Where once she had been a class favorite, he now couldn’t bear to look at her.
And oh, by the way, all this time later, Liv says, she continued to miss me.
Then lo and behold, what should arrive in the mail but the absolute best news. Suspiciously good news, but still. She’d passed—with honors in the difficult course—and the prof was willing to praise her in print.
She was reeling, dazed at the unexpected run of good luck, when yet more arrived. Tucker, already working for HMZ, had learned of a job opening. He had applied on her behalf and must have done a decent job of it, because she had an interview.
She had gone. She had killed it. The company offered. Then on the day she received her employment contract via registered mail—and boy, after years of receiving past-due bills, how weird it was to finally appreciate the magic of the post office—Tucker confessed.
The honors mark in the critical class? The work of a computer-savvy girlfriend in the departmental office. Good thing Tucker knew her, because Liv had definitely failed that exam. Definitely. And the prof’s unstinting recommendation? A sleight of hand, courtesy of the same girlfriend. It was amazing what one could accomplish with bootlegged stationery and the prose and signature copied from another student’s authentic letter.
But Liv shouldn’t worry about being exposed. Tucker had something on the now-ex-girlfriend, so she’d probably never blab. The prof had been diagnosed with stage four cancer, so he wasn’t currently available to contradict the paperwork. And if she were “lucky,” the prof would be cold in the ground before Liv ever required another reference.
All she had to do was say nothing, take the job, work her socks off, and earn her credentials in an unofficial apprenticeship.
Liv had almost done the right thing then by ripping up the contract and going to the university to confess. But she hadn’t.
She hadn’t, and the prof lived, and because she had given in to a craven impulse for self-preservation, she had never known a day’s peace while at work.
“Say something,” Liv says when she comes to the end of her speech.
CHAPTER 26
FINN
Throughout this recitation, Tucker has remained mute. He hasn’t moved, other than to pass Liv a towel since I hadn’t thought to bring Kleenex.
Truthfully, I’m feeling dazed and am having trouble summoning the appropriate words.
Ever since Liv mentioned the word “secret,” in anticipation of this moment, I imagined her confessing to a wide range of troubling scenarios. In most of them, I envisioned Tucker embarking on a criminal enterprise, with Liv getting caught in it incidentally—like, she thought she was driving him on an errand, only to discover she was the getaway driver in a bank heist.
In a few instances, I imagined Liv with a higher degree of culpability. Embezzlement, for instance, which is why a forensic accountant started poring over Tucker’s projects this morning.
I even imagined situations where Liv was the criminal mastermind, and Tucker the reluctant accomplice. Liv committing a hit and run, for instance, with Tucker confined to body dismemberment and disposal.
In all the scenarios I imagined, we’d basically be required to step off the plane and hire her a criminal lawyer and crisis management specialist.
But this, this is simultaneously both more mundane and consequential.
From what Yolanda and I have gathered, in the Tucker-Liv partnership, Liv performed most of the work while Tucker provided little in the way of engineering oversight. That’s scary enough. But if Liv’s not a technician, that means HMZ clients have been paying for the work of a professional engineer, yet acting on the opinion of a layperson.
A decade-worth of industrial clients who have built refineries and pipelines and gas plants.
And now that I’ve been made aware of the problem, it’s my responsibility to see their faulty work corrected. If I don’t, and there’s an injury or accident involving one of their projects, like the one which just occurred in Corpus Christi, Wakefield will be liable. We are talking potential legal exposure of company-destroying magnitude.
But as none of that is relevant or fixable right now, and I’m just grateful to finally be in Liv’s confidence, I squish her to me and hope I’m making the right noises of support.
They seem to be working. I can feel the tension ebbing from her body and she’s definitely hugging me back, when I hear myself say, “But that doesn’t make sense.”
“I know, I know.” She pats my chest and steps out of my arms. Her face is red and tear-streaked. She pushes her hair behind her ears and raises the towel again to blot her tears. “This isn’t an excuse, but I was irrational at the time and—”
“No. I mean—” I scratch my head “—it doesn’t make sense.”
She shakes her head in incomprehension.
I put my hands on my hips and search my memory for the scrap of conversation I’d had with Yolanda the other night, before I sent her to Liv’s room. I hadn’t been focusing very well, but a name finally floats into consciousness. “By any chance, was your reference from a Dr. Yakish?”
“Yes,” she says, fresh misery breaking over her face. “That was him.” She blows her nose and shakes her head in confusion. “Why?”
Why, indeed? It’s coming back to me now—what Yolanda casually dropped when I was distraught over Tucker’s interference.
“I don’t think you understand how much research Yolanda does to prepare for a retreat. Before you came on this trip, she had already read through your file and reviewed your transcripts.”
One of Liv’s shoulders comes up apologetically. “But I told you—you won’t see anything wrong. The paperwork looks normal.”
“No, I get it. But I don’t think you understand how thorough Yolanda is. Or how connected. Did I tell you she guest lectures for a few colleges?”
Liv shakes her head, clearly growing impatient. “And?”
“She knows your prof, Liv. As a matter of fact, she had dinner with him a few weeks ago and your name came up.”
Liv blinks.
“This…Dr. Yakish was very fond of you and wanted to know what became of you, especially since he’d been happy to write you a glowing reference. He’s one of the reasons we were confident about sending you back to school.”
Liv is frozen with the towel partway to her nose. Her eyes cut to Tucker, who has done little more in the last few minutes than shift his weight from side to side. Whatever she sees there causes them to widen.
“Think, Liv.” I keep my voice gentle because she’s so still she has to be in shock. “Did you ever talk to your prof about your marks? Did you ever challenge them in any way?” Do you have any verification you failed other than the word of a proven deceiver?
“No,” she says quietly, still watching Tucker’s face. She sniffs once. In the suddenly charged atmosphere of the hut, the sound seems incredibly l
oud. “Because if I had, that would have jeopardized—he would have picked up—”
She blinks and the towel slips from her grasp. She cocks her head and takes a step toward Tucker, her bare foot trampling the towel into the sand. “Did you lie to me?”
He takes a step back. “Liv, I—”
She closes the short gap by lunging at him with arms raised, so that her palms smack him at chest level. She’s a comparative lightweight, so she barely rocks him, but he takes another step back. All the cockiness has vanished from his face.
“Did you lie to me about my marks?” Another push, so they’re out of the hut now. “About my reference letter?”
I follow doggedly. Under normal circumstances, Tucker would never do anything to physically harm her, but I’ve never seen him like this. He looks like a cornered animal.
He twists his body to avoid a tree and now he’s backing up toward the rocks, sending the seabirds aloft again.
“Did you lie to me, Tucker?”
“Liv, I…”
She stops abruptly and puts a hand to her forehead. She paces a tight clockwise circle, muttering to herself, then pivots and traces the same route in reverse before halting a few steps from Tucker. She looks at him accusingly.
“Y-you let me work overtime to protect your job. You let me think I was a nobody. That I wasn’t capable. You let me think I wasn’t worthy of Finn.” She bends over, audibly panting, making sounds like she’s retching.
I want to go to her but my every instinct says she won’t want to be touched.
Tucker doesn’t heed the same impulse. When he strokes Liv’s back in a gesture designed to comfort, she raises her head and feeds him a look that could ignite diamonds.
“Get away from me.” Her voice is low, thick and tortured, like she’s been crying a thousand hours.
His face crumples. “Liv, I—”
“I said get away from me.”
I have always thought Tucker fought my relationship with Liv, partly out of reverse snobbery, and partly out of a dog-in-the-manger sentiment. But for a second our eyes meet over her hunched figure and I glimpse a misery so acute, so unfathomably boundless, that I suddenly get it; he loves her, the stupid sap. He loves her, and this was the only way he thought he could keep her.
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