The biggest victim across the length of the trail, apart from the deceased, was Gracey. The poor girl spent a month on house arrest after being taken through the wringer leading up to the initial charge, and several weeks afterwards waiting to find out exactly what would happen to her family.
She was awarded compensation for the wrongful arrest, and several local papers issued apologies for defamation. In her natural way, Gracey shook it off as being part of the rich fabric of a life that was just getting going. Isabella had been put in prison, which was a huge shock to the system, not least because she was the last person Gracey expected to be capable of murder, and her fractured family had become even more so, but if anything positive could be taken out of the whole mess, it was that she actually felt closer to Isabella that she had at any other point of their lives.
It was as if getting this out of her system was what Isabella needed to connect. It was an extreme way of doing it, of course, but it was a way nonetheless. When she heard Isabella’s story at the trial, which was the first time she had really heard her talk about their stepfather, it made much more sense. Philip had been on a crusade to make her life miserable from day one, and half of the stuff that Isabella spoke about, Gracey had either been too young to remember or blocked out completely. She understood too, that her attempting to make friends with Philip at the very end of his life, must have appeared to Isabella as some special form of treason.
“You look like you are going to burst”, Isabella said as Gracey eased herself into the uncomfortable metal jail chair.
“Two more weeks”, Gracey said, smiling. “The next time I come in you’ll be able to see her.”
“Or him.”
Gracey gave her a ‘don’t be ridiculous’ look.
“You don’t know yet”, Isabella said, backing up her comment.
“Trust me, I know. Leighton wants a boy. Not only that, he wants to call him Philip.”
Isabella rolled her eyes.
“Yeah, I know. Don’t worry though, it’s going to be a girl. I can feel it. I might call her Phillipa.”
Gracey smiled. A second later Isabella understood that she was joking. For sisters, they were still in the process of getting to know each other, which felt really weird for both of them.
“How are you doing?” Gracey asked, placing a comforting hand on Isabella’s arm.
Isabella shrugged her shoulders. “You know, alright. Class is fun. I’m teaching them about toxic and medicinal plants. It’s cool.”
“That’s not what I meant”, Gracey said.
“I’m alright. You don’t need to worry about me, Gracey. You’ve got your own life to think about. How’s Leighton?”
“Good.”
Gracey beamed a wide smile and Isabella didn’t need further translation to know what that meant.
“He’s working on your appeal.”
“He knows I killed his father, right? I mean, he did get that part about my confession?”
“He understands, Isabella. Remember, we knew Philip much more than Leighton ever did. For Leighton, Philip was a story and nothing more. He had feelings for him, and what happened hurts, but he can empathize with what you did. He doesn’t hate you for it, none of us do.”
The hand was back on Isabella’s wrist to comfort her. The more she had someone comfort and touch her, the more she missed of it when it was taken away.
“Is there anything about him that’s not perfect?” she said.
“Yeah, tonnes of stuff. But it kind of pales in comparison when he takes his shirt off, if you know what I mean.”
Isabella snorted a laugh. “My little sister in love with a billionaire. Who would have though it. You really are turning into Mom.”
“Hey! I’m not a gold-digger! I only want Leighton for his body.”
The two girls giggled at that.
“I brought you some things. I had them all nicely wrapped but the lovely prison officer on the counter decided to fuck with the natural order of things and ruin the surprise.”
“Gracey Logan!” Isabella said, surprised. “Was that a cuss word, I heard?”
“Sorry”, Gracey apologized. “Being pregnant makes you say things you wouldn’t normally say. I might have said it to him as well. They nearly didn’t let me in.”
Isabella started rummaging through the bag of gifts. Gracey had brought so many things it was a wonder how she had managed to carry them at all. There words books on botany, rare plants, medicinal plants and two creative writing structure guides. In addition, there were chocolate bars, cigarettes, packets of biscuits, and board games. There was so much stuff, it wouldn’t all fit on the table.
“Gracey, this is really kind of you, but why? I only asked for a couple of botany books. The rest of this, you didn’t have to do that!?”
Gracey shrugged her shoulders. “I’ve seen films about what goes on in here. I thought that it would be better for you to have cigarettes and food, you know to make sure you don’t get raped.”
Gracey whispered the word raped in as theatrical a way as she could manage. Isabella knew instantly that she was goading her.
“Fuck, Gracey!”
Isabella said, finding the real treasure amongst the gifts. It was a lelo lipstick vibrator that came with a quick charge USB socket and was fully waterproof. Isabella quickly covered it with her hand while Gracey smiled.
“That one isn’t for trade”, she said.
“How did you get this in here?”
“Where there is a will-” Gracey began to say. “Plus, that’s an essential item. Essential items aren’t prohibited, are they?”
“Thank you”, Isabella said. “For everything, Gracey. You have every right to hate me. This could easily have been the other way round and I would have been happy to let you rot here.”
“That’s the old Isabella”, Gracey said. “We’ve already said goodbye to her. Besides which, I feel like I’ve just got my sister back. Sure we can’t go to the movies together, but I feel closer to you now than I did before. Even when we were kids. How fucked up is that?!”
“Gracey!” Isabella remonstrated again.
“Sorry, sorry, it’s these hormones.”
“That kid of yours is going to be one foul mouthed baby if you carry on like that!”
Gracey rubbed her enormous bump. “I still can’t believe it, you know. Life is crazy sometimes. I still can’t believe he picked me.”
“Your billionaire.”
“My Tempest”, Gracey said. “I never thought he‘d be the kind of man to allow himself to be tamed. Not Leighton.”
“You’ve just got what he needs. You know billionaires can’t resist Logans, it’s a well known fact. I’m just waiting for mine to turn up.”
Gracey smiled. “Five minutes ladies and gentlemen”, one of the prison guards called. “We’ve got a full facility today. Lots of people visiting.”
“I’ve only just got here”, Gracey complained.
“Bring him next time you come”, Isabella said. “If he wants to, of course. I’d love to see you both together.”
“The next time I come”, Gracey reminded her, “you’ll be holding this instead of me.”
The visits never seemed to be long enough. There was always so much to talk about and so much to catch up on, with what seemed like never enough time to do it. Isabella officially had four hours allocation every month, which was a rough ball park figure, because neither the guards nor anyone else seemed to keep count. Gracey liked to visit once every two weeks or so. That seemed like a decent amount of time for a conversation that didn’t stop dead after fifteen minutes. It also gave Isabella time to use the things that she brought her. Sometimes, like that day, the guards limited visits to thirty minute blocks, and that all depended on how many people had booked in to come. Thirty minutes felt like a paltry amount, especially because the drive there was just as long, but Gracey had no idea how long she would be given until she arrived at the facility, so there was no way to gauge the risk. Thirty
minutes was better than no minutes, however, and she didn’t want to ever let her sister down. It was enough sometimes to just see her.
Gracey was in a good place. A year on from a moment in her life when she thought she’d never see the outside world again, things were looking up. Yes, her sister was in prison, and Pandora and her mother were still barely talking to her, but she was happy. She had the perfect boyfriend in Leighton Tempest, the perfect home in the Chesapeake estate and the perfect future in the bundle of joy that was very close to saying hello to the world. That wasn’t all she had to look forward to either.
Leighton had proposed. He’d flown Gracey to an Italian villa that looked out over lake Como, got down on one knee and asked the shocked but delighted girl to marry him. And in broken syllables, which she had to repeat twice, Gracey had, of course, said yes.
There was nothing more that she needed. Leighton, her baby, a wonderful home and true love to fill it. She missed her stepfather and her own family from time to time, but she was ready to make her own.
With everything that had happened in her life so far, Gracey finally felt complete.
Pandora and Alexis
Pandora, dressed in a thousand dollar Prada jumpsuit, Manolo Blahnik heels and expensive chunky gold jewelry, leaned on her rake and smoked a cigarette. Community labor did not suit her. She just wasn’t cut out for it.
Litter picking was meant for the proletariat, not the bourgeoisie. Despite her recent conviction, Pandora saw herself very much in the latter category.
“Pandora Logan!” The event organizer, an ex military official called Steve, called to her, apoplectic with rage.
Pandora saw him storming over. She rolled her eyes and thrust out her chest.
“Is there any reason why, Miss. Logan, you seem not to grasp the principles of this exercise?”
Most of the other workers had stopped now to look over.
“My back hurts”, Pandora complained.
Originally given two hundred hours by the judge, it had already increased to three hundred and fifty for various outbursts of insolence. They had her painting over graffiti, cleaning up dog shit from parks, serving food in a soup kitchen and accompanying elderly residential home residents on an outing to the bingo, none of which she actively participated in. The litter picking was at the end of a long list of tasks she refused to do.
“If you don’t work, I’ll be required to report you”, Steve informed her, his mustache twitching.
“Whatever”, Pandora said, taking a long puff on her cigarette and giving him a sultry look. It wasn’t outside of the realms of possibility, that Pandora would fuck this man to get a tick on her sheet and a pass for the work. It wasn’t like it hadn’t happened already.
Like Gracey, Pandora and her mother had moved on. They were also, despite the fact that Pandora seemed like she would never finish her community service - even with the amount of government officials she fucked - in a much better place.
They had left the fortunes of Philip Mandrake De Vries behind, only to sink their talons in that of another. Another two to be precise. Father and son, Albert and Ernest Rathsburger. Alexis’s capabilities for finding billionaires showed no bounds, and for Pandora, the match of athleticism, intelligence and abundant wealth, literally in Ernest, proved a combination too powerful to resist. Love was of secondary importance. The mother and daughter team relocated to the other side of the river, Pandora took over one entire wing of their seventy two room mansion and Alexis made sure she knew both where the drinks cabinet was and that it was regularly restocked. After years of bitter solitude, Albert and his son, couldn’t have been happier.
Steve didn’t know how to cope with her. It was almost as if the girl was doing this on purpose. Shouting didn’t seem to help, nor did she seem fazed by his various threats. What they had was a standoff, and the longer it went on, the redder Steve’s cheeks were getting.
“Just tell me when you’re done”, Pandora said eventually, letting the litter picker drop to the floor as she wandered away. “I’m going to sit down for a while.”
And with that, Pandora went off to find a bench, and Steve could do nothing more than mutter his disgust, and mark her contribution in his ledger as zero.
When Pandora’s parole officer found out, a man she was also attempting to engage in nocturnal activities as a way to end the ridiculous mess she had unfairly found herself in, the only thing he could do was increase her required hourly commitment. After lengthy investigations and a back and forth with the state, he found he didn’t have any power to send her to prison or put her back up in front of a judge.
There was one piece of good news, however. A new opening had come up and needed to be filled. Pandora’s name was instantly put down on the top of the list, and no matter how much she tried to win him over, he wouldn’t allow himself to be dissuaded. Pandora could complain all she liked. The new sewage treatment works over on the East of the city would be allowed to make their mark on the uncooperative and workshy girl. Pandora had four hundred and fifty hours to commit, and he knew exactly where she was going to spend every single one of them: cleaning out tanks of the finest shit Baltimore residents could offer.
Leighton and his mother
Almost two months passed before Leighton finally sat down to read the near four hundred page handwritten document his father had left him as part of his legacy. His excuse was that he wanted to wait until the complications around Gracey’s trial had been satisfactorily concluded, and his fiancee had been set free with her name rightfully cleared. Really, it was because he was more scared of the truth than anything else he ever had been in his life.
It had stayed sealed in the jiffy bag until the night Isabella confessed, when he finally decided enough was enough, and reasoned it was time to get it out of the way, bury his father once and for all, and move on with his life. He read it through in one sitting, unable to stop himself once he had started. It was not at all what he expected.
After reading it cover to cover twice more, he gave it to Gracey to read. She was in tears after the very first page, crying all the way to the very end of the letter.
It took him moments to find the facility where his mother had been living for almost all of her adult life, and a couple more to be told she was very much still alive with no intention of going anywhere in the near future. It was six months, however, before he gained the courage to finally go and see her in person.
Gracey offered to support him, but Leighton felt like it was something he should do alone. The drive to the facility was absolutely nerve wracking, as was the wait in the reception area while the friendly nurse went to inform Isabella that she had a visitor. Leighton reasoned that it was probably better if he identified himself to the staff as a member of the family, but certainly not Isabella’s estranged son - if he felt it appropriate he could do that to his mother directly.
He didn’t want to cause a scene nor risk getting denied access. It had taken long enough to build up the courage to come here in the first place, something Leighton had got used to not having to think twice about. In business, he was an absolute lion, but when it came to the matter of his parents, Leighton wanted the world to swallow him up. It wasn’t everyday, that at nearly thirty years old, you got to meet your mother for the very first time, and Leighton, well aware of what was at stake, didn’t want to fuck up their first meeting.
“Go on through”, the nurse said with a smile when she returned. “Bella’s out in the garden painting. You’re lucky, she’s in a good mood today.”
Leighton composed himself, walked through the large open plan recreation room, which the reception gave out to, and through the double doors to the patio and acre of landscaped garden beyond. His mother was the only one out there, sat at a wooden table with sketchbook in hand, slowly rendering the swaying trees and distant buildings that lined the edge of the city beyond. He had practiced what to say a million times. He’d gone over it in his head, which included acting out the countless permuta
tions that might present themselves. He was all set to go, when Isabella heard him approach, turned towards him, took off her glasses and smiled.
“Hello, Philip”, she said. “I wondered when you’d be back.”
Leighton was stunned into silence. His mother was frailer than he had imagined, almost ghostly in her appearance, but absolutely beautiful, as though she might have just wandered in from another time period. She had light blue eyes like a Persian cat, and thin skin through which you could almost see her blood running. On the table next to her sketchbook sat an ashtray full of cigarette ends, while one recently lit cigarette sent a thin trail of smoke into the sky.
“You look different”, Isabella said. “Come closer, so I can see you.”
Leighton stepped towards his mother. “Isabella”, he said, tears beginning to well in his eyes.
When he kneeled in front of her and took her shaking hands in his, she’d already realized her mistake. “Oh my”, she said, almost choking on the words. “It can’t be. Leighton. Is that really you? Is that my son?”
Leighton embraced his mother strongly, her body feeling like it might blow away if a gust if wind came along to take it. Tears dropped onto her sketchbook and neither of them knew who they belonged to. Her cigarette burned out to nothing before they felt the need to separate.
“I waited for you”, Isabella said, holding on to his hands as tightly as she could manage. “I never forgot. Philip didn’t think I remembered what happened, but I never forgot. I knew you’d come back to me, I knew it.”
They walked around the garden together, hand in hand, and Isabella told her son about the center, about her drawings, the other residents, the good nurses and the bad nurses, and anything else that occurred to her might be important. The nurses had never seen her happier, nor as talkative, and when that first visit was finally over, Leighton couldn’t believe that his mother was sick at all. She seemed perfectly normal, absolutely in control of her own emotions and completely lucid.
DONKEY: A Stepbrother Sports Romance (With FREE Bonus Novel Charged!) Page 42
