I tear the page with Logan’s image on it off the easel as well, and fold it, sliding it over the top of the page that holds Danielle’s image. I need to keep sketching, but not here. Not around other people. I need to be alone, to find me again and maybe with me, I’ll find Danielle again. Maybe I’ll even find a way back to the mother that I thought I knew, but now—I just don’t know anymore. I need art supplies. I need time alone. I walk back toward the coffee area and exit the art room to find Logan sitting at the table we’d shared together this morning, his hair rumpled, his attention on his computer. In that moment, I dare to appreciate the fact that there is a quality about him I find appealing, some something that I cannot name, but it sets him apart from the normal stuffed suits I frequently encounter.
I cross to join him, claiming my seat in front of my computer that still rests on the table under his protection, while stuffing the folded pages in my hand under my purse on the chair next to me. He grimaces at whatever he’s working at and tosses down the pen in his hand. “How’s sketching?”
“Apparently better than being an attorney. Something wrong?”
“Nothing that won’t bore you out of your mind or piss you off since you hate attorneys.”
“Try me,” I say. “You might be surprised.”
“I’m preparing a filing and I don’t feel like it’s strong enough to make my case.”
“Why?”
“It lacks facts.”
“I’m good with facts,” I say, seeing an opportunity to get to know this man in his world, not mine, and size up his true motives. “I’m free. I can help you research.”
Surprise flickers in his eyes, followed by warmth. I’ve pleased him, and for this moment, it feels real. I try to think back to meeting Tobey, to any moment like this that felt real, but if it exists, it was long ago forgotten. “Keep me company,” he says. “That will motivate me.”
In other words, he’s a smart man who doesn’t want me in his business, and that sets off alarms. He wants me close, but not too close, and I decide that I’ve imagined that moment of genuine warmth in him as a person when it was about reeling me in; keeping me close.
“I’m antsy for something to do,” I say. “I’m going to head out and let you work.”
“Stay,” he encourages, his hands sliding over mine, the touch rocketing up my arm and stealing my breath.
I’m disarmed and after my newfound conclusion about his motives, and those of everyone around me, I do not like being disarmed. Not one bit. “No,” I say, jerking my hand back. “I really need to rest up before the class tonight.”
“What time is class? Maybe I’ll be your student.”
I laugh. “I’m doubtful that you’re a good student.”
“Every good attorney is a good student. It’s part of winning.”
And winning is all that matters. Oh, how I understand that attitude. It’s exhausting. It’s what I want to escape. I stand up, pack up my bag, and settle it on my shoulder. “Good luck finding your facts.” I walk away and consider that maybe, just maybe, I’ll walk away from more than one attorney. I’ll walk away from them all. I’ll decide the possibility of a presidency doesn’t get to rule my life. I’ll do what my mother never did. Of course, that fact of her life is no secret. We all know she stayed.
Right up until the moment she died.
***
I step onto the street and start walking toward the Bed and Babbles down the road after a quick google search produces a result in Cherry Creek. Apparently, it operates like the area’s everything store and I’m hoping to find art supplies. Turns out, they really do have a bit of everything and while the supplies are not perfect choices, they’ll get me by until I can have the proper choices delivered.
An hour later, I walk into my rental, setup a little studio in a garden room off the kitchen. I’m glad I walked away from Logan today. Alone is what I do best. Alone is safe. Maybe one day it won’t be, but right now, there are too many unknowns and too many of the wrong certainties, like my father’s candidacy.
I pull out my paintbrush and as much as I want to stay in this new reality, I have another reality that is icy and cold, settling in every warm spot my new teaching job has created. I know why I drew Danielle and not my mother. She was erratic, unpredictable and yet the one person I shared a dangerous secret with, but I knew her, we were bonded. I could control her, or so I thought. I’m the one who ended up drugged, not once, but twice and yet, our secret died not with me but with her. This idea slides into my mind as if it was my decision, and I quickly shove it aside. No. That is not what happened, but something did and someone knows what that something is, and that’s dangerous. I have to remember that night.
I start to paint. First producing what seems like a simple memory; the drink that was not so simple at all. The drink that was drugged, by Danielle. I shut my eyes, searching the black hole that is my mind:
The s’mores drink Drew ordered appears in front of me, and I grab the marshmallow and take a bite, the sweet chocolate of flavored liqueur touching my tongue. I turn to find Danielle’s back still firmly in place, her body turned intimately toward Drew’s.
My eyes snap open. Her back was turned. My brow furrows. When did she drug me? Did the bartender drug me for her? I stand up and start to pace. I want to go back to Austin, to find him, to confront him, but I know that would bring attention to myself that I can’t afford. I inhale and force myself to reach into the deep, dark depths of that black hole again. I’d gulped the sweet chocolate drink and I go back to that moment.
Tobey appears by my side, resting an elbow on the bar. “Hey, honey.”
I hate when he calls me honey. My father called my mother honey. I rotate to face him. “Are you gay?”
I think back to that question I’d intentionally thrown at him with such accusation and I know why. He’d not only called me honey right after I’d seen that text message—maybe I even thought he’d sent the message back then—but Drew had also hit a nerve, something I’d sensed with Tobey. Something between Tobey and I that just didn’t feel real. Passion that was never quite ripe. The idea of him faking desire for me had cut deeply.
Tobey had scowled and snapped back at me, “Why the fuck would you ask me that?”
“Are you?”
“Do I fuck like I’m gay?”
“I don’t know how someone gay fucks,” I say.
His hand had settled on my shoulder and I remember wanting to feel something, wanting a spark that didn’t exist to exist, “Let’s get out of here and fuck,” he’d said. “That’ll end this conversation.”
And so I’d woken up in a hotel room, where he claims we did just that—fuck—and yet I had my dress on. Not that taking off your dress is a requirement to fuck, but one would think that if Tobey was trying to prove he was into me, he’d want me naked. One would think I’d remember such a display of manliness, but then, sex with Tobey was never overly memorable.
I tear away the page that displays the drink and stare at a blank page, furious with myself for what I don’t know. I grab a pencil this time and I start creating again, letting my mind lead me. I draw myself and Danielle on a mountaintop with a woman between us right before she fell to her death. I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all. Why is this what is on the page? Why am I going there?
I flashback to that shove before the fall. I bury my face in my hands. I believed what I told the police. I really did, but my silence turned it into a lie, a damning, poisonous lie. It became my unwanted secret that I don’t get to own alone, a constant hammer hanging above me, ready to fall. I know why I drew this now. I know the warning my mind is giving me. Remember or else. Remember now.
Standing up, I tear away the drawing and carry it to the kitchen where I turn on the stove top and set the edge on fire. I then stick it in the sink and let it burn until the fire alarm goes off, and then I wash it down the drain. I leave the alarm on for a full minute, the screeching sound a w
arning that echoes the one in my mind: Someone has a secret about that night and I need to be very, very concerned that it’s someone other than me and about me.
Of course, my father would bury that secret to protect himself, to protect the presidency but this is no comfort. My father would bury Danielle, or maybe even me, to protect that future. Is that why my mother stayed? I thought they were deeply in love but—perhaps he simply scared her. I catalog random moments, and the look in her eyes, and the truth comes to me in bitter acceptance: She was afraid. My mother was terrified of my father. For the first time in my life, I do not want to be like my mother.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
My father’s hatred of my art ran deeper than his need to turn me into his version of the perfect First Daughter. It was my connection to my mother. She was the one who put my first brush in my hand. She was the one who, to my father’s peril, insisted that my talent was a gift that couldn’t be ignored while he called it a frivolous hobby. I would be a doctor or an attorney. The end. If I’m honest, denying myself my connection to my mother, forcing myself into law school, most certainly giving up my art, was punishment. I killed her. I didn’t deserve a connection to her. Punishment I know my father wholeheartedly approved of. Punishment my father found every way possible to deliver, over and over again.
Knowing all of this, why then would my cover story in Denver be rooted in the world of art, when my father hated that world? Why then would my cover story use my mother’s name as my name? There’s only one answer: more punishment. He blamed me for whatever happened in Austin. He knew what I couldn’t remember.
Of course, I took what would have been a small taunt, and turned into a full-blown body slam, when I’d offered to teach that class when I started to hunger for my art in a deep, passionate way. I’m sure when his confidants, whoever was watching me, reported back to him on my new teaching job, this amused my father, pleased him, in fact, as he knew it would pain me to let it go. Unfortunately for my father, he wasn’t the only one working a plan and he was a long way from burying what really happened that night in the bar.
But then, so was I.
***
THE PAST—MY FIRST NIGHT AS HAILEY ANNE PITT, ART INSTRUCTOR…
Despite my worries about secrets and lies at play around me, especially where Logan is concerned, my steps are fast and light as I head back to the coffee shop to teach my class. For the first time in years, adrenaline that isn’t anger, but rather excitement, pulses through me. I arrive thirty minutes early to setup, but upon entry, I’m jolted to find that one of the televisions over the bar is playing the news, with my father and that damn book, the topic. “We have this book on the shelves,” Michelle calls out to the general population of about twenty.
Eager to get out of this room before my image is randomly flashed on the screen, and I’m recognized, I dart toward the bathroom sign. I’m instantly down a hallway, wooden walls encasing me, and I quickly search for cover, shoving open the door labeled “Ms. Coffee” of all things. I might have responded to such a name with a snort back in Washington, but here, it’s cute. It’s real. It’s fun. Not ready to let go of this newfound place, and identity, I shut the door behind me and lean against it, two sinks to my left, two closed stalls just beyond them.
I step to the sink and stare at myself in the mirror, and there is no doubt that I am Hailey Anne Monroe, complete with dirty blonde hair and blue eyes. If I was in Washington, I’d have been identified already. That I’m in Denver is unexpected, and thus far unrecognized, offers hope that might remain that way. I want it to last and a visual change would help. I could change my hair color, but I nix that idea the minute I have it. Dying my hair is about as appealing as the years in law school I’ll soon endure to be my father’s version of me. I gave up my art for him. My hair color is the one part of me that I still know as me. I reach behind me and braid the long strands, and upon inspection, I decide that helps. I don’t look as much like me as before. Maybe I’ll do temporary pink highlights and leave them in long enough to give my father a heart attack, but again, that might draw attention.
Satisfied I’ve done what I can to hide my real identity, I head for the door when it bursts open and someone runs smack into me. A yelp follows, and I instinctively grip the woman’s shoulders to find it’s Megan. “You,” she says, almost like it’s an accusation.
“Hailey,” I supply, in replacement of “you,” and noting her bloodshot eyes, I ask, “Are you okay?”
“Of course I’m okay,” she says defensively, pulling away from me, clearly not worried about upsetting a customer that she still believes me to be, but I have this sense that she feels caged. Trapped. Discovered in some way.
Okay then, I think, stepping aside, to give her the space she clearly demands. She brushes past me toward a stall and I turn just in time to watch her shove a hand through her dark bob, a deep scar running down her arm. Unbidden, my hand settles on my hip, over my own scar. A scar that resembles hers in a way that tells me, like mine, hers is created by steel penetrating flesh, which is not a gentle injury.
She shuts the door and I stand there a moment, wondering about her, about what created that injury and what pain haunts her in the aftermath. I do not remember the last time I wondered what hurt someone instead of who someone was preparing to hurt. Oddly this is far more uncomfortable than the latter, which should be the opposite and I do not like this about me. I look over my shoulder at that stall and wonder if this young girl in a coffee shop might have far more in common with me than either of us might first think. I wonder if she would wish for my life the way I might just wish for hers.
I exit to the hallway and hurry back toward the coffee area. My dash past the television area is quick, my retreat to the art room, a success. Already there are people milling about, waiting for me to get them started. Michelle comes rushing into the room. “You ready?” she asks. “Usually we get everyone seated, take drink orders, and then the instructor gets everyone going.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“Do you want a glass of wine?” she offers.
“Oh no,” I say quickly. “We don’t want me to start painting your walls instead of the canvas.”
She laughs. “We’ve had a few incidents.”
I laugh with her, but considering my past drinking experiences, I imagine she’d welcome a painted wall over blood and missing a person. Of course, I doubt anyone here is planning to drug me, but that experience is just a little too raw right now to indulge. Shaking off that thought, I quickly focus on the here and now where I want to be, and setup at station for myself at the front of the room. It’s not long until I have a full room, and I’m teaching everyone to draw dandelions with lots of laughter in the room as wine begins to dictate the skill on the pages. It’s a fun night and at one point, while helping someone turn a weed into a flower, my skin prickles. I’m just leaving Bruno, who indeed looks like a Bruno, to his work, when the air crackles and I look up, seeking the source, to find Logan leaning inside the archway.
I dislike that I notice how good looking he is which I could dismiss as a simple observation of fact. I could, if my heart wasn’t racing with his attention, and the fact that I know he came here for me because it’s for the wrong reason. I should now be sharpening my wit and caution, suspicious over his motivations and I am and yet, there is more. There is that part of me trying to face the fact that the last two men I was with most likely were on my father’s payroll. And the fact that what I had with Tobey wasn’t even close to real. Maybe my father even paid him to oversee me. These thoughts have me turning away from Logan. I can’t forget that he too could be here to oversee me, and that idea successfully shifts my female instinct to get to know him, into my desire to punch him right in the kisser I will never kiss. My only love affair in Denver will be with art.
I refocus on a pretty blonde named Ivy and help her paint a rose and when she beams with her success, she is even more beautiful. Like Danielle, I th
ink. Danielle was a beautiful mess. No. She is a beautiful mess which is why she will re-appear any day and revel in her ability to cause chaos. I shake off the crazy thought and glance toward the archway to find Logan has disappeared, but he’s not gone far. Of this, I am certain.
For now, I throw myself into my love of art, and I do love art. I love being a part of this place. I love what I’m doing here. In fact, while my class runs right up until midnight, I would happily have continued with my lessons far beyond. Once the last student departs I gather my things and look up to see Logan leaning on the archway. Of course, he’s here for me, the real me. I’m his job, the woman he’s spying on, but there’s this small, weak part of me that wants him to be just a man who knows me as just a woman. For once in my life, I’d like to be wanted for me, to know it’s really all about me. The way a paintbrush allows me to be just an artist and the class tonight allowed me to be just a teacher.
I walk toward him as he straightens, and I notice how tall and broad he is again, but that’s not what really matters. It’s the way he owns the space he occupies while Tobey needed me by his side to own anything even himself. He needed me to get to the White House. “How was class?” Logan asks, driving away Tobey, and pulling me back to him, his eyes warm with what feels like genuine interest.
“I enjoyed it,” I say. “I’m looking forward to the next one.”
“Which is when?” he queries.
“Monday night.”
“What are you doing now?” he asks.
A Perfect Lie Page 17
