One Perfect Love

by Jessie Evans

  “And I wanted to stay in high school, and get a scholarship to college,” I say, beginning to lose my temper. “And Emmie wanted to be born without developmental delays caused by her mom using drugs while she was pregnant.”

  Aoife’s mouth drops open, but I push on before she can speak.

  “But it didn’t work out that way. We don’t always get what we want, Aoife,” I say, forcing a gentler note into my tone. “But if we work together, we can make choices that are the best for your daughter. It might not be ideal for you or me, but it will be what’s best for Emmie.”

  “My daughter needs her mother,” Aoife says, but I hear the doubt crimping the edges of the words.

  “Your daughter needs the same thing she’s always needed, someone to love her and take care of her and make her feel safe, and I have done a damned good job of that,” I say, driving my argument home and praying I can finish getting through to my sister. “Taking her away from a loving family—a family we would have killed for when we were kids—is pure selfishness, plain and simple.”

  “Then I guess I’m a selfish bitch,” she says, tears streaming down her flushed cheeks. “Because I’m not dropping the suit. I want to be happy, and I’m not letting you take that away from me.”

  I start to tell her that I don’t give a shit about her happiness one way or another, but she pushes past me, throwing her parting shot over her shoulder.

  “I have to go bury my father now.”

  Her father. As if I didn’t love him and hate him and live in the long shadow he cast every bit as much as she did. As if I didn’t stay in town and take care of his house and his laundry and his kids and try to make sure he ate a decent meal now and then for years after she left me alone.

  The injustice of that stupid “my” is the final straw. I decide to skip the graveside, family-only service and head back to my real family—Gabe, Sherry, and the kids. I slip through the small crowd of mourners still gathered in front of the church and start swiftly toward the parking lot. I don’t intend to cast a single glance toward the limos parked at the curb, or any of the people waiting to get in them, but as I lift my purse to dig for my keys, I catch sight of an elegant figure in a dark gray suit in my peripheral vision.

  Even before I turn my head, my pulse is already speeding.

  I know that silhouette. I’ve only met Gabe’s father a handful of times, but he and Gabe are the same height, with the same broad shoulders, and long legs, and the same way of tilting their head when they’re listening to something they’re really interested in hearing.

  Right now, Aaron Alexander is standing next to the family limo, head cocked as he listens to something my sister is saying. I’m too far away to catch any of Aoife’s words, but when she swipes tears from her cheeks and motions back over her shoulder toward the church, I have a pretty good idea who she’s talking about.

  “Shit,” I curse. So much for lying low until we find out what Gabe’s parents used to blackmail him last summer.

  With one last look at the impeccably well-dressed man questioning my sister, I turn and start toward the car. But I force myself to walk, not run. Chuck always said that you should never run from danger. Running lets the bad guys know you’re afraid, and attracts their attention. Better to slip away slow and steady, and hope something more vulnerable-looking than you catches their eye. And so I maintain a calm, even gait before slipping into the van and easing slowly out of the parking lot unobserved.

  Maybe Chuck did teach me one or two things of value, after all.

  But only one or two and that might not be enough to hold my family together through whatever the Alexanders have up their sleeves.

  Chapter Twenty

  Caitlin

  “Life loves to be taken by the

  lapel and told, ‘I’m with you

  kid. Let’s go.’”

  -Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  I arrive back at the hotel an hour and a half before I promised to find Sherry and the kids already out at the pool. I park the van, pull off my hat, and let my hair out of the knot that’s pinching the back of my head, before slamming out the door and crossing to the fence.

  The moment Sherry sees my face, she knows something’s wrong. “Oh God.” She stands, tugging the bottom of her pink and white polka-dot one piece down as she tosses her Wired magazine onto her lounge chair. “Aoife was horrible.”

  “Aoife was horrible, and then Gabe’s dad showed up,” I say, hurrying on when Sherry’s eyes go wide. “He didn’t see me, but I’m pretty sure Aoife is going to tell him we’re in town. They were talking when I left.”

  “What are you going to do?” she whispers, casting a glance over her shoulder to make sure none of the kids are close enough to hear. “I mean, I’d like to think Mr. Alexander is harmless, but he did blackmail his son into having surgery, then fake Gabe’s funeral. I’m not sure he’s dealing with a full deck.”

  I nod, pressing my lips tight together. “I’m going to go talk to Gabe. We may move to another hotel. Somewhere in Charleston maybe¸ where it will be harder to find us. I want to know the kids are safe.”

  Sherry crosses her arms, looking chilled despite the hot summer day. “I wish we could go back to Maui. Giffney is giving me the creeps. I never realized how messed up this town was until I left. It’s like…the place where dreams go to die.”

  “You can go home if you want to,” I say, hating that I’ve dragged my best friend into this crazy situation. “I have to stay until the court date, but—”

  “No way.” Sherry shakes her head. “I’m not leaving until I’m sure you’re going to have your happily ever after. Mr. Sexy is in the room, by the way. He was trying to dig up dirt on your sister, but your phone was blowing up. I think it was driving him a little nuts. I tried to turn it off, but it was still vibrating every time Isaac called.”

  I roll my eyes and let out a sound somewhere between a groan and a muffled scream.

  “I know, when it rains, it pours.” Sherry shoots me a sympathetic look. “It just wouldn’t be your life if you didn’t have to bury your father, while dealing with the return of the sister from hell, a custody battle, a boyfriend back from the grave, and an ex-boyfriend who’s discovering his obsessive streak.”

  In spite of the nightmare morning, I have to smile. “I love you, you know that?”

  Sherry grins. “And I love you, despite the fact that you appear to have been born under the unluckiest star ever.”

  “I don’t know. I’m still feeling pretty lucky right now.” I turn to look toward Gabe’s room to see him out on the balcony. I lift my hand and wave, but he stops me with an urgent motion of his arm.

  “You need to come look at this,” he calls out, holding up his phone.

  I let my arm drop with a sigh. “I’ll be back to spring you in a few,” I tell Sherry.

  “Don’t rush,” she says. “We just got out here a few minutes ago. The kids are playing great, and my sister can’t get free until dinner tonight so I don’t have anywhere to be.”

  “Thanks.” I squeeze her hand through the gate and hurry up to the room.

  I’m not looking forward to telling Gabe about his dad—or learning whatever it is that has him upset—but I can’t wait to be in his arms. Every second away from him feels like a second I’ve wasted. I wish we could escape from the world and spend a week or two alone together, making love, lying in the sun, and doing nothing worthwhile except finishing the job of falling for each other harder the second time than we fell the first.

  When I turn the corner on our floor, Gabe is standing in the doorway to his room, dressed in dark blue jeans and a pale blue tee shirt he picked up this morning while he was buying my hat. The shirt molds to his impressive new muscles and emphasizes the ice blue of his eyes. I’ve always thought Gabe’s eyes would be equally at home in the face of an Alaskan hunting dog, or some kind of supernatural predator, but I can’t say I’ve ever seen them look quite as menacing as they do right now.

 
“What happened?” I ask, knowing immediately that he has to go first.

  “I need you to see something.” He moves back, holding the door open wide enough for me to move past him into the room.

  Inside, the bed is still disheveled and the desk is littered with pieces of hotel stationary with notes written on them in Gabe’s elegant handwriting. Danny once said that Gabe makes eye-contact like a psychopath—I’d told my brother that’s the kind of eye contact I like—but Gabe’s handwriting looks like it flowed from the pen of an eighteenth century schoolteacher. It’s gorgeous and makes me think of heartfelt letters, poems, and things lovers sent each other in another age.

  It’s one of the little things that make Gabe Gabe, things I want to unearth like buried treasure, piece by piece. I want to focus on rediscovering all the things I love about him as we move into the future together, but with every passing moment, escaping the past feels more impossible.

  “I didn’t mean to invade your privacy.” Gabe plucks my phone from where it’s resting on top of the notes. “But your phone was ringing every ten to fifteen minutes, and I wanted to know if it was the same person. I figured if it was, they either had a legitimate emergency, or might be a threat we’d want to be aware of.”

  I nod, pressing my lips together. “It was Isaac, right? Sherry said he was taking a walk on the stalker side.”

  “He’s something worse than a stalker,” Gabe says, the ominous note in his voice making the hairs on my arms stand on end. “This is his picture, I assume.”

  He holds up the phone. Isaac’s contact information is pulled up on the screen, and the picture of Isaac on the afternoon of his graduation from the police academy grins back at me from the corner.

  “That’s him.” My brow furrows as I glance back up at Gabe. Before I can ask him why he wanted to know, he places my phone back on the desk and pulls his from his back pocket.

  “When I saw his picture, I thought he looked familiar,” Gabe says, scrolling through something on his screen. “I thought it was because you said I’d met him last summer, but then I remembered where I’d seen his face.”

  He holds up the phone. “My private nurse after the surgery, Olia, was from Sweden, but she had a thing for pizza. Wood-fired pizza was her favorite.”

  I take the phone from him, holding it at a different angle to reduce the glare from the window.

  “We went to the same place every Wednesday afternoon,” Gabe continues. “We weren’t supposed to leave the house without one of my parents, but they have couples therapy on Wednesdays, and Olia was okay with breaking the rules in the name of a sausage pie with extra onions.”

  I bring the image closer to my face, trying to see what has Gabe so shaken up. It’s a fairly benign-looking selfie, taken by a fresh-faced older blond woman with her hair pulled back in a ponytail. She’s grinning as she leans in close to Gabe. His smile looks more like a grimace, but it’s the sunken places beneath his eyes and the skeletal way his skin stretches across his cheeks that breaks my heart.

  “You were so sick,” I say, fighting to swallow past the lump in my throat.

  “I was getting better then,” he says, dismissively, obviously not interested in my pity. “Don’t look at me. Look behind me. Over by the counter. He’s not in focus, but you can tell it’s him.”

  I shift my gaze, and feel like I’ve been kicked in the gut. My breath rushes out, but it doesn’t rush back in. For a moment it feels like I’ve forgotten how to reason, how to add up two and two to make four. My brain insists this can’t be real, but my gut knows it is. It knows, and the horrible knowledge races through my veins like a thousand tiny glass shards.

  I suck in a ragged breath. “When was this taken?”

  “September,” Gabe says in a voice that makes it clear he’s already tracked the timeline and realized this was before I lost the baby, before Isaac flew to Maui to help his “friend,” and ended up staying to be my lover.

  “He knew,” I whisper, fingers digging into Gabe’s black phone case. “He had to know it was you. Even though you’d lost weight, I knew right away that—”

  “Oh, he knew.” Gabe takes the phone gently from my hand, tossing it onto the desk as if he can’t stand to touch it. “The first time we went in, he looked at me like he’d seen a ghost. I explained about my memory loss and asked if I’d known him before, but he said that I looked like someone he used to know. After that, every time Olia and I went in, he stayed out of our way. I’d put him out of my mind, but now…”

  “Oh my God.” My knees give out and I sit down hard on the thick, gray carpet. “He knew you were alive. He knew I was so devastated and that I was pregnant, and he still… He let me believe….”

  Gabe sits down in front of me, resting his hands on my knees, but he doesn’t say a word, as if he knows nothing he can say right now will help.

  “He let me fuck him,” I say, rage rushing in to banish the betrayal, shoving it aside with hot hands balled into fists. “He fucked me, and told me he loved me, and all along he knew that the person I really loved was still alive.”

  “I’m sure he would say he did it out of love for you,” Gabe says, in that silky voice that he gets when he’s really angry. With some people, rage makes them rough around the edges, but it makes Gabe smooth, calm, as cold as a frozen lake about to crack under your feet.

  I bite my lip. “He did it because he knew there was no way he stood a chance if I knew the truth.”

  Gabe leans in, until our foreheads are nearly touching before he whispers, “I want to do horrible things to this man. I want to make him suffer for every minute he made you suffer, and for every second he kept you from me.”

  I shiver. My eyes slide closed and for a second I can’t keep from imagining the way I’d make Isaac pay, the way I’d exact my vengeance if I had nothing to lose, and not a trace of morality. But that’s not who I am. Isaac isn’t innocent, but he isn’t a monster, either, and I could never do to him the things I’ve done to my other marks, no matter how much a part of me might want to.

  “I can’t,” I say softly, still not opening my eyes. “I hate him, but…I can’t hurt him.”

  “Maybe I can,” Gabe says.

  I slit my lids, staring at his lips through my lashes, trying to tell from the set of his mouth if he’s serious. His mouth keeps its secrets, but when I pull away to look into his eyes, I see the truth.

  “You’re not going to hurt Isaac.”

  He sighs. “No, I’m not. But we’re not going to be able to play by the rules, Caitlin. Not if we want to be together. I listened to the messages Isaac left.”

  I chew the inside of my cheek, holding my breath as I wait for him to tell me the rest of the bad news.

  “After the first three messages, demanding you call him, Isaac left a tearful message begging for your forgiveness. He swore he was only trying to protect you. He said you have to leave Giffney right away.”

  I frown. “How did he know I was here?”

  “He said his mother told him last night,” Gabe says, arching a brow. “She heard it from a girl who works at the pizza place.”

  “Kimmy’s friend.” I curse, driving a hand through my hair and fisting it on the top of my head. “I can’t catch a break in this town.”

  “That’s what Isaac seemed worried about.” Gabe guides my hand from my hair before I can do myself damage, and pulls me into his lap. “He feels awful for letting you believe I was dead, but says he did it because my parents swore you’d end up in jail if you ever came back to South Carolina.”

  My gaze snaps to his face. “What?”

  “Isaac promised them he’d keep you in Hawaii,” Gabe says. “And they were nice enough to pay his plane fare in exchange. He confessed everything in message four.”

  The angry heat swirling in my chest cools a few degrees. I’m shocked that Isaac was in on this—Isaac, one of the few people in the world I would have trusted with my life—but there’s a bigger threat in those words. “Your parents don
’t know about the things we did. Do they?”

  Gabe shakes his head just once, back and forth. “I don’t know, but I don’t want to stay to find out. I think we should leave.”

  I twine my arms around his shoulders, needing something to hold on to. “But I can’t leave. I’m due in court at the end of the week. The earliest I can leave the state would be next week, and that’s if—”

  “I’m not talking about leaving the state,” he says. “I’m talking about leaving the country.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Caitlin

  “Why, what is to live? Not to eat and drink and breathe,

  —but to feel the life in you down all the fibres of being.”

  -Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  I blink, but the look in his eyes leaves no doubt he’s serious.

  “I’ve been thinking about this since you left for the funeral,” Gabe says. “I was dead set against the surgery, and was prepared to die. My parents had no leverage as far as I was concerned. Nothing, except how much I cared for you.”

  “So you think—”

  “The only thing that could have gotten me on that plane was knowing that, if I didn’t, something bad would happen to you,” he says, echoing my thoughts. “And what could be worse than you ending up in jail for crimes I convinced you to commit?”

  “Oh God,” I say, throat clenching and a wave of sickness roiling through my belly. “But how did they find out? We were so careful. And our faces were covered and—”

  “Like I said, I don’t know,” Gabe says. “I’ve done everything but slammed my head into the wall trying to remember, but I can’t. Maybe I never will, since it happened on one of the last days before the surgery, but I’ve remembered enough to be ninety-nine percent certain my parents got to me through you, and I refuse to let them ruin your life.”

  My tongue slips out to dampen my suddenly bone dry lips, while my thoughts race. “What are we going to do?”