His Christmas Pearl

by Renée Dahlia

  ‘See. Your silence says it all.’ She stepped past him and pulled herself up into the passenger seat of the truck. The door shut with a bang, leaving only her sweet scent swirling beside him in the air. He couldn’t have it both ways—he couldn’t have her stay without giving too much of his heart to her, but he didn’t want her to leave either. It smacked too much of abandonment. His chest clenched as though stuck in a clamp, and he pulled the door open.

  ‘Don’t go.’ It came out as a rough command.

  ‘I have to.’ She stared ahead out the windscreen, not bothering to glance back at him, not even a fraction. The last flare of hope died away, leaving him with only a righteous anger to fill the void behind his ribcage. He stormed away, away from Sam and the driver, and every step took him further from her. Pinpoints of heat on his spine had him imagining her glare as he bolted away from her, like the coward he was. Not brave enough to trust her, and not brave enough to risk his battered heart one more time. He’d already lost his parents and his sister, he couldn’t deal with any more grief. He rounded the end of the shed without looking back.

  As soon as he knew no one could see him, he leaned back against the corrugated-iron shed, his shoulders and head resting heavily against the hot steel. His breath pumped in and out, shallow and rapid, and a sob rose up in the back of his throat. She was leaving him. Why did that hurt so much? He’d only known her for a few days—this had to be some kind of illness—his rapid fall into obsession with her. Christmas Day, and the fateful party where they’d met, was only five days ago. In less than a week, he’d developed this certainty about her. She’d lived in his house and just belonged in a way that felt so natural.

  He stayed there, staring out over the water. A pair of birds swooped and dove over the water, chasing a school of fish.

  ‘Hey, are you alright?’ Sam appeared in front of him.

  ‘Of course.’ He scuffed his boot on the ground. Sam’s hard chuckle did nothing to quell the rising swell of emotion in his chest.

  ‘Aren’t we a pair?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Lizzy left me, and now Zoe has left you. What did you do to her?’

  Kissed her like my life depended on it. Kiet shook his head once and pushed himself away from the shed. ‘Nothing.’ Nok left. His parents left. Sam’s Elizabeth—Lizzy—left. And now Zoe had left. All he had was himself and thousands of filter-feeding oysters.

  ‘Sure. I don’t believe you.’ And Sam. He still had his baby brother, but it was only a matter of time before Sam realised he needed to chase his dreams and leave as well.

  Kiet stared out over the water. ‘You don’t have to believe me.’ For the first time in months, certainty rushed into his veins and he breathed in deep, as if the fresh breeze over the water could wash away all of his problems.

  ‘What?’ Sam sounded curious, and Kiet started to smile as he figured it all out.

  ‘The problem isn’t the scam, or who did it. It’s that we stopped believing in each other. Me and you—instead of being brothers, we’ve fallen into being colleagues, and when I suspected something was wrong, I didn’t confide in you, I—’

  ‘You stopped believing in me. And then you blamed Lizzy for a crime that could have been done by anyone. She isn’t to blame, she’s just a convenient target for your guilt.’

  ‘My guilt?’ Kiet didn’t want Sam to be right. He was tired of everyone else being right, while he floundered around missing all the crucial details, like the ill-educated oyster farmer that he’d needed to become after the worst day of his life. His gap year had turned into his life, purely out of necessity, and he wasn’t sure he wanted it anymore. No, that wasn’t true at all. He loved the farm, and he would sacrifice everything for it, even his growing affection for Zoe. Especially that.

  ‘Yes. Your guilt. It’s not your fault someone is stealing from us. It’s not your fault an accident killed our parents. It’s not your fault the bullies at school targeted me. None of those things are your fault. Stop feeling guilty for them.’

  ‘But I knew something was wrong with the books and I ignored it.’

  ‘True.’ Sam patted him on the back. ‘And instead of doing the work to figure it out, you blamed Lizzy. Lizzy—whose only crime was being older than me, more mature, and … wiser. If you’d been paying attention, you’d know she left me because she saw how I need to grow up.’

  ‘Grow up? That’s nonsense.’ Kiet sat up straight and stared at his brother. ‘You were forced to grow up when our parents died. I don’t believe her for a second.’

  ‘Except I didn’t grow up, did I? I was mollycoddled by you, by the teachers at boarding school, and I never needed to grow up. I had you to make all those decisions for me …’

  ‘Being an adult is overrated.’ Kiet wanted to kick something and he paced in a circle, scuffing his boots on the gravel. Little puffs of dust floated around his feet.

  Sam scoffed. ‘You know most people say that as a joke, not with such hurt. You did your best, Kiet, and that’s what matters to me.’

  ‘Obviously my best isn’t good enough.’

  ‘I’m guessing you aren’t talking about your big brother skills. Because on that measure, your best has been amazing. Without you, I don’t know where I would have ended up. Lost, like Nok. Gone.’ Sam didn’t have to say it. They both hoped she was alive somewhere, living a good life, because without a body it was impossible to begin mourning for her. It didn’t matter that the odds weren’t in her favour—a missing fifteen-year-old girl. Kiet had wondered where she was so many times, when most likely Nok was dead. Kiet’s mouth dried, caught between rage and hurt.

  ‘Never. I would never have let you.’

  ‘So why are you letting Zoe leave?’

  Kiet staggered back a step. ‘What?’

  ‘I see the way you look at her, and the way she looks at you. You have something special, and you are letting her just walk away from you. Why?’

  ‘I can’t force her to stay.’ Kiet stopped breathing. He wasn’t letting her walk away. She’d decided to leave, on her terms, and he wanted to know why. Why now? She’d done all the work, going tantalisingly close to finding the scammer. But Zoe hadn’t solved any of their financial problems. She’d spent days going over their accounts, looking busy, and then she’d left without an answer. Only one question remained. Why had she driven him home on Christmas Day? Was she in on the scam too, and her presence here was simply designed to put him off the scent? The image of her chatting to Elizabeth at the party, and Elizabeth glancing in his direction, roared to life. He’d fallen for her sweet charms, her sugary kisses, and all the while, she’d been part of the plot to steal his farm.

  ‘It’s not your business, Sam.’ Kiet’s fists formed at his sides. ‘Come with me. We need to go over all our accounts and figure this out ourselves. Every fucking thing we’ve spent money on in the last three years. We have to look at it all.’ To Kiet’s surprise, Sam smiled. It wasn’t a smiling matter.

  ‘That’s the determined Kiet I’ve missed. Come on then. We’d better get started.’ Sam started walking back towards their crumbling cottage, and Kiet followed.

  Screw everyone else—it was time he fixed his own problems. No more ignoring the numbers, just because he hated sitting still. He could read and pace. He would find a solution, because it was his problem to fix. He couldn’t let the farm fail. It was the only thing he had left. He had to do this for Sam, for their parents, for Nok wherever she might be, and for himself. The family farm came first. Family was the reason he was still here, fighting for the farm’s survival.

  Chapter 14

  Zoe had cleaned her apartment from top to bottom over the last three days, scrubbing everything until it was spotless. Everything smelled like citrus and clove oil, and her stuff was sorted into all the right places. Only her bookshelves were visually untidy, but she had more books than shelf space, and she’s sorted them by theme, so while it looked messy, it made sense to her.

  Zoe tried to pretend th
is was the normal clean she needed to do before going back to work, but the idea didn’t stick. She knew the cleaning was an analogy for how she wanted to scrub Kiet out of her life. How could someone get stuck in her heart after less than a week?

  She admired so much about him. His determination to succeed in business—that competitive drive she had tried to have in her old job but had only ended as stress. In Kiet, it came across as an innate part of him, as if it were natural for him to want his farm to blossom and succeed. His competent hands as he shucked oysters, the way he handled the stubby knife, and sluiced water through the morsel ready to eat. The precise way he lined the oysters up on the ice so they were neatly aligned. She loved details, that’s why this clean was the perfect way for her to get her life back on track. A fresh start without Kiet—that week with him needed to be consigned to her past. She’d learned about herself, and she’d been brave enough to kiss him and to ask for more without her mother’s nagging voice about propriety.

  There were other things she admired about Kiet. The way he cared for his brother—just as she cared for Jade. The way he wore his grief for his parents without hiding from it. She was jealous of his grief, and her skin prickled because she was would never have the same. If her parents died, she knew her own grief would be mixed with a tinge of relief. Relief that their expectations over her life, and their bigotry, would be gone, and she felt like a horrible person for realising this truth about herself. She wanted the pure grief of love that Kiet carried around. It was the worst thing to be jealous about—no one wanted dead parents, not even her. Her parents might be bigots who’d rather keep their religious ideals than love her sister, but she’d still miss them if they died. She missed them now, or was it the idealised memory of them that she missed?

  Zoe sat at the kitchen table and covered her hands in moisturiser, wincing as it soaked into the cracks caused by too much scrubbing. She should have worn gloves, but it was too late now, the damage was done. Her cleaning chemicals were supposed to be environmentally friendly, and she’d assumed they were skin-friendly too. Maybe they were, in small doses. Maybe people weren’t meant to scrub their entire houses clean because their heart ached. The work made her muscles ache with a physical pain, the perfect distraction for the ache in her chest, except it reminded her of the ache in her shoulders on Boxing Day when they’d cleared away the fallen gum tree.

  Everything came back to him, and yet Kiet had pushed her away. Why? What had she done wrong? Nothing. She’d been over their conversations, over and over, and every time she concluded that she’d done nothing wrong. She’d just wanted to help him, to use her skill with forensic accounting and help his farm find the scammer who skimmed precious funds from his business. Narelle was right, of course: every interaction with Kiet was flavoured with desire. He was attractive, with that dimple that flashed in his cheek on the rare occasions when he grinned. His grumpy outlook hid his sense of humour, and she yearned for those smiles. But Kiet was the one who didn’t want to be hurt. He’d sent her away, and he hadn’t argued when she’d confronted him about it.

  She rubbed the moisturiser into her hands, soothing the skin. Well, she’d be back at work tomorrow, and hopefully the ten days away had meant lots of jobs had piled up. She wanted lots of emails in her inbox, and many, many invoices to process. She wanted a crisis at the resort, or at Christophe’s restaurant, so she could hide away in busy work. Yearning for drama to give her a reason to hide only added to her guilt. What kind of awful person wants something to go wrong, just so they have busy work to do? For the same reasons, the idea of helping out at her parents’ church doing some volunteer work, maybe cooking for some elderly people, or reading the Bible at Sunday school, appealed. Those things would give her something to do. No, she’d already made her decision on that front, and she wouldn’t help her parents until they accepted Jade.

  Zoe’s phone dinged with an incoming message to one of her social media accounts, and she wiped the excess moisturiser on a tissue before she thumbed open the screen and clicked on the message.

  Narelle: Call me. Found some treasure for ya. Narelle ended the message with a gif of the shiny crab from that Disney movie. Yes! Narelle had the answer about the company scamming Kiet’s oyster farm. A wave of irony made her cheeks warm. All the time she’d spent on cleansing him out of her life in the past two days had been a wasted effort. She might have a clean house, but one little message and everything she’d been trying her best to avoid came rushing back. It was times like this that she wished she had a group of close friends to hang out with, but she’d left most of them behind in her parents’ church, knowing they were judging her and Jade for their decision to leave.

  Zoe plugged in Narelle’s number and her bubbly friend answered almost instantly.

  ‘You owe me a photo of your hot farmer.’ Narelle’s laughter surrounded Zoe. She really missed having a close friend. Was that partly why she’d enjoyed her week at Kiet’s farm? Because she had enjoyed the friendship with Sam, and the banter with Kiet? She nodded.

  ‘Yeah, yeah. I haven’t forgotten. What treasure did you find?’

  Narelle clicked her tongue. ‘This one was a good hunt. It didn’t take too long, but basically, there were some shell companies, and they all came back to one name. Joanne Andersen.’

  Zoe gasped. ‘Andersen, with an e?’ Her pulse started to speed up and one of her legs bounced up and down under the table. Lindsey Transport was owned by a shell company in turn owned by Joanne Andersen—the runaway daughter of Kiet’s accountant. Anger made her ears fill with a roaring sound.

  ‘Yeah, I take it you know her?’

  ‘That cow.’ It was so damned entitled, and lazy, to steal from hard-working people. This rage was the whole reason she’d gone into the field of forensic accounting. She’d wanted to help people who’d been tricked by law-breakers. She wanted to make things better, to heal victims of white-collar crimes. Any crimes, really, but she’d had mathematics and data skills and solving this type of crime suited her.

  ‘I take it that means you know her?’

  ‘Small town …’ Zoe sighed. ‘I babysat her when I was a teen and she was a spoilt little girl.’

  ‘Same M.O. now, I’d guess. I reported all the companies for fraud, so they’ll be under investigation. Do you have evidence of the amount they’ve skimmed from your farmer?’

  ‘He’s not my farmer.’ Zoe just wanted him to be.

  ‘Are you certain about that? Because your voice changes when you mention him.’

  Zoe didn’t want to let her thoughts loiter on that comment. ‘Could it be a coincidence?’ Zoe knew better than to make assumptions. Even in a small town, with one Joanne Andersen, it paid to check if the name was a coincidence, or worse, someone pretending to be Joanne. Joanne herself might be another victim in an involved crime.

  ‘That your voice softens when you mention your hot farmer? Nah. I’ve given you the deets, give me the goss.’

  Zoe cleared the grit in her throat. ‘I meant Joanne Andersen. It’s a common enough name, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah, but I found an address for her, and it’s in Marandowie. I’ll email all the information to you.’

  ‘Okay. I mean, that’s a pretty strong pointer.’ Zoe eased the air out of her lungs again. ‘I really appreciate this. And yes, before you say it, I’m sure I have a photo of Kiet somewhere. I’ll flick it to you.’ She hadn’t taken a photo of him sleeping on Christmas Day, although she wished she had, but she had taken a few of him working during the week on the farm.

  ‘Is he wet? In the photo?’

  Zoe choked on a laugh. ‘What? No.’

  ‘That’s a shame …. I’m sorry, I’ll keep my dirty thoughts to myself. There isn’t any eye candy in my office building, mostly old men in suits.’

  ‘Not much in a small town either.’ Zoe smiled as she fell back into her old city chatter with Narelle. ‘I’ll flick you a photo to keep you entertained for the moment.’

  ‘As long as it
’s not weird that I’m lusting after your boyfriend …’

  Zoe sucked in a sharp breath. ‘Now you are worried about that!? It’s fine. He’s not my boyfriend—’

  ‘Just a hot client?’

  ‘Yeah?’ Zoe winced. ‘I’m not sure if that makes it better or worse, to be honest.’

  ‘Aren’t we a pair? That’s it. I’m coming to visit you on the next long weekend, and we can commiserate our crappy love lives over bubbles.’

  ‘Now, that’s an excellent plan.’ Zoe tried to relax her shoulders. ‘Check your emails.’

  ‘Same, darl. See ya later. I appreciate the chat.’ Narelle hung up, leaving Zoe scratching her head. Narelle was such a whirlwind—she’d forgotten how much she enjoyed that. Narelle did and said all the things that Zoe wasn’t brave enough to do or say.

  Zoe paced into the lounge and opened her laptop. Her pulse raced as the machine took far too long to warm up. Come on. Come on. The smile was wiped off her face as she ran back over what Narelle had said. She needed to read Narelle’s evidence, to double-check her work, because it was one thing to listen to how it all pointed to Joanne, but another thing entirely to see it written down and confirmed. Her stomach churned, half with anticipation and half with nervous anxiety. She couldn’t tell Kiet until she was certain. Being so close to solving a puzzle and having to leave it behind because his emotions were too much for him to handle was another reason she’d embarked on her irrational cleaning frenzy. If she couldn’t stay at the farm and help Kiet, she could come home and help herself by tidying up.