by Amelia Wilde
“What would I have to do with it?”
“I don’t know, Ash.” Charlie folds his hands on top of his open portfolio. “You manage a lot of secret investments for dad. At least, that’s what you were doing before he died.”
“No.” This is getting away from me, and I didn’t even know I needed my hands on the reins. “I managed secret investments that he put in place for the family.” A cold, sinking feeling like cement falling toward the bottom of the lake pulls down at my gut. I straighten my spine. “If you have an accusation to make, Charlie, then make it.”
“I’m not making accusations. I’m making inferences based on the data that’s right in front of us.” He points at the screen. “Money is going into that account, for that ranch, god knows why. And…” His razor gaze falls to the portfolio in front of him. “Yes. Here’s the chain of accounting. The money comes directly out of the resort funds, passes into the projected accounts from the trust, and flows out to the ranch. Why is that, Asher?”
“I don’t know.” There are only so many times I can say it. “I don’t know. He didn’t tell me anything.” I wish he would have told me something. I wish he hadn’t put me at odds with the rest of my brothers over this. I wish I could march down the hall to his office right now and demand to know everything.
But he’s gone, and he’s never going to stand by the window of his office again.
“You’ve never seen this information before?” Charlie has his teeth deep into the facts now, and there’s no way I can disengage him because I can’t explain it. I have no fucking idea about any of it. Not a one.
“No. No.” I look at each of my brothers in turn. They all look back at me with the same eyebrows-raised expression.
“Listen, Ash,” Roman says quietly. “If this was you, if this was a project you set up for yourself, just tell us. There’s no shame in wanting a bit more, even if—”
“Roman, that’s not what this is. I went out there with a few sheets of paper and an address. I came to the address. And…”
I can’t do it.
I can’t tell them about what Everly and I did, because that will make this all seem a thousand times worse.
“And your wife here asked you for some help,” Charlie says. “Maybe she asked you for a ranch. Maybe you did have a whirlwind romance in Montana, with more on the side.”
“Charlie—” Roman’s trying.
“What’s to say he didn’t? What’s to say he didn’t meet her years ago, when the payments started? Nobody would have known. And dad wouldn’t have cared. Look at everything he kept from his.”
“Good things.” I shouldn’t keep defending this secrecy, because it’s obviously poison. “But these are good things. They make money from us, they’ve created a safety net for us…”
“A safety net we can’t access,” counters Charlie.
“A safety net we have to access together,” says Roman.
“We haven’t read all the documents yet.” Charlie sets his jaw. “How are you going to explain it away if there’s a clause in here saying that Asher has solo access?”
A silence falls over the table. There is no such clause. There has never been such a clause. But I haven’t seen any of this documentation, either. We were in a haze when we signed the paperwork. Even Charlie didn’t read it.
“Come clean, Asher.” Charlie looks at me across the table, eyes flat with pain and envy and all the frustration of the summer. “It was you and Everly, wasn’t it? Maybe you made a mistake, taking from the resort instead of the trust, but everybody makes mistakes.” His voice has lost some of its edge. “Even Roman makes mistakes.”
“Does he ever. Or at least Jenny does.” Beau laughs at his own joke. Nobody else does. “God, you are the worst crowd.”
“I didn’t do that. I don’t know how you want me to prove it to you, but I didn’t take money from the resort.”
Charlie nods, then looks down at the table.
None of my brothers can meet my eyes.
Not even Roman.
“Stop,” says Everly miserably. “I can’t take it anymore.”
Everyone’s heads swivel toward her.
“Asher didn’t steal from you. At least, he didn’t steal from you for that ranch. Who knows? Maybe he’s a really gutsy thief.” She lets out a choked laugh. “I live next door to the Bliss brothers of Paulson, Montana. There’s another Bliss family there. Maybe your trust got…all tangled up with them, somehow. He had no way of knowing, okay? I didn’t tell him.”
I am dead. My heart has been shocked into lifelessness.
Roman shakes his head. “That would be a neat explanation, Everly, but I don’t think that’s what happened. I think you fell in love, and I think you got carried away. I think this was you and Asher.”
“Except…we’re not in love.”
Each one of her words connects with my mind like a sledgehammer.
“I met Asher last week, and I convinced him to marry me to save my own ranch. My father’s will—” A shiver goes through her. “It was unbelievable. Our marriage is fake. It’s going to end in another three weeks. I have proof, and I’ll show it to you if you want to see it.” She goes back to her chair and unhooks her purse from the back. Everly takes out the envelope with our marriage certificate in it. “Signed last week.” She walks it up to Roman and puts it in his hands. “This whole thing is fake. But Asher’s telling the truth.”
16
Everly
I have fucked up beyond all reasonable belief.
The knowledge shakes me, rumbling like the motor of a boat under my feet. I’m unsteady, five seconds away from tumbling overboard, and nobody here would reach out to catch me.
Not even Asher.
I thought that by throwing my secret out into the air, it would prove Asher had nothing to do with this. That I had nothing to do with it. But from the look on Asher’s face, that was the wrong move. He’s ashen, and then a horrible red color comes to his cheeks. I’ve embarrassed him in front of his brothers. I’ve betrayed him in front of his brothers.
If it were me, I wouldn’t come back to this meeting room for the rest of my life. Asher might not have a choice.
Roman opens the envelope and slides out the certificate. He unfolds it with the infinite care of someone disarming a bomb. His eyes travel slowly over the page. I want to snatch it back, put it back in its envelope, and clutch it to my chest, but I don’t. I keep my hands to myself and focus on staying upright.
“What are their names?” he asks quietly.
“Austin and Luke. Bliss,” I add, then immediately regret doing it. It makes it sound fake, and it’s real. I have to make him understand that it’s real. “They’ve lived next to me all our lives. I…dated one of them for a while. It didn’t work out, like everybody thought it would.”
It didn’t work out, which is why I was in that bar in the first place. Which was why I met Asher in the first place. Which is why we’ve had one glorious week together, even if we spent half of it trying to abide by rules that strike me as idiotic in this moment. I could have had him in my bed for twice as much time.
I could have made this even worse.
I can’t bring myself to look at Asher, but I can see him out of the corner of my eye, and it’s killing me softly, the devastated set of his face.
“What happened, Everly?”
I take a deep breath. “Like I said, my dad was…not the finest individual. When he died, he left the family ranch to me on the condition that I got married. I didn’t know how to solve that problem. Snare a man by telling him he’d get half a ranch? I couldn’t even offer that. My sister…she deserves to keep it, and she was never going to get married, and I…”
This whole thing sounds insane.
It is insane.
“Asher walked into the bar I was in two days before the deadline.” I force myself to meet Roman’s eyes. “I was buzzed, and I asked him if he’d marry me. A fake, temporary marriage. A Hail Mary to save the ranch. He
’s not an idiot. He said no.”
Beau whistles. “Wow.”
I press on. “The next morning, he showed up at my house with a sheet of paper that had my address. And…” I look up at the page on the projector. “I guess your dad got it wrong, because he had my address on that printed sheet, but that address up there is the one next door to my ranch. The Bliss Ranch. That’s the right address.”
I turn to face Asher. “That’s the address you should have gone to. And I should have told you. I knew it couldn’t be a coincidence that somebody with the last name of Bliss had shown up in town, and come so close to that other ranch.” Tears burn at the corners of my eyes and sorrow grips my throat with both hands. I should have been honest with him from the very beginning. Only at the very beginning, it seemed like we’d both get out of this with no harm done. Just a saved ranch and a hasty divorce. “I let you think that setting things right at my ranch was what your dad sent you there to do, and I was wrong. I was so fucking wrong, Asher, and I’m sorry.”
It’s all I can do to look into his eyes, because I’m worse than Brutus.
“We’ll look into it,” Roman says. “Guys…”
Charlie’s the first out of his seat, Beau the last. His twin brother comes around and hauls him out of the seat, nearly spilling his drink.
“I missed something,” says Beau. “What are we doing?”
“Giving Asher the room,” says Charlie.
They’re gone in ten seconds flat, and my trembling, idiotic self is all that’s left to face Asher.
“Why?” His voice is deadly. It’s a far cry from the funny, playful man I spent he afternoon in bed with. “Why, Everly? What was so damn hard about telling me the truth in the first place?”
“I—”
“You made me look like a fucking criminal up here. Like I was stealing from my brothers. They’re not going to forget this, even if the truth comes out in the end.”
“It’s out,” I say. “It’s all out in the open now.”
“Yes, and they know I got suckered into a sham marriage by a woman who doesn’t care about me.”
It’s a hit square in the gut. It knocks the wind out of me and squeezes my stomach with both fists. “No—that’s not—I only said that because I thought it would help. I do care about you. I obviously care about you.”
“How obvious is it? You could have told me anytime. We’ve been together constantly for days. And you let me walk in here without knowing…” He gets out of his seat, sticks his hands in his pockets, and takes a big step back. “How could you do that? If you have nothing to do with the ranch next door, then why did you do that?”
“Because I had a crush on you.” The floodgates burst, tears running down my cheeks, but I’m not going to make that ugly sobbing face, I’m not. “I had a big, stupid crush on you, and you looked like a knight in shining armor when you showed up on my doorstep. The soul was fucking weak, Asher. And I didn’t want to risk letting you go.”
His jaw works. “And now what? We can’t keep this up anymore.” He gestures between us. “I won’t do it. My brothers will have me pegged for a liar. I don’t even know if this story about the other Bliss family is true.”
“It is true,” I insist. “You’re even related. I know you are.”
“How? How would you know that?”
“Because you have the same eyes.” It’s desperate, and I force the words through tears. “They have the same eyes as you. You must be cousins.”
“My dad didn’t have any siblings.”
Bricks, tumbling over one another. A long fall and a heavy landing. That’s what fills my chest.
“Then I don’t…I don’t know…”
“You let me think you were the reason he sent me there, Ev. I was living up to his expectations. And when I started falling for you, I thought…maybe it was a sign.”
My heart shatters.
“Fuck,” Asher whispers, down into his hands.
17
Asher
“Here.”
The three-ring binder falls with a thud onto Roman’s desk.
He looks up at me from behind his computer. “What’s this?”
“My travel records. My real credit card statements. It’s everything. Look at it. Do whatever you want with it. It’s proof that I didn’t steal from you.”
I parked my car in the parking lot three minutes ago and walked straight inside. All I’ve done today is ruin my life a bit more, drive Everly to the airport, and stop at the copy shop in downtown Ruby Bay to pick up the printed version of all these reports. I don’t care if they looked through it, either. Let them look. Let everybody look. Print it out on glossy paper and distribute it to the local news networks, for all I care.
He sighs. “Roman, I was out of my mind to make that accusation, and I’m sorry for it. Please don’t think—”
“Just take them. For your own peace of mind. I don’t want you to have a moment of doubt. Another moment of doubt.” I tap the binder. “It’s all there, plus a flash drive with digital copies and passwords to all the websites. You can keep track in real time. I don’t care. It’s up to you.”
He looks down at the binder, then back up at me. “Where’s Everly?”
“On a plane to Montana.”
Roman’s shoulders sag. “You sent her?”
“I did.” I don’t tell him that I’m gutted by her absence. That driving her to the airport was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life. That I’m so angry at her I can hardly breathe. It’s sucking all the life out of the world.
“You should have told us what happened, Asher.” Roman is sincere—I can hear it in his voice. “We’d be the last to judge. This summer has proven, time and agin, that we all do insane things in the name of love.”
“I don’t love her.” The lie curdles in my mouth, stinging my lips. “I’m here for the family, okay? Nobody can dispute that now. Even though I was gone. I’m—” I feel like I’m breathing in fire, which is the opposite of how these things are supposed to go. “I’m sorry, Roman. I couldn’t come back. I wasn’t trying to avoid you, and duck all those messages. It just—it was too much to see…” I wave in the general direction of his desk, his office.
“I know. I understand.”
“You do?”
Roman lifts one shoulder and lets it fall, and for the first time since the funeral, I see it—how much weight this has put on those shoulders. He’s the oldest brother. He stood up straight and tall when everything happened, and we took it for granted. I took it for granted. “It wasn’t easy to come sit at this desk. If I’d had the option to be out of the office for several months, I’d have taken it too.”
“It wasn’t right.”
“It was what happened. At a certain point, when it’s said and done, debating whether it was right or wrong is pointless.”
I squint at him across the desk. “That doesn’t sound like you, Roman. Don’t you love debating whether things are right or wrong?”
“Please. You’ve obviously been gone too long. I don’t like debating at all.” He laughs. “Don’t be a yourself up about it, Ash. We’ve all dealt with this in different ways. It only looks easy because we live next to the beach.”
“I don’t think it looks that easy.”
“Come back and live on the beach for a while. You’ll see how effortless I make it look.” Roman threads his hands behind his head, and he looks so much like my dad that I have to look away.
But then I look back, because this is reality now. And I’m alive in it, even if it feels like my heart has been flattened like the world’s saddest pancake.
“I might do that.”
“We’d be glad to have you.”
“Not Charlie.”
“Charlie’ll come around.”
“All right.” I put my hands in my pockets. He’s probably right. Charlie, out of all of us, gets mad the quickest, but I’ve never known him to hold a grudge longer than…well, a few years. Ten at most.
I freeze, then draw in another jagged breath. “I did. I can’t lose Bliss, or our family. You have to understand that.”
He sighs. “I do. But you should sit down.”
I fall into the seat before I think to ask why. “You have bad news?”
“Not bad news.” He squints at the computer monitor. “Interesting news. And you look like you’ve been awake all night.”
“Tell me the news.” My head throbs at my temples, and I lean my head into my hand and rub at them with thumb and forefinger. I want a week without news. I want a lifetime without news. Let this be the last piece of news I get from one of my brothers.
“I sent a private investigator to check out the Bliss Ranch. They corroborated your story. And they found out something else.”
I pick up my head from my hand, energy coursing through my veins like I’ve been injected with caffeine. Roman’s eyes shine with a new light. “Christ, Roman, spit it out.”
“Dad had a brother.”
“No fucking way.”
Roman lifts both palms skyward. “I know. Did you ever hear anything from him about a blue notebook? A journal of some kind?”
A movement in the air makes me look toward the doorway.
Charlie stands on the threshold, eyes wide. “He hasn’t. But I have.”
Everly
For the first time in years, I march from my driveway to the property line that divides our ranch from the Bliss Ranch and cross over it without any hesitation whatsoever.
I have something to say to Lucas Bliss, and I’m going to say it now.
I’ve spent all day on a plane, feeling like I was having a heart attack. The sun on the clouds failed to brighten my mood at all. Everything is bleak, ruined, in ashes. Up in flames, up in smoke. I’m going to have to tell Brooke it’s up to her now. Either she’ll have to get married or we’ll lose the ranch, but either way, I’m not living a lie. Not for another moment.
