Harder (Caroline & West #2)(80)

I found Evan and Rita Tomlinson. They were enough to get me out of Silt, but not enough to teach me some better way of life.

I’ve never watched anybody do what Caroline and her dad are in the middle of doing. They’re arguing, but she’s safe.

This house where she grew up looks like a temple to me, and it’s not the money, it’s that there’s love all over the walls, and good food, and Christmas presents for people they barely know, and shortbread cookies for my sister.

They can do all that and still argue with each other.

They can argue without f*cking up their love.

They raised their voices, just like I did. Lost their tempers. But then her dad sat down at the table and shut the f*ck up and thought about what Caroline said to him.

He’s still considering it.

And I think, hell, Caroline’s got to be right. She’s so f*cking smart, and she brought me here and had this argument right in front of me, so she has to be showing me what she thinks I need to see.

Showing me how to do this.

It’s not impossible. It’s just something I have to learn.

I’m good at learning, even if I’m complete shit at everything else.

Out of the blue, Caroline’s dad asks me, “What do you think?”

“About what?”

“Nate.”

“I’d like to see him get what’s coming to him. But to be honest, short of the death penalty, I’m not sure there’s anything that could happen to him that I’d think would be as bad as what he deserves. And I figure, even before the pictures, he already screwed up and lost Caroline, so he’s got a lifetime of regretting that ahead of him.”

Caroline’s giving me an oh-please kind of look.

“What? He does. He had you, and he lost you. Stupidest move of his life. You’ll be in the White House someday, and he’ll be telling his sad drinking buddies at the lonely bar where he wastes his time, She was mine once, but I f*cked it up.” I glance at Caroline’s dad. “Sorry.”

“For what?”

“He said f*ck,” Caroline explains.

He blinks. “Oh. That.” He waves his hand. “The White House?”

Color climbs her cheeks. “West wasn’t supposed to say.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s—”

I can just about hear the words that come next. Childish. Stupid. Impossible.

Not for me.

And right then, that’s when I get it. I really finally get it—how we box ourselves in.

How we take something that’s hard and make it harder for no good reason.

When I think about what kind of life I want my sister to have—who I want her to be like, what I want her to see, what I want to model for her so she’ll have a clue how to flourish, to thrive—I can’t think of any better model than the woman I love, lecturing her dad on what justice is.

Caroline is going after what she wants.

I’ve got to be the same way. Both of us do. It’s the only way to live that makes any sense.

Go after deep and make it deeper.

Accept that life is going to be hard—that everything worth having is worth fighting for—but don’t f*cking make it harder than it has to be.

Don’t put yourself in between the life you’ve got and the one you want.

I walk straight to her, pull her close, and look down into those deep brown eyes of hers. I say, “Caro, it’s not. Whatever it is you’re thinking about saying, it’s not true. And even if it turns out to be true down the road, if you go after it but you can’t get there—let it happen when it happens. Don’t write the end over the beginning.”

The gap between her teeth peeks out when she smiles. “I’ve heard that before.”

“A smart woman said it to me.”

She comes up on her toes and gives me a kiss—chaste but full of feeling.

Her dad clears his throat.

She stops kissing me, but she doesn’t unwind her arms from around my neck, and I don’t step away from the feel of her body pressed against mine.

He can f*cking get used to it.

“All right, kids,” he says.

He wipes his hands down his face. I’ve seen him do that once before, when he came to talk to me at the jail in Putnam.

It’s what he looks like, I’m guessing, when he’s giving in to Caroline’s way of doing things.

“We’ll have to draw up an ironclad settlement agreement,” he says. “Make sure you get assigned copyright over all those pictures, nondisclosure … I guess we can let go of admission of guilt. He’ll sign if he doesn’t have to admit he did it.”

“Everybody already knows he did it,” she says. “Everybody who counts.”

She’s looking at me when she says it.

I hear the front door open, Frankie chattering, footsteps heading our way. She sounds happy, and it occurs to me that I gave her that.

I gave her this Christmas. This family. Caroline.

As far as I’m concerned, everybody who counts is right here, exactly where I want them.

If I have to fight to keep my sister here, I will.


Late that night, I wake up to the sound of Frankie screaming.

“Daddy!” she’s saying. “Bo!”