Win (Windsor Horne Lockwood III #1)(67)

Amazing how well Angelica knows me, especially considering how little she knows me. And yes, this is Angelica Wyatt. The Angelica Wyatt, the movie star.

“What’s up?” I ask.

“Ema has been asking for you.”

Ema is a high school senior. She is also my biological daughter.

“I brought her to the hospital to see you,” Angelica tells me.

This displeases me. “You shouldn’t have.” I glare at Kabir, but I’m still talking to Ema’s mother. “How did she even know I was—?”

“You were supposed to have breakfast with her that morning,” Angelica replies.

“Oh,” I say. “Right.”

“She’s worried, Win.”

I don’t say anything. I don’t like this.

“When can she see you?” Angelica asks.

“Would tomorrow work?”

“Your place?” Angelica asks. “Dinner?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll drop her off.”

“You can come too, if you’d like.”

“That’s not how we do this, Win.”

Angelica is right, of course. We agree on a time. I hang up and continue to glare at Kabir.

“Ema called looking for you,” Kabir explains, “and I know you wouldn’t want me to lie to her.”

I frown because he is correct, and I don’t like it. “How much does she know?”

“Just that you were hospitalized. I told her you’d be okay. She didn’t believe me. She wanted to stay in your room.”

I am not sure how to react to this. I am often left adrift and unsure when it comes to Ema. This new relationship, if that is what we want to call it, often leaves me teetering and unbalanced.

Which reminds me.

“Trey Lyons,” I say.

“What about him?”

“Sadie said he went home to convalesce.”

“In western Pennsylvania,” Kabir says. “To some ranch or something.”

“I want eyes on him, twenty-four seven.”

“Got it.”

“Two men. I want to know where he is at all times. Run a background check too.”

Sometime later, with Kabir on the copter and heading back to Manhattan for his hot albeit serious date, I am back at the practice green, working on my putting, trying to clear my head, when I spot Cousin Patricia coming over the hill. She strides toward me with her shoulders back, her face set on grim, and one does not need to be a body-language expert to see that something is amiss.

Because I’m quick on the uptake, I say, “Something amiss?”

“You let me be a cowardly chickenshit,” she tells me.

“Redundant,” I say.

“What?”

“A chickenshit by definition is cowardly. Either call yourself a coward or a chickenshit. But a cowardly chickenshit?”

She crosses her arms. “Really, Win?”

I consider telling her to love me for all my faults, but I refrain.

Patricia picks up a club—a nine iron for those keeping track—and starts pacing. “So after we talked, I go back to the shelter where we help abused teens. That’s what I do, Win. You know this, right?”

There is a bit of a rant in her voice. I don’t reply.

“I mean, lately, it feels as though all I’m doing is executive bullshit—raising funds—but at the end of the day it is about those teens that we rescue because they have no one and that’s Abeona’s mission. We help kids in trouble. You get that, right?”

“I do, yes.”

“And you know what started me down that path?”

“Yes,” I say, “I’ve read your brochure.”

She is still pacing, but the word “brochure” makes her pull up. “What?”

“You went through a severe and brutal ordeal. It made you recognize the need.”

“Yes.”

“Despite all the horrors you experienced, you felt lucky. You had the resources and support to put your tragedy behind you. Now your mission is to provide the same for those less fortunate.”

“Yes,” Patricia says again.

I spread my hands as if to say, Well then.

“So what was that crap about reading the brochure?”

“I don’t think that’s the full story,” I say.

“Meaning?”

“It was more than your recognizing a need.”

“Like?”

“Like survivor’s guilt,” I say. “You escaped from that hut. The other girls did not.”

She does not reply. I continue.

“You believe now that you owe those girls something. Simply put, those girls haunt you because you had the audacity to live. That’s the part that really drives you, Patricia. It’s not so much that you had resources and others do not. It’s that you survived, and irrational as it is, you blame yourself for that.”

Patricia frowns at me. “That Duke psychology major didn’t go to waste.”

I wait.

“Do you know why I’m upset right now?” she asks.

“I can make an assumption.”

“Go ahead.”

“After we talked, you went back to the Abeona Shelter. Rather than hang upstairs in your executive office, you rolled up your sleeves and went into the field because you felt the need to connect or get to your roots or some similar banality. Perhaps you took the van out on rescue missions. Perhaps you counseled a young girl who was recently assaulted. At some point, you raised your head and took a good look around at this rather impressive shelter you, Patricia, built. And then you got misty-eyed and marveled to yourself something akin to: ‘These girls are all so brave, while I’m not going to the FBI because I’m a redundantly cowardly chickenshit.’”