by Nicole Baart
It was the right thing to do, and Adri palmed away her tears. Forced herself to give Harper her full, deliberate attention.
By the time Harper made it to the night before and Sawyer’s unexpected appearance at the mansion, Adri had gotten hold of herself enough to speak.
“Will was collateral damage,” she whispered, interrupting Harper’s account. Adri shook her head. “I don’t want to hear anymore. I know what happened next. Will tried to stop Sawyer and got shot.”
“More or less,” Harper admitted. “But I can’t figure out how Will knew I was outside instead of asleep in my bedroom.”
“I don’t think he knew you were outside. Will came downstairs after escorting you to your room.” Adri looked her friend full in the face. “I don’t know what happened between the two of you, but my brother thinks he’s in love with you. You’re breaking his heart. Again.”
“I don’t want to break his heart.” Harper’s voice was so faint that it hardly existed at all.
“Yeah, well, you’re breaking mine, too.” Adri rubbed her cheeks again, wiping the tears away so harshly it was as if she was trying to erase them altogether. “I just don’t understand. Why, Harper? How did you ever end up with a man like Sawyer? It’s not you.”
Harper looked as if she had asked herself the same question a hundred times. A thousand. “I hated myself. I believed I deserved him.”
“That’s a terrible answer.” But it wasn’t as awful as Adri claimed. She understood. She hated herself, too. Adri believed she deserved the exile she had forced upon herself, the hiding and the pretending. It was easy to convince the world that she loathed Blackhawk and everything about her past, but it was much harder to convince herself.
“I don’t know what else to tell you,” Harper said. “It’s the truth. After college I was sad and vulnerable and more or less homeless. You know my family life has always sucked, and everyone disappeared after David died. It wasn’t always . . . like that with Sawyer. It wasn’t always as bad as it got to be in the end.”
Adri could tell that Harper was just scratching the surface. But she didn’t make her friend say any more. She was all too aware of her own warning signs. Signposts along the way that pointed to the ruin where she now sat trying to piece back together all that had been broken. How many times had she tried to erase herself? In how many ways? But she couldn’t say all that. She wouldn’t. It was too self-serving.
Adri sighed a little, but decided to let it go for now. There was another question burning on her tongue. “Why didn’t you tell me? I could have helped you, Harper. We could have stopped Sawyer before he ever showed up here.”
Harper swallowed hard. Then squeezed her eyes shut and plunged forward. “He was blackmailing me. He knew something that would have ruined my life, that would have made me lose everything and everyone I ever loved.”
Adri didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything at all.
Harper sucked in a shaky breath, and before she even said the words Adri knew that she would exhale the truth. “He knew I killed David.”
29
HARPER
Bush camping wasn’t at all what Harper had pictured. She’d had visions of serene mountain vistas and meandering hikes through flower-studded meadows. Time together and long conversations that would eventually unravel the heart of the lovers’ knot that was their intertwined relationships. But in some ways the trip was doomed from the get-go, because everyone had a different idea of how their last hurrah together should play out.
Will was eager for fun, anxious to sign The Five up for skydiving lessons in the valley or a river rafting expedition that cut through the core of the coastal mountain range. David was distant and moody, drunk before they even got on the plane and bent on keeping himself in an inebriated state nearly every waking hour. As for Harper and Adri, they were, for one of the very first times in their relationship, at odds. When Harper said black, Adri was already whispering white, and although they didn’t try to annoy one another, it was clear before they ever made it out of the Fraser Valley that their fun excursion was going to be anything but. By the time they finally found a place to set up camp, they were at each other’s throats. Only Jackson seemed unperturbed.
As Harper pitched the tent she was supposed to share with Adri, she duly noted the exquisite beauty of the little pocket they had found. The arch of the mountains, still snowcapped in the cool spring air, and the narrow river that carved between, bubbling green and frothy before the pebbled beach that Jackson had led them to. He acted as if getting to their site was as simple as driving to the nearest McDonald’s, but they had wound their way down unmapped logging roads, parked in the dirt beside one of a million identical trees, and then hauled their gear in four separate loads down an indistinguishable path that Jackson eventually had to mark with strands of yellow twine. They were off the edge of the known world, and while in some ways it was exactly what Harper had been hoping for, she felt distinctly isolated. Cut off and alone. And it wasn’t just the rugged terrain.
“We’re in the middle of nowhere,” Harper said, holding up her cell phone as if raising it two feet would help her get better reception. Still zero bars.
“I thought that was the point.” Jackson flashed her an almost impish grin as he took a tent stake and mallet from her limp hand. She was too focused on her cell phone to notice, but he was in his element as he pounded the metal peg into the rocky beach. Straightening up, he leaned close and half whispered, “I brought everyone here on purpose. I think we have some things to work out. Don’t you?”
And then he walked away.
Harper didn’t know what to make of his strange comment. Did he know more than he let on? Or did he just feel the tension between them all as keenly as she did? It was hard to know with Jackson. He was usually quiet, often unreadable, but it went without saying that he loved them all. Jackson was forever putting every member of The Five before himself. And this trip was no different. He had taken them here for the peace. For the quiet. For the chance to make everything right before they set off into the world on their own.
But now that they were here, Harper didn’t know how to fix anything at all.
Jackson, however, seemed to know exactly what to do, and he wasted no time once their camp was set up. He recruited Will to help him haul fat stones the size of basketballs from the shallow edge of the river to create a ring for the coolers they had brought along. It was chilly outside, and Will screamed like a little girl when he first stepped into the slow current. But he wasn’t about to be shown up, and the two men worked until their bare feet and hands were blue.
“What in the world are you doing?” David asked after a while from his spot in a lawn chair near the water.
“The ice in the coolers will melt,” Jackson explained, “but the river is so cold it’s as good as a refrigerator. We’ll submerge the coolers halfway in the water and voilà—fresh food for a week. We just have to make sure the coolers don’t float away. Hence, the rocks.”
David was only half listening. “We’re staying here for a week?” he complained.
“That was the plan.” Harper tried not to sound bitchy. “I think it’s a great idea,” she told Jackson. “And I love this spot. Could we walk across to the other side?”
Jackson laughed. “It doesn’t look deep,” he said, “but it drops off fast.”
Adri pushed herself up from the rock she had been sitting on and joined Harper as she watched the guys work. “But I can see the bottom all the way across.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s not deep. Those rocks?” Jackson motioned out toward the center of the bottle green river. “They’re boulders.”
“Shut up.” Harper stepped forward, craned her neck to see better.
“This is glacier-fed water, baby. We’re standing in snowmelt.” Jackson seemed proud, as if he had designed the river himself. “Clear as glass
and cold as ice. I’d bet it’s twenty feet to the bottom in the center. You could cliff jump if you wanted to.”
Harper looked up at the rock face that flanked their makeshift camp. The layers of ancient gray stone and blue moss, the odd, small evergreens that poked from between tiny crevices. Just looking up gave her a rush. “I’m totally doing it,” she announced.
“You’d have to clear the shallows,” Jackson warned. “I’m not sure I’d recommend it. I said you could cliff jump, not that you should.”
“You’ll teach me,” Harper instructed. “You’ll show me exactly what to do and I’ll do it.”
“My older brother is the cliff jumper in our family, not me.”
“Oh, come on. It’s like, what? Twenty feet to the top? That’s not much.” Harper didn’t really know anything about heights and distances and how to measure danger in feet and inches. She didn’t much care. For the first time since she’d stepped foot in British Columbia, she found there was something she actually wanted to do.
But they didn’t cliff jump. Instead they got on each other’s nerves for a couple of days, fished a bit—ate the rainbow trout they caught for breakfast—and then lolled around much as they always had back at ATU. Conversations went nowhere. Adri and Harper circled each other warily instead of confiding in one another like the best friends they had always been. David drank.
On the third day of their so-called fantastic vacation, their escape from civilization, Jackson woke up and announced, “I’m going for a hike.”
“There aren’t any trails,” Adri said. Like he needed to be reminded. He was the only one of The Five who seemed to be totally in his element.
Jackson produced a compass from his pocket. “Believe it or not, I can orienteer. I guarantee we won’t get lost. For long. We’ll find our way back. Eventually.” He smiled at his own joke, but only Will offered to join him.
“No thanks.” Adri shook her head. “I’m reading.”
This was the first anyone had heard of a book, but Adri did emerge a few minutes later from the tent she shared with Harper, clutching a worn paperback novel. Harper had never seen Adri read anything other than nursing textbooks.
“I think I’m out, too,” Harper said. Her mind was already spinning, devising a way that she could sweet-talk David into a little alone time, if Jackson and Will were heading out and Adri would be buried in a book. She didn’t much want to be alone with David, she didn’t trust herself around him, but talking to him was the only way she could think of to convince him that his life, and everything he planned to do with it, was a giant mistake.
Harper gave herself fifteen minutes after Jackson and Will had left, and then she announced to no one in particular, “I’m bored.”
Adri didn’t respond. Neither did David. The two lovebirds were sitting on opposite ends of the campsite.
“Adri . . .” Harper cajoled, putting just enough supplication in her voice to sound eager, not needy. “Come cliff jumping with me. Or, at least, come check it out with me.”
“I’m not into rock climbing or cliff jumping,” Adri said. She glanced up from her book and gave Harper an inscrutable look. “Take David.”
Harper tried to keep her expression neutral. “Are you sure?”
For just a moment, something in Adri’s eyes shimmered raw. There was hurt in her gaze, and hope, too, but Harper could only guess at the reasons behind her friend’s inscrutable emotions. Was Adri longing for Harper to free her from the prison of her engagement? Or was she praying that Harper would refuse even a couple of minutes alone with David? Did Adri understand just how warped all their relationships had become?
As much as she wanted to make things right with Adri, Harper knew that she couldn’t do it until she and David came clean. And there was only one way to make that happen. “Guess it’s you and me,” Harper said over her shoulder to David. But before she turned away, she tried to wish her way into Adri’s mind and heart. I’m doing this for you, she thought. Please know that.
Harper took David by the hands and pulled him to his feet. His protestations were mild, and by the time they were hiking away from their camp toward the bluff that overlooked the water, he was following more or less willingly. They didn’t talk at all. The river burbled noisily, a breeze rustled through the trees, birdcalls, sounds in the underbrush of animals that went unnoticed, unseen.
David and Harper wove through a copse of trees separating the beach from the rocky ledge that climbed toward the distant peak of whatever mountain they were perched upon. When they reached the craggy rock face, Harper began to free-climb, hand over foot on thick outcroppings and wide ledges of the huge, jagged stone. It wasn’t necessarily hard work, but it required her to focus all the same, and by the time she crested the very top of the cliff, Harper was a little breathless, but triumphant. David followed slowly, his own path apparently more laborious. He was panting when he finally reached the relatively flat, uppermost surface.
“Why the hell did you drag me up here?” he grumbled, not pausing to admire the view. They were much higher than Harper had thought they would be. At least, it felt that way.
“Why did you come?” she shot back. “You didn’t have to follow me.”
“You yanked me out of my chair.”
“Because you’ve been sitting on your ass since the moment we got here. It’s pathetic, David. What happened to you?”
He gave her a dark look, and though she was so frustrated with him she could hardly stand it, his deep, brooding eyes still made her shiver. “I was born,” he said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Harper couldn’t tell if he was drunk or not, but she was shaken by how unbalanced he seemed. How angry.
“I’m a recent college graduate,” he told her, sweeping his hand grandly as if inviting her to study his diploma. “Not that that means anything. But I am also a soon-to-be husband and the proud new partner and powerless co-CEO of Galloway Enterprises. I have decades of living my father’s recycled dream before me. I have life by the tail. Lucky me.”
“Wow,” Harper whistled low. “Bitter much?”
“You have no idea.”
“I don’t know what your problem is”—Harper took a step forward and poked a finger at him—“but this has got to end. I know you’ve got unresolved daddy issues and you think your silver spoon life is crap, but you’re not dragging the rest of us down with you. You’re not dragging Adri down with you. It’s not fair.”
“And the truth comes out.” David leaned forward a bit until Harper’s finger made contact with his chest. “That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? You want to fix me.”
“No, I want to fix you and Adri. I’m not sure David Galloway is fixable.”
“He isn’t.”
Harper wondered in that instant if there were things that David had never said. If Liam had allowed a stallion—and his fists—to raise his son. She tried to imagine what it would be like to be so rich, to have so many expectations thrust upon her shoulders that she could barely stand beneath the weight of it all. Maybe David’s life was harder than she could have ever guessed. Maybe she’d drink herself to oblivion and be bitter and angry, too.
But Harper would never take Adri down with her.
“Why do you insist on clinging to her?” Harper didn’t mean to beg, but there was an edge of desperation in her voice. There was still a part of her that loved him, that wished he loved her, too, but she had seen too much of what David Galloway was capable of to harbor any fantasies that he’d come to his senses and sweep her off her feet.
“Why do I cling to Adrienne?” he mused, but of course he knew exactly what Harper was talking about. He seemed almost happy to answer. “Because she’s sweet and soft and pliable. Adrienne will make the perfect Galloway, and when we’re old and ugly and have nothing but money to comfort us, I’ll turn around and she’ll still be there. She’s faithful, that
one.”
It was out of her mouth before she could realize what she was saying. “You hit her, don’t you? It wasn’t just the one time.”
David wouldn’t look at her. “What do you know about love?”
Harper was stunned speechless. Her blood ran cold, her heart thumped painfully in her chest. It sounded to her like a door closing, her faith splitting open on the rough fringe of a reality she didn’t want to accept.
“That’s not love,” she managed. “Hurting Adri has nothing to do with love.”
“And yet, you hurt her all the time, don’t you? She just doesn’t know it.”
“She will soon enough,” Harper said. She wasn’t sure if she meant it or was bluffing. “I’m surprised Victoria hasn’t enlightened her already.”
“My mother? You’re kidding, right? Victoria never says anything about anything. Least of all anything of importance.” David winked at her. “We Galloways are good at turning a blind eye.”
“You’re sick,” Harper whispered.
David seemed to wake at her proclamation. He grabbed her chin in his hand. “And you wanted this. I think you still do.”
“I did,” Harper said. “Up until this very moment.” And she jerked her head out of his grasp.
David shrugged. “We’re ripe fruit, you and me. Perfect and stunning and desirable. But we don’t last long, do we? Eventually, we rot.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Harper took a tiny step back, a tremor of fear raising the hair on her bare arms. David seemed beyond himself, angry and contemplative and yet somehow deeply sad. Depressed even. She didn’t know who he was or how to reach him. Suddenly, her only objective was to bring him back. To get him off the cliff. Harper steeled herself and reached out a trembling hand to him. “Come on. You’re hungover. Are you still drunk? I shouldn’t have taken you up here at all.”
“I’m not drunk.”
“Whatever. Just come. Please?”
David studied her outstretched hand for a moment. “Are you afraid of me?”
