by Ashby, Riley
David looked between us all. “Shall we continue?” We nodded in unison, and he took his place at the desk once more as Meyer and I also reclaimed our seats. Joshua dragged over another chair, placing it next to my Mom’s, and we sat in to hear the rest of the impossible conditions for Meyer, Anita, and Joshua to meet in order to obtain Conrad’s blood money.
Meyer
Joshua and I waited in the cold outside the Women’s Prison, scanning the parking lot for David’s car so we could go inside and speak with Anita. We hadn’t told her I’d be coming, or David, because we didn’t want her to insist on bringing her lawyer and fucking up the entire plan.
“Why would she agree to see you?” I asked him. It was suspicious to me that he had been able to arrange a meeting with her so easily.
“She still thinks I’m on Conrad’s side,” he said, bringing his gloved hands to his mouth and blowing into them. “Why couldn’t we wait in the car again?”
“I didn’t feel like it,” I lied. In reality, it gave me a little bit of pleasure to see him squirm in the cold, even if I was uncomfortable myself. After David finished reading the will, Joshua mumbled something about needing to make a phone call and practically ran out of the room. Since then, he’d done an exceptional job at avoiding all of us. Maddie was frustrated to hell—she was still deciding whether to chew him out or try to make peace—but I could tell hit hurt Eva deeply to see the son she thought was dead run away from her time and time again. “You should talk to your mother, you know.”
“She’s not my fucking mother. We have nothing in common except some DNA. I didn’t even know her until a few weeks ago.”
“You don’t share anything besides genetics with Conrad, but that was enough for you to concoct an elaborate multi-year revenge plan.”
He glared at me. “You don’t know shit about my motives, Meyer.”
“You’re right, I don’t. Why don’t you explain them to me?”
“I don’t owe you any kind of explanation for what I did.”
“Are you fucking shitting me?” Forgetting we were outside a federal penitentiary and likely being observed by upwards of twenty armed guards, I took a step closer to him and clenched my fists. “You helped Conrad take her. Torture her. Abuse her. You could have ended it all far easier that either of us could have.”
“You’re not really one to throw stones here. Or did you forget all the crimes you’re complicit in?” He stepped forward to meet me, reminding me of his height advantage. But I didn’t care if he threw me to the ground and beat my face to a pulp. I was sick of being threatened into submission.
“You know why I behaved the way I did, and I feel sick over it.” I narrowed my eyes at him. “What’s your excuse?”
His lips twitched as he considered whether to answer me, exhaling clouds of white. “You had everything, Meyer.”
“Oh, fuck you. I lived in fear every fucking day of my life. Maddie says I have PTSD, you know that? They’re probably gonna give me more fucking head drugs. And I have to go to therapy.” I shuddered. I had no interest in sitting around explaining my feelings to some stranger, but Maddie insisted it would help me move past my lingering depression and urge to self harm.
He rolled his eyes. “Poor Meyer, growing up in a big house with all the money in the world. If only his daddy loved him.”
I acted before I decided to, hitting him square across the jaw with all the force in my body. His eyes went wide just before he tumbled to the ground. But he wasn’t down for long; he was back on his feet a second later. The fury was evident in his eyes, not that I gave a shit. I could barely see for how angry I was, and I would tear him apart right here even if it landed me in a prison cell of my own. But before he could lay so much as a finger on me, half a body appeared between us.
“Whatever it is you two need to work out, I suggest you do it somewhere there aren’t dozens of correctional officers watching your every move.” David glared at me, then Joshua, only lowering his arm and taking a step back when both of us nodded. He straightened his coat and adjusted his grip on his briefcase. “Now, let’s go inside and talk to Miss Schaf. I’ll read her the conditions of the will, and then the three of you can talk about how you want to proceed with the execution of your father’s extensive holdings.”
Joshua hadn’t stopped glaring at me, but we’d at least discussed this scenario enough times to know how we were going to present this to her. There was no way I was giving her a dime more than I had to.
“Let’s get this over with,” I said, and led the small procession into the prison.
*
“Absolutely not,” Anita said. “Five million is peanuts, Meyer. I can’t live on that.”
My sister looked like a stranger without her usual five pounds of makeup on. I honestly hadn’t even recognized her when we first walked into the interview room. That was fixed the moment she opened her mouth to demand why I was there; of course, at the mention of a will, she’d perked up considerably. Now, I was barely resisting the urge to lean across the table and rip out her hair by the roots.
“It’s more than you deserve. Or do you want me to tell the police about your involvement in Shawn’s death?”
“If you were going to turn me in, you would have done it already. I doubt there’s any evidence left to tie me back to that.”
I scowled. She was right, and she knew it. “You don’t need to worry about having anything to live on. You stick that five million in a high yield savings account and you’ll have more than enough to last you the rest of your life once you do get out of here.”
She’d taken the news that Joshua was our half brother surprisingly well, sneering at him a bit but then going right back to ignoring his existence completely. She was irritated about splitting up the money more than she had to, but I’d made it clear I never intended to let her walk away with anywhere near a third of what was left.
“I want one hundred million.”
Even Joshua’s jaw dropped at that. “That’s not happening,” he snapped back. The venom he spoke with took me aback. I knew he wanted money for himself, but this was more than greed in his voice.
She glared between the two of us. “You know, I’ve been keeping quiet about what’s been going on over at the house.” She lowered he voice and leaned in closer. “I’m sure I could cut a pretty sweet deal if I told the Feds just how Meyer and Maddie came to get together.”
I’d expected this; honestly, it was surprising she hadn’t threatened me with it earlier. I shifted forward in my seat, getting as close to her as I could without getting screamed at by a guard. “Tell me, Anita, did Maddie ever tell you she was at my house against her will?”
She didn’t say anything, but the tightness in her jaw told me what I needed to know. Madeline hadn’t even bothered to plead with Anita when she visited.
I leaned back again. “Ten million, and that’s it. Or I’ll pull your lawyer.”
She gasped. “You wouldn’t!”
“I would. How much money did you save, Anita? Enough to pay for even an hour of his time? You’ll be stuck with a public defender by this time tomorrow. And then you really won’t have to worry about how much money I give you, because you will never see the outside of a prison cell again.”
David shifted next to me, clearly uncomfortable with this strong-arm tactic, but Anita was already caving. This was why I didn’t want her lawyer here. He’d have negotiated and threatened far more effectively than she could.
“So why don’t you sign this—” I held out my hand, and David handed me a one page contract that I slid across the table to her — “and you can have some money and I’ll keep paying for your lawyer.”
She sneered at the paper as she read. “This says I’ll take all the blame for the sale on the company’s behalf. And that I won’t try to pin any of it on Shawn.”
“That’s right. And unless you want to be defending yourself in court, you’ll sign it and let us get out of your hair. I’ll transfer you ten milli
on dollars to your offshore account tomorrow, and we will never speak again.”
She sneered, and seemed almost ready to refuse, but then grabbed the pen offered to her by David and scrawled her signature across the bottom of the page. She threw the pen back across the table and sat back, arms crossed over her chest. “I always hated you.”
“I know, and I never understood why. We had a common enemy.” I thought about what Eva said, that she’d suffered as much as I had in a different way. And wasn’t it true? She was stuck here and would be for several more years. My head was fucked, but at least I was free. I had people who loved me, a new family to help me build a new life. Anita had nothing and no one.
“The money will be in your account tomorrow. I’ll keep paying for your lawyer until the trial is over.” I stood and buttoned my jacket, Joshua and David following suit. “I’m not paying for any fucking appeals. When you get your sentence, you accept it like an adult. And Anita?”
She looked up at me. She was on the verge of tears, but to her credit, she held them back with the same stubbornness that had gotten her in to this mess to begin with.
“Don’t contact me when you get out. You leave the state and make your new life scamming rich old men somewhere else. I never want to see or hear from you ever again. Is that understood?”
“Crystal fucking clear,” she snapped, and saluted me with her middle finger.
*
David rushed away as soon as we walked out of the prison, no doubt eager to get some breathing space from my insane family. Joshua and I walked back to the car side by side, but with a healthy distance between us. I wanted to get home and talk to Maddie as soon as I could—being away from her for this long was making me nervous—but Joshua paused outside the car instead of getting in right away.
“I know your life sucked. I shouldn’t have implied that you had it easy.” He fished around in the pocket of his coat, retrieving a packet of cigarettes, and placed one in his mouth. I’d never seen him smoke before. “He didn’t even take me to a fire station, Meyer. I was found in a literal fucking dumpster. They guessed some teenager got overwhelmed and didn’t know what to do. But it was a grown ass man who left me to die.”
He lit the cigarette, and a sweet smell unmistakable as marijuana, not tobacco, filled my nostrils. He inhaled deeply and held the smoke for some time before letting it out.
“Figuring out that Conrad was my father was a lot of guesswork. When I dove deeper into his personal life, found out how many criminal prosecutions he’s avoided by paying the right people large amounts of money, I figured he had to be keeping girls at his house. I assumed whoever my mother was, she was long dead.”
After one more puff, he offered me the joint. I considered it, then shook my head. He shrugged and stuck it back in the corner of his mouth.
“Lots of babies get adopted by nice families, but I wasn’t one of them. My parents divorced when I was five, and then my dad drank himself to death by the time I graduated high school. Mom had a crisis after the divorce and married some asshole five years younger than her who didn’t want kids. No one gave a shit about me. So when I graduated and got my dad’s life insurance money, I used it to hire an investigator. It took the better part of a year, but he eventually led me to Conrad.”
He took one more puff of the joint, then put it out on the bottom of his shoe before placing it back in the packet. I shoved my hands deeper in my pockets, wishing we were out of the cold but not wanting him to stop talking.
“I never really hated you. But I hated him, for keeping you, just because you looked like him. So I used the last of my savings to move out here and learn to do personal security. I figured if I could get in close, I could take him down from the inside.” He snorted, as if embarrassed by himself, and looked at his feet. “I had this grand plan, the way it was going to go down. The look on his face when he realized I was the one who fucked him over, and what I’d say to him in response.”
“That’s why you didn’t want him to be dead. Because it meant you weren’t the one to take him down.”
He nodded. “If anything, what he got was too easy. Relatively painless. And Anita—God knows she deserves the jail time, but he deserved it more.”
I sighed. “Yeah. He did.”
We stood in silence for a few minutes, looking anywhere but at each other. A couple of birds sitting on the fence took off and strained against the wind.
“Fuck it’s cold.”
Finally. “Can we get in the car now?”
“Absolutely.”
We took opposite positions from normal, him in the passenger and me in the driver. I hadn’t trusted him with anything in several weeks, and I wasn’t about to start after finding out he’d been keeping the secret of our shared parentage for so long. I turned on the engine and cranked the heat, bouncing impatiently as we waited for the car to warm up.
“How old are you?”
“Almost twenty six.”
I cursed quietly. Surely I knew how old he was when I hired him. He had been born less than a year after Eva was kidnapped. But there were plenty of people born that year; why should I think he was related to me?
“Look, you don’t have to apologize to me.”
“Good, because I wasn’t going to.”
I gritted my teeth. I was about done with him interrupting me. “But you should make amends with Maddie and Eva.”
“I don’t see why I should bother. Do you think Eva even tried to find me after she escaped? I doubt it. She and Madeline are both strangers to me.”
“That doesn’t mean they’re not family.”
“You of all people should know that just because someone is family doesn’t mean you owe them anything.”
“They never hurt you. You could see how clearly it hurt Eva to have you taken from her. She thought you died, Joshua.”
He didn’t say anything, but didn’t rebut me either.
“She lived in hiding for twenty-two years. Maddie never met her grandparents. Joseph walked out on his family without a word in order to keep her safe. Even if she thought you were alive, she couldn’t have risked exposing you or herself to Conrad. She kept you safe the best way she knew how. I’m sorry that wasn’t good enough for you.” I took a deep breath. “I destroyed her, Joshua. I stole her daughter and then rubbed it in her face. But she knew me. She raised me during some of my most formative years. She was able to trust in me even when I hurt her. But you? She doesn’t know you at all. And everything you’ve done has been to hurt her. Even if that wasn’t your intention. Knowing the reason behind why you did what you did, I sympathize with you at least a little. Like you said, I’m certainly guilty of plenty in this clusterfuck. But I’m trying to be better. And I think it would be a good idea if you did too.”
He sank in his chair and folded his arms across the chest, glaring at me out of the corner of his eye. “You don’t need to dress me down over it.”
Thank God he took that well. I’d been ready for him to walk home rather than ride with me. Eva would have been heartbroken. “Well, that’s what big brothers are for.” I reached over and rubbed the hair on top of his head. He sneered as he yanked away from me, then knocked his skull on the window.
“Ow,” he muttered.
“That’s what you get!” I backed out of the narrow parking place, startling a Canada goose who had chosen to take a nap in the middle of the lot. It honked angrily as it scuttled out of the way. “Are you hungry? I’m fucking starving.”
“Yeah, I could use some coffee at least.”
“Okay. Let’s stop at a Waffle House. French toast is Anita’s favorite food, and I want to think of her while I shovel six pieces down my throat.”
Maddie
I leaped from my chair the moment I saw Meyer’s car pull on to the property, but forced myself to walk rather than run toward the garage. I’d missed him far too much while he was gone. Maybe he’d appreciated the time away, though. That notion flew from my brain as he stepped inside and lo
oked down the hallway for me as he kicked off his shoes, then jogged to close the distance between us before he took off his coat. He wrapped me in his arms so tight it chased away my worry.
“How did it go?”
“I got her to agree to ten million, and to keep Shawn’s name out of this.”
I sighed in relief. “I knew you could do it.”
“I thought I’d have to offer her fifteen, but you were right. She believed me when I said I’d take away her lawyer.”
It was a dirty move, but I didn’t mind making her sweat a little in order to get her to agree to whatever Meyer and Joshua wanted.
“And what are you guys going to do with what’s left?”
“Just take what you want and give me the rest,” Joshua mumbled as he brushed past us. He’d grown a bit of stubble over the past few days. The stress was finally getting to him. I sighed as he rounded the corner and headed up the stairs, not sparing either of us a second glance.
“Don’t worry too much,” Meyer said. “I talked to him.”
“Really?”
“Of course. In spite of everything that’s happened, I think he’s a good person.” He let me go slowly, unpeeling his fingers one by one, then took off his scarf and shirt. I walked alongside him as he returned them to the closet. “He got caught up in Conrad’s mess just like I did.”
“You’re sounding rather forgiving.”
“He’s my brother. Our brother.” He wrinkled his nose. “That sounds weird.”
“Yeah, let’s not say that any more.”
Meyer laughed as he took my hand.
Over the past few weeks, as we worked our way through Conrad’s possessions, the house grew emptier and I watched Meyer transform before my very eyes. He narrowed down the area of the property he wanted to build our new home on, and his eyes started to sparkle again as everything about him became more relaxed. He lost the frown that permanently marked his face as he slept; when he held my hand, his grip was looser and less likely to cut off my circulation. He even seemed to be getting along better with my dad. I caught them in one of the guest rooms one time, loading books into two boxes marked “Keep” and “Donate,” arguing good naturedly about who would play in the Super Bowl in a few months.
