by Ren Benton
He blinked, as if startled anyone would ask. “I’m okay. Ish,” he corrected as an afterthought. “Gin... deals with it her own way. Sometimes her way is business as usual, just a little more subdued. With Simone here and wanting to throw a parade, her way might be finding somewhere else to be until after midnight. She’ll check in before it’s time to file a missing person’s report.”
“I’d like to talk to her when she does.”
“About anything in particular?”
“I’ll think of something.” Lex would look for inspiration during his call to Dr. Ogawa. “I need to borrow a phone again.”
“Knock yourself out.” Ethan’s finger hovered above the blender’s controls. “I’m dying to see if this baby is loud enough to cut through Simone’s Valium.”
The longer Simone slept, the less everyone would have to put up with her, but Lex didn’t spoil Ethan’s fun by pointing that out.
Dr. Ogawa had pencilled him in for a few minutes between her regularly scheduled appointments. She led with her usual open-ended question. “How are things going?”
Lex’s state of mind was far down his list of priorities. He was paying for the time, so he’d talk about whatever he wanted. “It’s Gin’s brother’s birthday. Her dead brother. Ryan.”
“Were they close?”
He snorted at the understatement. “Inseparable. They were—”
Twins.
No one had said a word about Gin’s birthday.
By oversight or at her request? Lex had been her shadow for over two years. Why couldn’t he remember her birthday even once in that time?
He reconstructed the timeline of their relationship. They met on New Year’s Eve. By May, she still might have been keeping him at arm’s length-plus so he didn’t warrant the usual trail of breadcrumbs women left to lead a man to a convenient gift registry. But the same time the following year, he’d been in her bed. Google would remember better than he did if he’d been on the road or she’d been on location to cause a separation, but there should have been calls and presents regardless. The year after that...
His spinning thoughts slammed down into his body. He knew exactly where they’d been on this day five years ago. She’d celebrated her thirtieth birthday weeping over him in a hospital — another blow from him when she needed all the support she could get.
As punishment for that failure, his memory supplied a verbatim account of a decade-old news report. Actor/director Gin Greene was celebrating her twenty-fifth birthday with her twin in their New Orleans home when her brother was murdered and she was savagely attacked by Jeremy Fogle. Fogle had been arrested three times previously for breaking and entering her California home and stalking. In the struggle, Fogle was killed.
Ryan was murdered. Fogle was killed. Passive victims of acts perpetrated by no one in particular. Jeremy Fogle gutted Ryan Greene was too graphic for sensitive audiences.
So was Gin Greene bashed in Jeremy Fogle’s skull.
At least until a piece of shit prosecutor decided to try her for murder, and then it became a media free-for-all. Not even Garth Houle’s crime scene photos had been too graphic for public consumption then.
No wonder she wanted to strike this day from the calendar.
Dr. Ogawa’s soothing professional tone grated on his frayed nerves. “This must be a difficult time for her.”
That was the understatement of the century, but Gin would pull through. “She’ll be fine. She’s tough.”
“You often speak of her as if she’s impervious to pain.”
“You know why.”
“Well, yes. The question is whether you can acknowledge why you so badly need to believe she’s ‘tough,’ ‘strong,’ ‘a survivor.’”
She wanted him to say it out loud. Acknowledging the ugly truth only to himself fell short of their treatment goals.
What would happen if he said it out loud for a change? Bursting into flames, loss of oxygen, plummeting, shattering impact... “I hurt her, and I don’t know how to live with myself if I caused lasting damage.”
He’d inflicted scars on top of the ones she’d already suffered. No one who hurt her deserved a place in her life.
“She contacted you. She welcomed you into her temporary home. She’s trusting you professionally. What indication is there she hasn’t forgiven you for any hurt you caused her in the past?”
Forgiveness felt hollow. He wanted things to be the way they were before. No, he wanted a time machine so he could go back and do it right, sober, honest. His history of being a jackass laid a filter of doubt over his best behavior now. She’d never trust him. “She took off sometime this morning without telling anyone, and I’m worried. I wish she’d invited me, and I’m taking it personally when I must be the last thing on her mind.”
Which was typically selfish of him, demanding her attention while she was struggling to bear a heavy load. He had a goddamn head doctor on call and still couldn’t be a decent human being.
“You’re permitted to have a full range of feelings, Lex.”
“My feelings are shitty.”
“Emotions are value neutral. If you recognize one isn’t serving you or others, you’re permitted to release it, without acting on it and without guilt for experiencing it, and move on to the next.”
He thought a lot — the doctor would say too much — about how his feelings could burden or upset Gin, but not how they could serve her. The idea of doing something with an emotion instead of merely being crushed beneath its weight was too enormous to wrap his head around all at once.
If the doctor gave him anything else to ponder, he’d never manage. “They need their phone back.”
“I’ll keep you on the schedule for your regular appointment on Tuesday.”
That was probably a good idea. He doubted he’d figure out how to navigate his life without professional help before then.
Lex returned the handset to the vacant office. As he turned to leave, his gaze landed on Gin’s phone atop the charging pad.
He often left his phone behind. If it wasn’t in his pocket, he didn’t miss it. Given his tendency to misplace his belongings, home was the safest place for it.
He’d never known Gin to stray far from the house without her phone. Even if she turned it off for privacy, she wanted it on hand in the event of an emergency. Multiple flat tires. Fall with subsequent inability to rise. Terrorist attack. She could conceive a thousand situations in which the ability to call for help could prevent loss of life and limb, and she would not allow disaster to occur because she’d shown up unprepared.
He hoped leaving her phone behind meant she hadn’t gone far. If she’d intentionally gone in search of disaster without that one defense...
He reflexively dismissed the idea she could be in a reckless emotional state, and resurrected it just as quickly. His self-serving delusion that she was inhumanly strong was too fresh in his mind. This day had left scars on her soul. Wherever she was, she wasn’t fine.
Her slip-on sneakers weren’t in their usual spot by the front door, so at least she hadn’t left barefoot.
He stepped outside and closed the door behind him. In the absence of a snow-covered landscape revealing the direction of her footsteps, he had no chance of tracking her. His only option was to answer the easiest question first: Did she take a car? There was no point looking further if she’d gone for a drive with a three-hour head start.
He followed the bend in the driveway to the garage. Olivia’s rental car and the SUV in which Ethan and Gin had transported their equipment stood side by side. He peered through the windows of each vehicle to make sure Gin wasn’t using one as a hiding place.
No woman. No blood. No garden hose running from an exhaust pipe. His mind writhed with the effort of birthing other grim possibilities. She’d walked to the road and been picked up by an opportunistic psychopath. She’d walked into the woods and been eaten by bears or wolves or both. She’d walked into the lake with her pockets full of rocks.
The lake was closest.
He ran down the path through the woods, skidding to a halt on the rocky shore when he saw the boathouse ahead. She’d sent him there the first day to escape. Did she know from experience it made a good sanctuary?
He approached slowly, telling himself that if she was inside, he didn’t want to startle her by exploding through the door. While it was true, there was another reason the tightness in his chest didn’t abate and the hand reaching for the door shook.
What if she wasn’t inside?
He turned the knob and pushed the door open. His body blocked the daylight, so he stepped inside, out of the way. Wooden planks gave an ornery creak beneath his feet. He couldn’t make out a boat in the gloom, but the weak light outlined the edges of stored sports equipment — some kind of net, a pair of baseball bats, either snowshoes or vintage tennis racquets.
His eyes adjusted to the low-visibility guessing game and settled on a light box beside the door. He flipped up the switch with a loud clack.
The darkness remained untouched.
“It burned out.”
He strained to see into the corner from which the raspy voice emerged, but she’d chosen her camouflage well. If she hadn’t spoken, he would have left, thinking the place deserted.
He returned the switch to the off position, as Gin must have done when she arrived in the middle of the night and blew the bulb — and then sat here in the dark rather than seek more hospitable shelter.
She came out here because she wanted to be alone. Now that he knew she was safe, he should respect that and leave.
Or she came out here because she felt alone and everyone’s attempts to be respectful let that impression ride.
Well, he had recommended she get more practice telling people to fuck off. Duty demanded providing her the opportunity. He shuffled toward her, relying on his toes to find obstacles before he trampled them.
“Stop.”
“Gin, I’m not leav—”
“There’s a bicycle hanging in front of you.”
He raised a hand to locate the hazard and jerked when his wrist struck rubber tread, much lower and many inches closer to his face than anticipated. “Did you find this with your head?”
“Not hard enough to knock me out.”
He detected a hint of disappointment in her flat tone. He ducked under the tire and stayed low, arm outstretched, hoping to run into her with his fingers before his feet.
A shockingly chilled hand grabbed his in the dark. “If this was a horror movie, you’d be so screwed right now.”
If he heard any trace of humor, he’d tell her his pants would be a lost cause for sure, but even he knew some moods were too sensitive to be lightened with a dumb joke.
He followed her arm toward the floor and sat beside her. Based on where they touched and didn’t, he guessed she was hugging her knees to her chest. The sleeve he’d touched felt like the lightweight jacket she wore for running, which might be fine at forty degrees while working up a sweat but not so much for sitting still in a drafty boathouse. No wonder her hands were like ice.
He needed Dr. Ogawa to tell him what to do, but even if he hadn’t left his phone on the bedside table and even if the Wi-Fi range extended this far, she’d only ask him what he thought was the right thing to do and waste time unpacking his rationale while Gin curled in a ball of misery.
So he did what felt right, even if it was selfish, and put an awkward arm around her shoulders.
The feeble offer of comfort unlocked a shudder, followed by a gasp, chased by a sob that sawed through her body and into his.
His denial crumbled to dust. Her silence wasn’t a sign of toughness but pain kept private because no one could understand the breadth and depth of it.
Lex couldn’t understand, but he could grieve for a sister who lost the brother she loved beyond measure. He wrapped his other arm around her — elbows, knees, and all her broken edges — and held her tight so the quaking didn’t shake her apart. She was painfully, horribly small in his arms, issuing a single anguished note over and over that carried no further than his ears.
Her pain couldn’t be cured by a few minutes of crying, but the intensity of its expression couldn’t last forever. She rested heavily against his ribs while she caught her breath. Her voice was in shreds when she whispered, “It should have been me.”
His arms clenched as if he could pull her inside him to keep her safe. He wanted to say that was bullshit, but he sensed she’d been waiting a long time to utter those horrible, heavy words, and she’d trusted him to take them from her. So he took them, held tight, and suffered the wrath of the hellish suffering contained within.
She sniffled against his chest. “Don’t tell anybody about this. I’m supposed to be over it. They’ll want me back on meds, and I can’t write on meds.”
That pain he understood. The prescriptions that helped him limp through rehab came with detachment from the creative well. When he wanted to write again, there was nothing there. That echoing void had been worse than the depression, anxiety, and insomnia the pills had barely affected anyway. It took another sixty days to get that shit out of his system, and he’d spent all of it thinking how much more functional he’d been on alcohol, which strengthened the little voice goading him to relapse.
Medications helped a lot of people. His mother swore by her antidepressant, and he saw the proof in her living her best life now. But good luck getting a doctor to believe there were any exceptions. They had more faith in magic beans than a patient with the silly notion that crying one less hour per week wasn’t worth losing the ability to do the only thing he was good at.
“You don’t have to be over this.” How could she be over this? There was no cure for the kind of trauma she’d suffered. She had physical scars to remind her every day of what Jeremy Fogle had done to her, what he’d stolen. He wouldn’t steal her art from her, too. “Nobody’s going to make you take pills.”
He couldn’t imagine Ethan or Maisie pushing that agenda, but even if they did, he’d fight for Gin. An ex-boyfriend didn’t have any rights to throw around, but he was damn good at being loud and obnoxious while wrapping his enemies in circular arguments until they quit in confusion. Making himself heard at his weakest had been exhausting, but he’d roar at the top of his lungs now to guarantee Gin’s wishes weren’t ignored.
She burrowed closer to his side, probably seeking warmth as much as solace. She could have his whole supply of both, but he’d rather get her out of this icebox first. “Come inside and let me make you some eggs and bacon.”
“Not yet.”
“Okay.” He stretched out his legs and got as comfortable as possible, which wasn’t very.
“You don’t have to stay.”
The fingers clutching his shirt didn’t motivate him to leave. “No point cooking your breakfast until I know you’re coming to get it. Besides, getting up from the floor is a production at my age. I need to center myself before making the attempt.”
She shifted so the length of her leg pressed against his. “Better hurry. The longer you sit, the harder getting up will be. My everything hurts.”
“If all else fails, you can climb onto my back and I’ll crawl to the house.”
“I don’t want to go back today. And maybe tomorrow.”
“You’re welcome to hang out in the studio to escape from Simone.”
“It’s not just her. There will be calls and emails looking for a quote for the annual stories about the gruesome discovery by Ryan Greene’s fans when they went to pay their respects at his grave and found it gone because his evil twin had his body dug up and spirited away to parts unknown.”
“Tabloid bullshit.”
“Worthy of cover placement next to this week’s cheating rumors and disease speculations, but true in this case.” Her knees bent back toward her chest, and Lex adjusted his arms to incorporate them. “He didn’t want to be in the ground. He never liked tight spaces or the dark, and Grandma told us one too m
any stories about coffins popping up and floating away during floods. But he especially didn’t want to be on display. He was such a ham, I figured he’d enjoy being summoned to perform from beyond the grave, but even he wanted his dignity at the end.”
“So naturally, Simone buried him in a Hollywood cemetery.”
“Have you seen the photo shoot from the funeral? She looked exquisitely tragic in Gucci.”
Without the cloak of darkness, she wouldn’t allow such a tide of bitterness to break upon her mother. He doubted she’d have opened her mouth beyond the warning about the bicycle. Lex knew this trick: Lights off. Turn away. Expose a naked heart when no one could see it.
In the harsh light of day, develop amnesia, blame it on a bad dream, or otherwise deny, deny, deny it ever happened.
But as long as she was willing to share, he’d serve as her confessor. “I would have thought he made arrangements for you to handle his affairs.”
“We did. We celebrated our eighteenth birthday in a lawyer’s office. Ry promised someday we’d have a normal birthday with friends and cake and nothing even slightly newsworthy to spoil it.”
Seven years to the day later, their birthday became the most sensational story in the world, and it continued to warrant annual attention.
“But I couldn’t do anything from the hospital. Certainly not stop Simone at her performative best. So instead of making the awful decision to have my brother’s body cremated because he was dead at twenty-five, I got to make the more awful decision to have my brother’s body exhumed and then cremated because he was dead at twenty-five.”
Even on the surface, awful didn’t begin to describe those decisions, but scratch away the thin veneer of the telling and the whole truth took on horrific proportions. Gin had been twenty-five herself. Traumatized by violence. In physical pain, stitched up and missing parts of her body. Mourning her brother. Betrayed by her mother. Facing criminal charges for defending herself. The business she’d built with Ryan faltering with him gone and Gin overwhelmed by all of the above.
Yet when Lex met her only two and a half years later, she’d been steady and kind and funny and otherwise the opposite of the blubbering mess he’d still be now if confronted with even a tenth of what she’d endured. He had good reason to believe she had the strength of a goddess. His mistake had been thinking she worked her miracles without sacrificing a piece of herself — probably bitten off her tongue every time some weakling had the gall to whine about a petty inconvenience in her hearing.