by Ruthie Knox
She looked like a girl.
She looked like what she was—a grieving granddaughter, eight years younger than Roman. Younger than that, if you looked at what she’d done with her life. Or not done with it.
The kind of person who could barely manage to pay the heat bill, but damned if she wasn’t doing an excellent job of screwing up all his plans.
“So tell me what your grand vision is,” she said to the creamer. “For Sunnyvale.”
“Why, so you can change my mind?”
“Because we’re going all the way to Georgia together, and we need to find something to talk about.”
“Your friend is in Georgia?”
She nodded.
Georgia.
Fucking Georgia.
The news did something to his body—disconnected it from reason long enough for his fist to hit the table and make the creamers jump. Make one of them spin in a lopsided circle and then roll off onto her lap.
Ashley flinched as though he’d struck her.
Roman took a deep breath.
He wasn’t that kind of man. He’d come into close proximity to physical violence only twice in his life, and both times he’d thrown up. An unpleasant side effect of having been fathered by a man who was serving a life sentence for the cold-blooded murder of two women.
Roman had no stomach for violence.
He didn’t get angry. He was not the sort of man who pounded tabletops.
It was just her. This woman, this situation—the first time in years he’d so completely lost his cool. He inhaled again, slow and controlled, and forced himself to calm down.
It wasn’t as though he hadn’t guessed it would be a long drive. If she’d wanted him to drop her off somewhere close, she wouldn’t have worked so hard to keep from telling him. And Georgia wasn’t Alaska. True, they were still four hours from the border, and it was a big state. Huge. He could be stuck with her all day.
He could be stuck with her overnight.
Ashley placed a fourth creamer on top of her stack and glanced at him from under her eyelashes.
It doesn’t matter. You’ll drive wherever you need to go in order to get rid of her.
The thing to do now was to put her at ease. That’s what Roman’s contractor, Noah, would do if he were here. He would care, in his awkward, fumbling way, and his caring would calm her.
He was all feelings, that man. Roman’s opposite. But for whatever reason, they worked well together. Roman kept hiring him—had hired him over and over again, expanding the scope of the jobs he gave Noah until he was essentially an employee.
What would Noah ask if he were here?
He would try to get to know her. Find out what her interests were, her desires.
“Whereabouts in Georgia?” Roman asked.
“Okefenokee.”
That caught him off guard. “She lives in a swamp?”
“Sort of.”
“Nothing is ever easy with you, is it?”
He needed to recalibrate his expectations, somehow. It shouldn’t be possible for her to keep knocking him off balance, and so easily. The deeper she disturbed the stillness he’d spent so many years cultivating, the happier she seemed to be.
She balanced two creamers on top of the fourth, and neither fell when she let go. “No, I guess I’m not easy.” A moment passed, and she said, “Go ahead and kill me, if you’re going to.”
“What are you talking about?”
He sounded too high-strung, too aggressive, but she’d hit a sore spot. Jokes about murder weren’t funny when your father was a killer and you’d grown up in a small town where everyone knew it.
There were acts that couldn’t be forgiven. Acts that had to be paid for—if not by fathers, then by sons. His father would never be let out of prison. He’d paid for his crimes with his freedom, but it wasn’t enough.
Roman had been stuck footing what remained of the bill. The taint of his father’s betrayal a cloud that hung over his childhood, poisonous and still.
His foster father, Patrick, had tried to forgive him. He’d tried to love him. But he’d failed, and the failure had marked every minute of Roman’s youth.
We never want to see you again.
“Georgia,” Ashley said.
“What?” He’d lost the thread of the conversation.
“You’re not going to kill me for making you go to Georgia?”
“I said I’d take you to your friend. I’ll take you.”
She flicked the pull tab on the sealed top of the creamer with her fingernail. Silence invaded the space between them.
Flick.
Flick.
And then, blessedly, she spoke. “So what’s the diabolical plan, then?”
“I’m not diabolical.”
“You’re ruining my life. At least do me the favor of being diabolical.”
Roman ran his finger over the spines of the sugar packets, lining them up more neatly.
Ruining her life. Just the sort of exaggeration she was prone to. If her life revolved around Sunnyvale Vacation Rentals, she had bigger problems than he could solve.
The sugar packets were all out of order. He dumped them onto the table and began sorting them by color and size.
“All right, fine. Have you ever been to Truman Annex in Key West?”
She made a face. “That’s what you want to do to Sunnyvale?”
“Not to Sunnyvale. Sunnyvale will be gone. To the property, and all the property surrounding it. Upscale architecture that respects local style, a mix of hotels and rental cottages with single-family owner-occupied homes, shopping—”
“But Little Torch is one of the old-school keys,” she interrupted. “It’s quiet. It’s not like Key West at all.”
“Not yet.” He tapped the last sugar into place and put the caddy back, lining it up so it sat perfectly perpendicular to the edge of the table.
Ashley stuck another creamer on top of her tower, but her hands weren’t steady, and the whole thing collapsed. “You’re nuts.”
“I’m not. I’m just better informed than you.” He swept the creamers into the space in front of him and began building a house. Three creamers on the long wall, two on the short. There were enough to make it three stories tall. Sugar packets would do for the roof. “Tourism has a life cycle, and the Keys are in a consolidation phase. Over the next ten to fifteen years, all the old mom-and-pop motels and run-down rental places like Sunnyvale are going to be cleared out in favor of what tourists want now—bigger hotels, more luxurious rooms, Starbucks on the ground floor, a horizon pool so they can look at the ocean without actually going in it.”
“That’s not why people come to the Keys. They like how eccentric it is. They want to get away from all the Starbucks.”
He shook his head. “That’s why people came to the Keys before. Now they want everything the way it is at home, only with a little Florida flavor. Conch houses and great landscaping. Seafood flown in from Japan. Jimmy Buffet songs. They want to spend their whole vacation at the resort and never have to look at a map, but they also want to feel like they’ve really been someplace.”
“Wait, how big is this resort of yours going to be?”
“By the time all the phases are finished, it’ll take up that whole side of Little Torch.”
“Half the key?”
“Approximately.”
“You’re out of your fucking mind. You’ll be killed in your sleep. People will stick horse heads in your bed.”
“Adjustment is part of the process.”
“I’m not talking about adjustment. I’m talking about death threats. I’m talking about all the people who live in these houses you think you’re going to knock down. Where do they fit in this scheme of yours?”
“They don’t.”
“So, what, you just erase them?”
“They erase themselves. I already own a lot more of the property than you might think. Most of these people you’re talking about—they’ve already sold to me, or they
will in a few years, when they’re ready to move into some assisted living place near their grandkids. The older they get, the more they need money. I have money. I give it to them, they move away. It’s simple.”
“Is that what happened with my grandma? You made her an offer she couldn’t refuse?”
He covered the roof of his house with Splenda packets. “She asked me not to talk to you about it. It was a condition of the sale.”
“You’re lying. She wouldn’t do that.”
“She did.”
Ashley reached across the table and knocked over his creamer house.
Roman gathered up the tubs and avoided her gaze. She was angry, and that was his fault.
But it wasn’t you who made the condition. It was Susan.
Same difference. Roman had been in league with Ashley’s grandmother, and he’d known that after Susan died there would be human costs to reckon with. It was part of the price he’d agreed to pay for Sunnyvale.
He didn’t know why Susan had wanted Ashley left out of it. He hadn’t cared.
He refused to care.
He considered the building materials before him. If he worked the jams and jellies into the plan, he could get more ambitious. He made the footers bigger.
“The last wave always stands in the way of progress,” he said calmly. “It’s natural for you to feel like the culture and character of Little Torch Key is being erased. But you’re wrong. I’m incorporating its culture and character into the new place. It will be the Little Torch you love, only better.”
“You don’t know anything about what I love.”
“Don’t I?”
“You want to turn Little Torch into some kind of fake, tacky Disney World paradise for the rich, and you think you can do it by evicting all the people who live there now, or turning them into servants. But nobody will want to stay at a place like that. Nobody will come back year after year and recommend it to their friends. It’s going to be pretty but forgettable. Heartless. Like you.”
“People do seem to enjoy Disney World.”
“You don’t know anything about what people enjoy. You’re barely even human.”
“Forgive me if I don’t agree that heart and soul are what tourism is all about.”
“I won’t forgive you for any of this.”
He checked her face. She wouldn’t.
He built another layer of jam walls and said, “It’s good, then, that I don’t need your forgiveness.”
She crossed her arms and looked out the window at the rain. Roman layered the available creamers, constructed a roof, and folded his hands on the table.
She knocked it down.
He’d known she would. He’d almost looked forward to it.
Ashley Bowman was impulsive, passionate, and absurdly idealistic. She’d never committed herself to a job for more than a few months. She’d never been engaged, never married. Susan had told Roman more about her than he’d wanted to hear, which was how he knew that Ashley had never had a relationship with a lover that lasted more than a few months. Her mother was dead, and she was estranged from her senator father.
The only person in the world she’d still cared deeply about had died, and Roman had taken her home away from her.
He knew enough about what Ashley loved to understand that he would never be able to buy her off. Once he got her to the swamp in Georgia and left her with her friend, she’d regroup and come after him again with everything she had.
But she wouldn’t win, because he’d done nothing wrong. He had the property. She didn’t.
Most people who got knocked around by life just gave up. They let themselves become victims.
Not Roman.
And even though she drove him crazy, he had to admit, Ashley wasn’t anybody’s victim, either. She deserved some kind of reward for all this effort. If she’d wanted something less than Sunnyvale—some boon he could bestow before sending her on her way—he might have given it to her. It was just that she wanted his keystone. His future.
She wanted the one thing he would never give up.
Makenna brought their food, and the jams and jellies and creamers had to be sorted and replaced in their caddies, lined up along the far edge of the table. By the time he’d finished, Ashley had begun eating her absurd meal.
The plate was divided into four sections. She dipped her fork into the piles of corn at random, as though it didn’t matter which section she ate from in what order.
Roman concentrated on his own food, dividing up the grilled catfish into neat bites. It tasted of nothing, which was how he preferred his food. He ate the rice pilaf next—fluffy nothing—and then he drank his water and put his napkin on the plate and pushed it away.
“Are you going to eat your hash browns?” she asked.
He shook his head and shoved the plate in her direction. She inhaled them. When she bumped the flat of her hand into the plate and got ketchup on it, she failed to notice, then smeared it on her sleeve.
She licked grease off her lips, and he found her disgusting.
He did.
For the most part.
When she’d finished the hash browns, he pushed the pancakes at her. She drowned them in butter and syrup. She got syrup in the webbing between her fingers and licked it off, her tongue acrobatic as a cat’s. Syrup dripped off her fork onto her pants, and Roman imagined the black spot soaking into the olive-green material. Wet and sticky.
“What?” she asked. “You’re staring.”
He shook his head, though he knew he had been.
He couldn’t stop.
“What’s the point?” she asked, swirling a doubled-up bite of pancakes around in a pool of syrup. “What do you get out of destroying one of the best places I’ve ever been? Just money?”
“Yes, just money.”
But there was no “just” about it. Money was respect. Success. Proof.
Money was everything.
“You are diabolical, you know.” She made it almost an apology. “I mean, you probably already know this. But you’re kind of a greedy, soulless son of a bitch.”
Roman smiled. He didn’t disagree. He only disagreed with the assumption that there was something wrong with being a greedy, soulless son of a bitch.
He’d worked such a long time to become one.
CHAPTER FIVE
They made good time after lunch. They’d outpaced the worst of the storm, and Ashley stared out the window at the yellow line that marked the boundary of the highway, letting her thoughts drift.
Her eyelids grew heavy, and she dozed again.
Roman woke her at Gainesville. He’d put his sunglasses back on.
“I need better directions,” he said. “The swamp is huge. Where are we going, exactly?”
She gave directions, then allowed her eyelids to fall again, hoping for sleep. Instead, her thoughts dropped into the groove scored by the words he’d said at lunch.
A condition of sale.
Shocking, how deep they’d cut her.
When she’d rushed back from Bolivia and discovered that nearly all of the clothes and pictures and decorations in her grandmother’s apartment—all the stuff that made home look like home—had already been carted away, Ashley had felt betrayed. The hospice worker she met with later said Susan hadn’t wanted Ashley to have to sort through it all. She asked me to put some boxes for you in the trailer, the woman had said, intending comfort. Ashley had tried to wrap that knowledge around herself, but it had only made her feel more like crying.
Not because the opportunity to sort through her grandmother’s property had been taken from her, but because she understood that Grandma had made this choice, this deliberate decision, to exclude her. And that she hadn’t made it once or twice, on a whim, but over and over again.
She must have made it daily, for months—this decision not to call on Ashley. Not to bring her back. Not to get her involved.
Roman’s bald statement made it so much worse because what he was describing wasn�
�t even a decision not to involve Ashley. It was a conspiracy against her, a condition of the sale, and she couldn’t make sense of it unless she allowed herself to believe the absolute worst.
Grandma hadn’t wanted her by her side to help her cross over into death. She hadn’t wanted her to carry on the legacy at Sunnyvale, to step into the shoes, the role, that she’d been training for since she was thirteen years old. To her grandmother, all Ashley was worth was a handful of boxes stashed in a junky old trailer.
The person she had loved best in the world hadn’t loved her back. Or not as much as Ashley loved her.
It turned out to hurt just as much the third time as it had the first two.
She turned as far away from Roman as she could get without leaving the seat and pushed the heels of her hands into her eye sockets.
A loud bang brought her head up.
Roman glanced in the rearview mirror.
Bang.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said.
Ashley spun around, but she couldn’t see the trailer well from inside the Escalade. “What is it?”
“The door’s blown open.”
He signaled and began to slow.
Bang.
“Sorry,” she said, before she remembered that she was supposed to be torturing him, not apologizing. “The latch is kind of crap.”
“It’s done this before?”
“It used to do this all the time.”
“Why didn’t you fix it?”
“We tried to fix it, but it doesn’t really cooperate.”
They were on a busy state highway, only two lanes, with a narrow shoulder. Roman pulled as far over as he could get and cut the engine. “You have a screwdriver back there?”
“Maybe. Why, what are you going to do?”
“Take the door off.”
He opened his door, and a car blew by going eighty miles an hour, way too close. Ashley squeaked. Roman stuck his leg out. “Don’t do that!” she cried.
