by Maegan Abel
"Yeah. You know, we haven't had a chance to catch up on things. Thought it might be nice to have a night together." His enthusiasm sounded forced, confirming something was going on. Sydney had a tendency to meddle. She'd been that way since I'd known her. I wouldn't put it past her to plan something.
As I thought that, my eyes landed on Brittany. "Mind if I bring a date?" I asked, thinking on my feet.
His hesitation spoke volumes, but I didn't back down. "Uh, sure. No problem."
"Great."
Once we determined a time, I hung up and started back toward Brittany. I glanced at Conner, watching him sit back against one of the walls as another boy his age came up to play where he was, and sighed at the blank look on his face.
"Everything okay?" Brittany asked and I took the spot beside her again on the bench. Rubbing my hands together to warm them a little, also probably because I was nervous, I turned to face her.
"Can I ask you to do me a huge favor?" We weren't seeing each other, although she'd made her interest clear, and I knew I was probably crossing a line I didn't want to cross with her, but I was desperate.
"Sure," she answered suspiciously.
"You have a date?" Nikki asked…well, spit the question at me as I stood in the doorway to her apartment. Conner walked in without hesitation, looking around expectantly.
"You sure you don't mind watching him?" I asked Paige, ignoring Nikki's question completely.
"If I said yes, would you cancel your plans?" she challenged, clearly still annoyed. I sighed.
"No, Paige. I told you before, it's none of your business." I gave her a look, begging her not to push it. The truth was, I hated lying to Paige, but I didn't want anyone telling Jackson it wasn't a date.
She glanced at Nikki and then stepped closer to me, lowering her voice. "What if I told you this is a really, really bad idea?"
I placed my hands on Paige's shoulders, giving her a playful shake. "It's not. It'll be fine."
"It's too soon," she said, obviously grasping at straws.
"I love you, Paige. Stop worrying. It's fine." I kissed her forehead and gave her a quick squeeze before looking behind her at Conner. "Hey, buddy, I'll see you in the morning, okay? Be good for Aunt Paige." He glanced over at me, in acknowledgment maybe, and I waited, holding my breath, hoping he would speak.
He didn't. With a smile I fought to keep in place, I knelt down to give him a hug. He froze, almost leaning away from my touch, so I quickly released him. He had barely let me touch him at all over the last few weeks. A part of me wondered if he still let Lili hold him like she did the night she came home, but another part didn't want to know.
With a nod to Paige, I headed out. The time it had taken to drop Conner off put me behind a little so I hoped Brittany was ready when I got to her house. Thankfully, she was. She opened the door, wearing a tight dress in a deep green that matched her eyes perfectly.
"Wow," I said before I could think to stop myself. When I realized how it sounded, I knew I had two choices. I could acknowledge it or make a smartass comment. In the end, I couldn't be a dick. "You look great."
"Thanks." She smiled, her head tilting to the side as she analyzed my black slacks and gray dress shirt combination. "You're not so bad yourself."
I chuckled, stepping back as her kids came up to say bye. She told them to behave and I headed to the car to give her a little privacy. Out of habit, I walked to the passenger door, opening it for her as she approached. Her cheeks tinted slightly as she stepped into the car and I shut the door, trying to steady myself. This wasn't a date.
The drive to Jackson's was short and I was able to keep the talk superficial. Jackson and Brittany had never officially met, but Brittany knew he was my previous partner. I'd opened up to her more than I'd planned to over the last few months, needing someone outside of my family I could confide in while I was still healing and trying to understand all that had happened.
As it stood, she knew everything. She was the only person outside of my therapist and Lili who did. It was hard to tell her, but she was surprisingly open about her life as well.
We were inside having dinner when all the pieces started coming together. She fell into easy conversation with Jackson and Sydney, she knew all about my past, and that another woman was pregnant with my child. She fit into my world. If I let her, she could become a permanent part of it.
"Zane?" Jackson asked. I looked up, being brought out of my thoughts.
"Sorry. What?" I said, trying to remember the last part of the conversation I'd heard and coming up empty.
"I asked if I could talk to you for a minute," Jackson said, his face tense. I glanced at Brittany and then nodded, pushing back from the table to follow Jackson. As we left the room, I heard Brittany offering to help Sydney clean up. She was considerate as well.
I noticed Jackson was leading me to the garage and paused, uncomfortable with the idea. The last time I'd been in there, I'd watched a lunatic hold Lili at gunpoint and nearly died. I wasn't in a rush to revisit the crime scene.
I forced myself to follow him into the room, my mind automatically rushing through the moments as I glanced around before finally stopping to wait for Jackson to face me. He stared at door leading outside, the one I'd busted into when I'd heard Lili's phone ringing but she didn't answer. The tension I'd seen on his face earlier was now showing in the set of his shoulders before he finally turned to face me.
"I thought I could take it to the grave. I thought if I never said anything, no one would ever know. But it doesn't matter because I know. And that's bad enough."
I crossed my arms, knowing I wasn't going to like whatever he was about to say.
"Everything that happened here that day was my fault."
He didn't elaborate and his words hung between us, tightening my already strung nerves. I forced myself to be quiet and wait him out when everything in me wanted to shove him into the wall and demand he tell me what he meant.
"Adam came to me when Lili was staying here and told me I could be arrested, warned me Lili was underage. He said he was afraid I would get in trouble since her family was looking for her and had tracked her as far as Vegas. He had newspaper articles to back him up. I never even looked at the dates. I freaked out and was going to come home and tell her she had to move out, but…" he trailed off, but this time, I couldn't contain my anger.
"But, what?" I ground out, using every bit of my willpower to stay where I was.
"But I had two sick babies, a wife who had postpartum depression to the point she could barely function most days, and the hospital bills were starting to roll in." He sighed, finally turning to face me. "He said there was a reward. He told me he'd return her to her family and we could split the money. He promised me no one would get hurt."
"I'm pretty sure a bullet to the back hurt. In fact, a bullet to the back still hurts nine months later." My voice was cold, though the rage bubbling up inside me felt red hot.
"I know. Fuck. I know, Zane. It wasn't supposed to happen like that." He sounded desperate.
"Everything you've done since then: giving us the house so cheap, helping out with things when I couldn't, even going to Mexico to bring her home. It was all out of guilt." The truth tasted bitter as betrayal flooded in.
"No. Not guilt." He shook his head. "I was making it right. Just listen, okay? The day you called me about the fire, I'd already heard about it from Adam."
My eyes narrowed further and I stepped forward, losing my grip on what patience I had left.
"Wait. Listen. He told me Lizzie had fucked up and she was freaking out. He'd been crashing with her for a while, apparently. I didn't want to listen to him, told him to fuck off, but he told me Conner and Lili had been kidnapped. He told me Lizzie had given up Lili to pay off a debt, used information she'd overheard from him to do it, but Conner wasn't supposed to be part of it. He wanted to get Conner back but couldn't do it alone."
I frowned and reached up to lock my hands behind my head, giving
up the pretense of calm as I started to pace the floor.
"I told him I didn't know anything and I'd call him if I figured something out. The next day, when I met you at the house, I found Lili's phone in the grass. I knew there might be information on it since it was left behind, so I kept it. Adam and I used it to figure out who specifically had taken them, but we needed someone who knew the ins and outs better than us." He stared at me, silently begging me to stay calm. "That's when we went to Tish."
"Are you fucking kidding me?" I growled, pausing just short of putting my fist through a wall as the betrayal continued to cut deeper.
"Tish didn't want anything to do with Adam. He was pissed, but everyone focused on getting Conner and Lili home. When Conner came home, I figured Adam would be out. He'd made it clear getting Conner back to you was his only priority. But, he stayed around. We started making a plan to get Lili out but it involved all of us working together and Adam and Tish couldn't be in the same room together without someone to intervene. That's where Tony came in."
I ground out a string of profanity at the mention of Tony. I knew he'd been a part of this story but for whatever reason, his name was the one that put me over the edge. I slammed my fist into wall, watching the drywall splinter and crack as the dust rose around the spot.
Jackson didn't give me long to dwell on it before he continued. "We perfected the plan before we even left Las Vegas. Tony was on the inside, I was the communication between Tony and the outside as well as keeping up with Tish back home in case he heard anything, and Adam was the muscle. We knew he would be willing to kill without a second thought because we'd seen him try before."
"You watched him nearly kill me when his bullet was aimed for Lili, yet you trusted him not to try again?" I snapped, leaning back against the wall as I faced him once more. I knew my hand should probably hurt, but the adrenaline coursing through me in the moment still had me numb from the pain.
"He was clean. He was still healing from his own bullet wound. I shot him when we were fighting for the gun." Jackson's voice dropped, telling me he wasn't proud of that fact. I could see how much it still haunted him. We spent so much time patching people up, the last thing we ever wanted to do was hurt someone.
"So, what happened in Mexico?" I asked, needing to hear the rest before I lost my grip completely.
"Things went well, for a while. It was a lot of waiting for Adam and me, getting periodic updates from Tony when he could. We had a system down and once he finally made contact with her, we would be in touch every twenty-four hours or know something went wrong. We got the call that he'd made contact and then didn't hear from him the next day. We started to get ready for plan B, but Adam's contact down there told us the Mexican military was moving in the next day for a raid, so we had to think fast. We had to get them out. We weren't even sure either of them were still alive but we worked as fast as we could. Adam was still inside when the raid started. He got to Tony, and together, they got to Lili." He was sitting on the floor at this point, slouched against the wall with his head hung in defeat. "I felt completely useless. I couldn't do anything but wait. Finally, Tony called from the hospital and I rushed over there to find them."
When he didn't say anything else, I considered the only question I had left. "Where is Adam?" I wasn’t sure why I wanted to know, but I hadn't seen him and everyone, including Lili, had hidden his involvement. It was infuriating.
Jackson blew out a breath. "He didn't make it. He got Tony and Lili to an exit, but…" He shook his head.
A part of me had a hard time imagining Adam giving up his life for someone, but the old Adam, the younger Adam, the one pre-heavy drug use and pre-parent death, would've laid down on a mine for almost anyone he knew. Maybe Jackson was right about him being clean. When I opened my mouth to say something, the tears on Jackson's cheeks made me pause. Watching a man I had only seen revert to tears the day his daughters were born crying told me exactly what he was feeling. And, as angry as I was, I knew what it felt like to live with the weight of a body on your conscience.
"It wasn't your fault." I hated hearing those words, hated saying them even more, but sometimes they just needed to be said. "You did your job and even if you'd gone inside, it probably wouldn't have changed anything."
Jackson snorted, a derisive sound I'd rarely heard from him, and as he looked up at me, I could see how exhausted he truly was. This had been eating at him, ripping him apart from the inside. I was his cry for help.
Slowly, I lowered myself to floor to sit across from him, proving my intention to stay until he was talked out and showing him he wasn't alone.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Moving On
Lili
"Where the fuck are all the pens?" I asked, throwing papers around as I looked through the mess of a counter. I'd been off two days but it may as well have been two weeks with all the crap that had piled up. "How hard is it to clean up your shit?"
Macy and Beth hustled over, grabbing papers and starting to clean the mess. I slammed the bottom drawer and dropped the handful of pens I'd grabbed from the stash into the holder beside the computer. Without another word to the girls, I headed back to the offices.
"H-hey," I said, stuttering a little when I noticed Tony sitting in the seat across from Tish. It wasn't that I couldn't be around him, but it was easier when I knew he was there. I’d thought he was off today. Shaking free of the shock, I smiled at him and turned my attention to Tish. "I need to put it an order. We need pens. We're almost out."
"Go for it," Tish responded distractedly, his attention on his phone. He frowned at the screen. "Would you shut the door on your way out?" he asked by way of a dismissal.
"Sure." I smiled, closing the door and taking a deep breath to steady myself. It wasn't personal. Tish loved me, I knew that.
Two months of therapy had helped me learn to handle the feelings of inadequacy that came with the events of my past. I'd spent two days in the hospital after the really bad night before finally being released with a treatment plan. It was rough, and honestly, I still had bad days, but I was getting better.
It had been a long road already and I was far from completely healed—hell, I was far from healing the relationships with those around me. Tish's dismissal just now made me wonder if it had something to do with his arrest.
Kas told me my parents pushed, giving the police no choice but to arrest him, since they couldn't get anything on Zane. It was petty and below even what I would've expected from them. Despite Tish's protests, I'd gone to the District Attorney's office and spoke on his behalf, telling my side of the story and having the charges against him dropped. I'd called my parents and let them know their actions solidified my decision to completely cut them out of my life.
Slowly, the media presence died down. Reporters would pop up here and there occasionally, trying to get a scoop, but things were finally starting to quiet down. Life was moving forward.
I'd spoken to Denni, cleared the air between us, and we seemed to be healing our relationship slowly as well. Kaitlyn, however, I was still angry with. It wasn't fair and I had talked to her, but I still felt that edge of betrayal. I was working on it.
The other part I was working on was Zane.
One day, I would be in a place where I could face him again. I would be ready to fight for us the way he needed me to. It had become my mantra.
I'm going to deserve him.
But, I wasn't there yet.
And then there was the date he'd been on a few days ago.
I'm going to win him back.
Yeah, that one still needed more work to feel believable.
My hand rested on my bump, a reminder and a way to ground myself in the present. I'd found out two days ago that it was a she, and that made things even more real. I'd thought a lot about adoption, not because I had anything against having a baby, but it needed to happen when the time was right. And now, the time was very, very wrong. I'd discussed it with my therapist on more than one occasion
and being a single parent still felt glaringly outside my range of abilities at the moment.
"She gets knocked up by Tish's brother and she thinks it gives her free rein on the place," a voice sneered as I rounded the corner toward the front desk.
I laughed, a short, bitter sound as I slapped my hand against the counter, making my presence known. Both girls jumped, spinning to face me with matching looks of shock.
"If you think for one second this has changed me," I started, patting my abdomen, "you clearly don't know me."
"Lili…" Beth started and rather than cutting her off the way she no doubt assumed I would, I raised an eyebrow, waiting. "I…I'm sorry. I didn't mean it."
Crossing my arms, I kept my smile in place. "Don't backpedal now. You meant it and you're only sorry you got caught."
"No! No, I—”
"You're fired. How's that for free rein? Get your shit and get out," I said, doing my best to keep my cool. About two weeks ago, I learned the baby didn't like it when I got upset. Now that I could feel it—her—moving, I was starting to understand a little better.
Beth gaped at me for a second, seeming completely stunned by my words. "You can't fire me." She was grasping at straws. She knew as the office manager, I did actually have the authority.
"I won't repeat myself. I'll call the cops next," I said, crossing my arms over my swollen, overly sensitive chest.
She huffed as she grabbed her things, shoving her oversized sunglasses on before storming out the door. My gaze shifted to Macy, who audibly squeaked before busying herself cleaning and sorting out the mess left of the counter.
With a grin, I propped my butt on the chair behind the computer, going through the inventory sheets to determine what I needed to order. I scowled at the numbers, frustrated by the amount of supplies that went missing on a regular basis from the shop.
When Tish offered me the job, I'd thought he was just being kind. But it seemed he did need someone to help handle the clerical side of all this mess. Plus, with the expansion plans to double the square footage since Tish bought the space beside the shop and now the talk of opening up a second location, he would need more people to employ.
