by Chloe Cox
“So you don’t talk?” I say. “You don’t have a say?”
Silence.
“I don’t get you,” Brison says finally.
“Why?” I ask him. “Because I don’t come around to intimidate women? Or because I don’t do everything Alex Wolfe tells me to?”
Brison shoots me a look that would be lethal if it wasn’t like looking into a mirror. He says, “You’re here now, aren’t you?”
For some reason those words hit me hard. I ball my hands up, knowing they’re itching for a fight, but it’s only because those words reminded me of what Harlow told me last night. That the way she sees it, Alex Wolfe shows up, and I disappear. Alex Wolfe comes calling, and I leave.
That’s not what this is. But I can’t pretend it never happened.
***
Alex didn’t let the subject of Harlow drop for long. It took me a while to figure out that Alex really did have plans for me, and that he must have had those plans for a while. He was never going to let me go on being Juan Roma’s son forever, but Juan dying maybe got him to press fast forward a little bit. Or maybe it was Harlow who got him all panicky. Either way, he stepped up the pressure.
Those dinners out, they became more like interviews.
What were my interests in business? What were my strengths? All this stuff I’d only ever thought about in the abstract, figuring it would take me a lifetime of work to get to the point where anyone gave a crap about what I thought or what my interests were.
It’s difficult to adjust to the idea of having a parent who cares about you. I guess a part of me didn’t trust it. Seemed too good to be true, you know? But Alex, man, he was smart. He knew that. He started slow.
And he kept asking about Harlow.
Just poking around a little bit. Did I see a future with her? Hell yes. What other family did she have? None that cared. What were her prospects?
What the hell did that even mean? I didn’t have prospects until Alex Wolfe showed up and told me I did.
One evening he came to pick me up at the gym, walked in in a three-piece suit, said hi to Pops. Looked at me like he was making a decision, the way a bookmaker might look over a horse, thinking, does he have what it takes. Then he says, “Ok, we’ll talk.”
What? Man, I’d just been working the speed bag. I had no idea what he meant.
“What are you talking about?” I asked him.
“Get dressed. I have an offer for you.”
I won’t deny I got a rush from that. As I said before, I am not proud of it, but I will admit to weakness when I have it, and knowing Alex Wolfe thought me capable of things made me feel important. Made me feel good. Like I said, I was young and dumb. Naïve.
So I went out with Alex. I watched him eat his steak and creamed spinach, getting more worked up by the second, thinking about all the things I could do for Lo and me with a real job, a real future. Thinking I could buy a house for us, maybe, if Harlow didn’t want her parents’, or thinking I could hire a lawyer and get custody of Dill. Thinking I could fix all the problems by myself.
“I have a job for you,” Alex said, slicing into that steak, watching it bleed. Jesus, the things you remember. He looked over at me while he let that steak bleed all over the plate. “I want you to go California.”
“California?”
Like I said, I was kind of dumb. I sat there thinking about how I was going to get Harlow out to California with me. I’d have to find a way to get Dill.
“California,” Alex said again. “I have a project out there I could use your help on. Row houses, tracts of land, the city being a little bitch. I want you to learn the business.”
I remember smiling. I didn’t have a poker face at all back then.
“You’d be out there to learn, Marcus, at my expense,” Alex says, eying me, taking a sip of his red wine. “No distractions. You’d be out there by yourself.”
Slowly it fell into place. What he was really saying was “without Harlow.”
“No,” I said. “Can’t do it.”
Alex didn’t hear no very often. You could see it on his face, working out whether or not I’d really just said that, figuring out how to respond to it. It was like a foreign language to him. In retrospect, kind of funny.
All he said in the end was, “I see.”
But of course that wasn’t the end of it.
It kind of took me a little while to get used to the idea that Alex thought of Harlow as a burden. As someone who wasn’t going anywhere, who was trouble in any way, shape, or form. I didn’t deal with it for a while as a legitimate problem beyond that first day when he talked about her in a disrespectful way and I just thought that was how he was with women, but only because I didn’t really believe it. It was like he’d told me the sky was green. He was just wrong, and eventually he’d have to see that.
But slowly I realized that Alex wasn’t kidding. He really didn’t think Harlow was good enough for his son.
He saw her as a threat.
And once I figured that out I got pissed off all over again, no matter how much he tried to convince me to take that job in California. No matter how much money he offered me. No matter how much stock in his company he gave me.
“I stay with her, Alex,” I said to him over another fancy dinner that tasted like ash in my mouth. He was starting to make me sick. “Or she comes with me, one or the other. I go where she goes. Don’t pick a fight you’re not going to win.”
Hindsight is twenty-twenty, right? That was probably the worst thing I could have said to him. But I didn’t know that until Alex Wolfe came back with his counter offer.
***
Brison and I have been driving in silence now for a good twenty minutes, getting farther and farther away from Harlow. Every exit we pass in the wrong direction is putting me more on edge, and I can see the vein in Brison’s forehead pulsing, and I know this car is about to explode.
“You really prepared to tell the old man to go fuck himself?” Brison finally says.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m prepared to do a lot worse than that, depending on what he does next. Where are we going, Brison?”
“Jesus,” Brison says, and pulls off the highway on some no-name exit surrounded by old warehouses and empty lots.
I tense up. This doesn’t look right.
“Brison,” I say. I’m ready to fight him in this car. I know I can take him; Brison’s about my size, a strong guy, but he was never a fighter. I’d rather do it outside, though.
“He was going to pick you, you know,” Brison says, still gripping the steering wheel hard, even though we’re no longer moving. He’s pulled into a parking lot next to a warehouse. No one’s around.
“He still might pick you, even after all this, if you do what he wants,” Brison says. He’s getting angrier and angrier. I can’t blame him. I know exactly what he’s talking about.
Alex has put Brison and me in competition with one another ever since I went out to California. He let it be known that it was open season, that we’d have to fight for the right to be his heir. His daughter, the sister I don’t know at all, a woman named Colette—she wanted none of that, got the hell out.
See, Colette is smart.
Brison and I aren't.
And I won. It kills him. I can see it in his white knuckles, his nostrils flaring like a damn bull’s, that vein still pulsing away in his forehead like he’s about to give himself a stroke.
“You have been fighting me for this for five years,” Brison is saying. “I don’t fucking believe you’re giving it up.”
“Brison, why’d you take me out here?” I say. “Where’s Alex?”
My hand is on the door.
“Why?” Brison shouts. He hits the steering wheel with the palm of his hand and turns on me. “Why the hell would you give it all up for some woman?”
That’s the moment when I go from hating my half-brother to pitying him.
“I hope you understand one day,” I tell him. “For real, I do.”
>
Brison blinks and looks at me with that vacant, ‘no one’s home’ look, like I just popped him one. I don’t think he’s had a whole lot of experience with people wishing him well for no reason at all.
“I’ll be damned,” he finally says, sitting back in his seat and letting his hands drop.
“Where is Alex?” I ask him again.
“Marcus,” Brison says, starting the car back up. “Alex was never coming. My job was just to get you out of the house.”
Everything stops. Then:
There’s my hand flying out to grab Brison’s neck.
There’s my pulse roaring in my head.
There are a million bad thoughts running through my mind.
“Let me take you back,” Brison chokes out. I have him pinned back against the window, my right hand cocked, my left on his throat. “He’s not going to hurt her, Marcus, he’s not stupid. Just let me take you back. He thinks you’re going to be gone for hours.”
I curse. Brison doesn’t know this, but Alex doesn’t have to lay a finger on Harlow to hurt her.
“Go,” I tell him. “You better hope you’re right.”
chapter 20
HARLOW
I wake up knowing something is wrong.
Well, the first thing that’s wrong is that I’m awake at all. Marcus kept me up practically all night, and not that I’m complaining about that—not at all—but I am someone who needs her sleep. Or at least someone who needs more Marcus, as soon as I get up.
And that’s the second thing that’s wrong. I’m alone in my bed.
Our bed.
Thinking about it like that makes me smile. I turn over, blinking my eyes against the sun streaming in through my window, and listen intently for what he’s doing downstairs. I would not put it past him to make breakfast, and I’ll admit: I’m intrigued.
But no. Nothing.
So here is when the anxiety starts. Just a little twinge in my stomach, not a full-blown freak out or anything, nothing I can’t handle. And I know it’s unreasonable. It’s just like a muscle that I used to use every day that I’ve put on bed rest, and it’s threatening to cramp up in protest. But I remind myself of what I realized last night, of what I’ve been in the process of realizing ever since Marcus came back into my life: I don’t have to be afraid like that.
He has not left me.
Having faith in Marcus proves not to be so hard. But having faith in the universe as a whole is an altogether different skill. That one might take me a while.
Ok, so I decide to deal with it. I’ll just go find him. I force myself out of bed, my body aching in the best of ways, and wipe the sleep out of my eyes. I do a survey.
His clothes are gone.
Check that: Most of his clothes from last night are gone. His suitcase is still here, and his shirt is exactly where I dropped it last night, but his pants and jacket and shoes—gone.
So…that’s weird.
I roll off my bed and dig up some boy shorts and a tank top, thinking Marcus will probably take them right off again when he sees me, and it’s when I’m hopping around the room with my foot caught in the shorts that I hear someone knocking on the door. No, more like banging. Pounding.
He’s locked out? How would that even…?
I pad toward the stairs, running a hand through my tangled hair, already smiling, thinking about what I’m going to ask him to do to me when I see him, when I hear the door open. So I hurry up, bouncing down the stairs, excited to see my man.
And I find Alex Wolfe standing in my foyer. Looking up at me.
Smiling.
***
I am no stranger to the extremities of emotion. Having your parents die unexpectedly at a relatively young age will familiarize you with a whole bunch of things you’d rather not know about, especially if you’re already highly strung. But, once you’ve been through that ringer once, it’s nice to be able recognize something bad when you can feel it coming. It helps you prepare when you know what it is.
Unfortunately, sometimes it also triggers a memory.
For me, it’s physical at first. Seeing Alex Wolfe like that, smiling up at me like a predator, in my home… I don’t know exactly why I get this feeling of being hunted, of being cornered, with the world about to fall down in flames around me, but I do. I recognize it as “impending doom.”
I’ve only felt it a few times. When my parents died, when Marcus left, when Dylan had me cornered in a bathroom.
I mean, technically, Alex Wolfe should be no more than Marcus’s father, to me. If anything, I should have a positive association with the man, considering his involvement, however shady, with helping me gain custody of Dill. I know I owe him everything.
But my body doesn’t know that. My actual, physical body? It sees Alex Wolfe, and it says, “You’re about to lose everything.”
It takes everything I have to keep that under control. I feel it in my stomach first, this roiling nausea that heats me up from the inside until I can feel the anxiety start to burn through my skin, start to make me sweat. I grip the handrail of the stairs and try to ride it out.
But then comes the memory.
And the memory I most associate with this feeling of impending doom is what I can remember, however little, of the day I lost my parents.
It felt like dying.
I felt like this, sick, and like I was suffocating in the feeling, unable to catch my breath. It would slam into me and I’d fight, struggle for a while, trying to breathe in the thick, choking air, and I’d catch hold of Marcus, clinging to him like a piece of driftwood. I’d have a few moments like that, panting, heaving, crying, feeling grateful that that feeling had passed, and then I’d remember that it was true, that this was reality, that this was actually happening, and it would start all over again.
So basically a much gentler version of Hell, punctuated by brief moments of respite in Marcus’s arms.
What I try to think about when this feeling comes back is how I am grateful that I haven’t had to deal with anything else truly terrible happening in my life. I am so much luckier than many women, especially women in my situation, who end up in foster care, however briefly. I know I don’t have it so bad in the scheme of things, and I know that I’m just wired for anxiety, and that it’s something I have to deal with. So I try to think about how lucky I really am, and I try to remember that, whatever it is, I can deal with it.
Alex Wolfe, with that blood-curdling smile on his face, is making it very difficult to do that.
“How did you get in?” I ask him. I haven’t moved since I first saw him.
“It’s not a very secure door,” Mr. Wolfe says, shaking his head in disapproval. “It just opened with barely any pressure at all.”
I go from hot to cold in an instant.
“You broke in?” I say.
“No, I wouldn’t say that,” Mr. Wolfe says. He’s wearing a three-piece suit again, very dapper, even though it’s the end of summer. “The door opened, and I came in to make sure you were all right, Harlow. That’s how I would put it.”
I’m confused. That sounds a whole lot like the kind of breaking in that I would never be able to prosecute anyone for.
I feel a flash of fear, but I dismiss it as just my anxiety. As the ghost of fear from the last time I felt anxiety about losing everything like this. It’s just my own issues, my own memories, messing with me again.
Or maybe it’s just easier to think that I’m overreacting than it is deal with what’s actually happening, which is that Alex Wolfe has broken into my house and he looks angry.
“Mr. Wolfe,” I say, carefully making my way down the stairs. “I saw you at the fundraiser last night. I just want to say that I’m sorry if this causes you any inconvenience.”
Mr. Wolfe raises his eyebrows, putting one hand to his chest in mock disbelief.
“Why should you be sorry, Harlow?” he says. “You won the battle.”
This is his charming face. Suddenly I can see the family resemblance
in that broad smile, the strong jaw, the light eyes, and I think of Marcus. And I tell myself that they must have more in common than just a great smile. After all, this is the man who stepped in and helped me get custody of my little brother. He can’t be as scary as he seems right now.
“Thank you, Mr. Wolfe, but…” I hesitate. I’ve never spoken to him about this in explicit terms because I didn’t want to jeopardize it, especially if Mr. Wolfe’s influence on the custody case was less than aboveboard—which, let’s be honest, of course it wasn’t aboveboard.
But it’s time.
“Mr. Wolfe, I know you got me Dill,” I say. “I never understood why, but please believe me that I’ve always, always been grateful. I don’t know, I guess I thought you took an interest because of Marcus, or… It doesn’t matter. The point is, I know I owe you everything, and I can never repay that. And that’s why I’m sorry.”
I’m surprised to find I actually am starting to tear up. There’s something cathartic about expressing gratitude, about apologizing. I’ve been carrying this debt around for so long, not knowing what I did to deserve such kindness, and therefore half-terrified that it would be taken away at any moment, that simply saying thank you has always felt impossible.
But I have to do it.
“Thank you,” I say. I swallow back the tears, press my lips together. “Thank you,” I say again.
And Alex Wolfe laughs.
“Don’t thank me yet, little girl,” he says, walking into my living room. “We’re not done.”
I’m starting to think my sense of danger isn’t all that off. I’m starting to think maybe this isn’t about memories after all.
“What do you mean?” I say, following him. Mr. Wolfe has sprawled out on my couch like he owns it.
“What I did to get you custody, Harlow, was bribe the judge,” he says, putting both arms back on the couch. He looks comfortable. “It wasn’t hard. It wasn’t even very expensive, given the favors Judge McPherson owed me at the time. Your brother cost me less than ten thousand dollars, Harlow, you know that?”
