I bit into the turkey and Ruffles sandwich, tossing a chunk of the bread onto Dad’s grave. A bird waddled over and pecked at it.
Finally, life in this miserable place.
Blithe Beach, North Carolina.
A small town of humble, hardworking people. The town I’d grown up in before moving to Eastridge. Shitty houses. Shitty streets. Shitty beach, that’s more waste run-off than beach.
But the people didn’t suck.
They worked hard, raised good families, and did nice things for each other. Gideon could do worse.
Footsteps approached from behind. The shadow loomed over me, but I faced the tombstone. He sat beside me and leaned against some stranger’s grave marker. When he caught me staring, he shrugged.
“You think the dead care about sharing? If anything, they like the company.” He combed his fingers through his hair. “I take it Emery didn’t send me that email, asking me to meet her here?”
Nope. All me.
“Gideon.”
“Hey, kid.”
Kid. Wonder if you’d still call me that if you found out what I’ve done with your daughter.
He picked at his Timberlands, a far cry from the billionaire who never left the house in anything that cost less than a house mortgage. “I take it you’re talking to Emery if she gave you access to her email?”
“I’m more than talking to Emery.”
My Durga.
I never really gave much thought to Fate, but every time I considered how hard the world must have worked to get our paths to intersect so many different ways, I became a believer.
A war brewed within Gideon’s eyes as if he’d considered punching me before the yearning won. He missed his daughter. So obvious, a glass window would be less transparent.
“How is she?”
I rested a forearm on my bent knee. “She’s trouble.”
“Always was. When she was eight… and you were an adult,” he slid in, “I used to think she’d burn the world down with a smile on her face and good intentions.”
“Still could.” I tossed the sandwich to the crow.
Another landed.
You eavesdropping, Dad?
I wiped my palms on my sweats. Dad would give me shit if he caught me here in any of the overpriced suits that filled my closet, so I’d stopped by Nike for a pair of joggers. He’d still kill me for these. They cost more than he used to make in a day.
Gideon toyed with a beer can I’d placed in front of Dad’s tombstone. “Has she seen Virginia?”
“I’m not here for idle chitchat.” I swiped the Budweiser from his palm and chugged it.
He yanked another can from the 6-pack and cracked it open. “Tell me about my daughter, and I’ll talk to you.”
“Talk to me, or I’ll tell the world where you’re at.”
“You’ve changed.”
“You changed me.”
“I did nothing, and I suspect you know that, or I’d be cradling a black eye right now.”
True. True as fuck. I’d spent the past four years searching for Gideon, and now that I’d found him, I skirted around the damn questions.
Maybe I didn’t want to know the answer, because everything about this felt off. Blithe Beach? The population couldn’t fill Eastridge Prep’s football stands. Most maps left the place out, and despite the beach, it hardly constituted as a beach town.
Tourists didn’t go to places like this.
Billionaires didn’t hide out in places like this either.
They flew to non-extradition countries and lived the rest of their lives in luxury. At the very least, anywhere but Blithe fucking Beach.
I emptied the can and crushed it. “Why Blithe Beach?”
“Hank mentioned Blithe a few times.” Gideon drank small sips of his beer. “He told me to escape here when the company collapsed. I figured it’d be a good place to settle down.”
“Dad told you to come here?” I frowned at the ‘loving friend’ engraved on the marble.
Always took you as a bleeding heart, Dad.
“Yeah.”
“You talked to him?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you possess a vocabulary beyond ‘yeah,’ or have the polluted waters here induced developmental regression in your brain?”
“Fuck, kid.” Gideon shook his head. “You’re too young to be this jaded.”
“I was less jaded when I had a dad.”
He ignored my jab. “I heard the trial’s board booted Hank. I talked to someone on the research team and found out why they nixed him.”
“Because Doctor Douche lost his money with Winthrop Textiles and took it out on Dad,” I finished for him.
“No.” Gideon exhaled. “That’s what I thought, too, but no.”
I could punch him. Rewriting history to make himself feel better sat on some low-as-shit rung of hell.
“I’m done with this bullshit.” I moved to leave, but he stopped me.
“Hank lied.”
“Watch your mouth.” I fixated on Dad’s marker, wishing ghosts existed so he could haunt the fuck out of Gideon.
“He told you and Betty the lie because it was better than the truth.”
“Which was?”
“That he’d die any day. The trial hadn’t helped.” Gideon finished off the beer and replaced it with another. “It was all a placebo effect.”
“He took the medicine.” I jacked the can from him. “I saw him. I drove him there myself and waited in the treatment clinic.”
“Yeah, and it looked like it was working because he thought it was working. It wasn’t. They removed him from the trial after they realized the results weren’t there. It had nothing to do with the money. In fact, I offered to pay for more treatments elsewhere. Hank said they wouldn’t help, but he did ask for a favor.”
I refused to accept this.
If Dad’s death had nothing to do with money, I wasn’t guilty. I didn’t play a hand in killing him. That meant, all this fixation on revenge over the past four years amounted to… nothing.
I downed that beer, too. “What’d he want from you?”
“He asked me to take care of his family, but I knew you wouldn’t let me.”
“No shit.” I crushed the can and added it to the stack. Looked better than the dead flowers soiling the other graves.
“I was your seed investor.”
My hand hovered above a new can. “My seed investor was a Saudi oil—”
“—prince named Zayn Al-Asnam.” His sly smirk begged to be punched. “I know. He’s a character from 1001 Arabian Nights. I had a cover story made, a shell company founded, the works.”
The windfall from insider trading on Winthrop Textiles stocks started Prescott Hotels, but Al-Asnam’s—Gideon’s—investment turned it into an empire.
Shit.
No part of my life went untouched by dirty money and devious lies.
I flicked lint off my joggers. “That means you know I had my own money going into this.”
“I know where it’s from, too.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
Or turn me in?
“I admired Hank Prescott. I enjoyed his company, friendship, and sometimes, advice.” Gideon leaned forward and wiped a smudge off the gravestone.
I noticed that it appeared in far better condition than the rest of the ones in the cemetery. How often did he come here?
Gideon continued, “I regretted the way Virginia treated your family, but she needed to control the household. It gave her something to do outside of pestering Emery and scheming. I also know you stole the ledger the night of the cotillion.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I saw you burn it. If not for your dad, I still wouldn’t have turned you in because of what you did for my daughter. We all knew you hospitalized Able. He only pointed at Reed, since he knew hurting your brother would cut you deepest.”
To this day, my relationship with Reed had never recovered. Small Dick was smarter than I gave him credit for.
“How do you know I burned the ledger?” I thought of the charred remnants I’d locked in my safe before driving down here. Still viable evidence. Against the thief. Against me. “You were holed in the office with Eric Cartwright and Virginia. You couldn’t have seen.”
“I saw the replay. I had hidden cameras installed in the mansion when I became suspicious of Virginia.”
The second profiting party Brandon Vu had mentioned.
“She was the one who embezzled,” I said, a statement. Not a question.
I pieced it together, mostly because I knew Dad would never befriend someone who’d hurt so many people.
“I figured it out too late.” Gideon’s lament seemed genuine. “I stole the ledger from her and would’ve turned it over to the S.E.C., but you took it after I confirmed Balthazar and Cartwright’s involvements. Why’d you burn it?”
“Emery. She stood up for Reed and got you to negotiate his release.” I shook my head and raked a hand through my hair. Regret felt like a bullet to the skull. All this could have been prevented if I’d left the ledger where I’d found it. “She’s loyal as hell.”
Gideon hummed in agreement. “Why’d you take the ledger back from the fire?”
“I overheard you arguing in the office.”
“If Emery finds out, I will cut you off, Virginia, and I will sue you for everything you own, Cartwright,” Gideon had warned, his voice steady and threat real.
“Please,” Virginia scoffed, “she already knows. Why do you think I sent her to that shrink to set her straight?”
“I thought Emery knew about the embezzlement and kept it from my family,” I continued, “despite knowing we’d invested everything into your company.”
“That wasn’t what Virginia meant when she said Emery already knew.”
“What’d she mean?”
“Virginia needed money to leave me. I would’ve given her a divorce settlement to keep her out of our lives, but she’d signed a prenup. It made her uncertain. So, she embezzled from the company. First a little, but she got greedy.”
He toyed with his words, selecting them like you would a pet. With careful consideration. “I had plans to turn her in, but she had something over me. If I kept my mouth shut on her involvement in the scandal, said nothing about Eric or Balthazar, and left Eastridge, she’d keep her mouth shut.”
“They deserve to pay.”
“I can’t go after them. Not without Emery suffering.”
And then he explained the argument I’d overheard in the office.
He spilled his secret, telling me the one thing that could convince me to keep this from Emery.
I didn’t agree with lying to her, but I agreed she needed to find out from him.
She was a plot twist. A surprise. The curveball thrown at me near the end of the book. If I wanted to reach the happy fucking ending, I needed to embrace the twist and fight my way to the finish line.
I couldn’t keep secrets from her.
If I didn’t tell her, I would lose her.
But if I told her, I would hurt her.
So, when the man I’d spent four years seeking revenge from asked me to keep his secret, I agreed.
Even if it meant losing Emery.
