I Will Find You(74)

The weight was gone from her chest. Just like that. Poof, gone.

Someone had tackled him.

Rachel tried to sit up, but the brain impulses still couldn’t reach the muscles. She just lay there, her head lolling to the side, where she heard Hayden let out a primal scream. Then Hayden punched Tyler and then punched him again and then again. His fists just flew, spraying blood across the room. There was no tiring, no letup, and Rachel was sure that Evan Tyler would have been killed if two other guys hadn’t heard the commotion, burst into the room, and pulled a bloodied Hayden off him.

Evan Tyler was comatose for the next two weeks.

Rachel still wanted to press charges, especially after she heard that she had not been Tyler’s first victim, but the school wanted it swept under the rug. Tyler was in a coma, after all, with facial fractures that would take months to heal. Hadn’t he suffered enough? His mother was an important woman. Did Rachel really also want to drag the school through the dirt? What was the point in that?

Rachel didn’t care about any of that.

She did, however, care about Hayden.

That was the issue. The beating had gone well beyond the act of stopping a crime, and while the Payne fortune would certainly assure a soft landing, Hayden’s family wanted it kept quiet for all the obvious reasons. So that was how it went. Deals were made. Money might have exchanged hands.

Swept away for the greater good. Over. Onward.

Except for those images of Evan Tyler, who would later become president of the college, seared into her brain.

As for Rachel and Hayden, they became close friends. That, she realized, happened often when you are bonded in either tragedy or a secret—or in their case, both.

When David and Cheryl met Hayden during a visit to Lemhall University, David pulled Rachel aside and said, “That guy’s in love with you.”

“No, he’s not.”

“He may be settling for the Friend Zone,” David said. “But you know better.”

She did, but that seemed to be the origin story of ninety percent of boy-girl friendships on campus in those days. The guy likes you, wants to sleep with you, doesn’t get to, settles on being a friend, the tension goes away. Either way, she and Hayden became close confidantes—the kind of close confidantes where you could never really date after all you knew, even if you wanted to.

The waiter came over with a plate. He placed it between them. “Lobster paella,” he said.

Hayden smiled at him. “Thank you, Ken.”

It smelled wonderful.

He picked up his fork. “Wait until you taste this.”

“I didn’t call you about Lemhall or that story,” she said.

“Oh?”

“Do you know if there was a Payne Industries event on May twenty-seventh at Six Flags amusement park?”

He frowned. Hayden still wore the Lemhall University ring, a tacky thing with a purple stone and the school crest, and she never understood why. He was, in fact, fiddling with it now, turning it around his finger like it was some sort of stress reliever. Perhaps it was. Still, the ring seemed too much to her. She wanted to forget the place. She guessed that for some reason he needed to remember.

“May twenty-seventh?” he repeated. “I really don’t know. Why?”

She took out her phone, swiped, showed him a photo of a family standing in front of the backdrop with logos. Hayden took the phone from her hand and studied it.

“I guess there was,” Hayden said. He handed her back the phone. “Why do you ask?”

“It would have been, what, a corporate event?”

“Probably. We buy a bunch of tickets to a theater or a ballpark or an amusement park. It’s a perk for employees and clients. Is this for a story you’re doing?”

She pressed on. “You’d have had photographers on hand, right?”

“I assume so.”

“I mean, like this photo in front of that backdrop. A photographer you guys hired probably took pics like this?”

“Again: I assume so. What the hell is this about, Rachel?”

“Can you get me all the photos?”

Hayden’s eyes flared for a millisecond. “Pardon?”

“I need to go through them.”

“Corporate events like this,” he began, “we sometimes rent half the park. There could have been, I don’t know, five, ten thousand people at it. What are you looking for?”

“You won’t believe me if I told you.”

“Tell me anyway.” Then Hayden added, “I assume this has something to do with your brother-in-law escaping prison.”

“It does.”

“You can’t still have a crush on him, Rachel.”

“What, I never had a crush on David.”

“You talked about him nonstop.”

“You almost sound jealous, Hayden.”

He smiled. “Perhaps I was.”

This was a minefield she didn’t want to wander into. “Do you trust me?” she asked him.

“You know I do.”

“Can you get me the pics?”

He picked up the water glass, took a sip. “Yes.”

“Thank you.”

“So what else?” he asked.

She knew him well. “This favor is trickier.”