The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (The Devils #2)(73)
Her voice cracks and she stops talking.
I feel an ache in my chest, as if my lungs are squeezing tight. I didn’t know she was blaming herself for what happened all this time. Of all the things she did wrong, this isn’t one of them.
“That wasn’t your fault,” I tell her. I know in my rare honest moment that my father was no saint. He broke my nose, for God’s sake. It’s all the years afterward I blame her for. “But you took me from my home, Mom, and from my school, and from my father, and you just—” My throat clogs. “Left. You were never there. Everyone in that household treated me like I wasn’t welcome and wasn’t even human and you just looked the other way.”
I wait for her denials, her arguments. She’s a lawyer, after all. It’s what she does best. But when I look up at her, her eyes are damp. “I know,” she says, staring at her hands, her voice raspy. “And that’s harder for me to live with than anything else, because I can’t get those years back and I don’t know where we go now.”
It’s more than she’s ever said before. I swallow hard and then force a smile. “Hopefully someplace with burgers. You know I hate salad.”
Her eyes finally find mine and we both laugh. Something feels like it’s shifting. Things aren’t perfect and they never will be, but maybe I can learn to live in the gray area just a little.
41
DREW
Ben, after much prodding and a few threats, finally receives the requested documents. They arrive so woefully incomplete he thinks I need a forensic accountant to figure out what’s gone on.
I’m back in Europe finishing the last few dates of the tour when he calls to discuss it. I have to go shut myself in the bathroom to talk. “If they’re being this cagey about a routine document request, there’s almost no chance they’re not hiding something major,” he says.
I perch on the counter as my stomach tightens into a knot. “Davis will go ballistic.”
“He will,” Ben says, “and wouldn’t Davis going ballistic over something that in no way involves him set off some alarm bells for you? Because they were buzzing for me the moment you said he’d hired everyone in your circle and that you don’t even have copies of all this stuff. And when he tried to cut me out of this by handling your bank loan himself…that was all the alarms at once, right there. What exactly do you think he can do to you?”
“He knows stuff, Ben,” I whisper. “Stuff I’d rather not have made public. I want out of everything, but if I come after him, he’ll come after me too.” Davis knows I have panic attacks and he knows how my father died. None of it is such a big deal, but I don’t want to discuss it in every interview and I don’t want to read about it every time I see my name online. Mostly, I just don’t want to make an enemy of Davis because he’s already terrible when he’s on my side.
There is disapproval in the half-second of silence before Ben speaks. But he likes to fight, and it’s not his life we’re discussing. “Then you need to decide how much you want to keep it all to yourself,” he finally says. “Just know that the way you’re living now—where you’re answering to him for everything and miserable—that situation is permanent until you do something about it.”
And if this situation is permanent, it means Davis shoves another three-record contract with the label under my face, full of stipulations about world tours and promo. Am I really willing to sign away the next ten years the way I have the last five?
I tell him I’ll let him know, but there’s a weight on my chest when I hang up the phone. There’s only one person I want to discuss this with and before I think too much about the fact that maybe I’m leaning on Josh and what a bad sign it is, I video call him.
He answers on the third ring. “Drew?” he asks, looking concerned. He’s in a massive tent, the kind you might hold a wedding in, and it’s the middle of the day because I’ve messed up the time. There aren’t even curtains dividing most of the people. There are just bodies lying on gurneys and it looks like chaos.
"I'm sorry," I tell him. "I didn't realize you’d still be at work. With the time change my hours are all messed up. I can call back."
He smiles and the thing in my chest eases. "I've got a second," he says. "Where are you?"
Before I can answer, a woman approaches him, also in scrubs. She’s pretty—high cheekbones, jet black hair. She speaks to him in French and I have no clue what she’s said but she sounds elegant and smart, the kind of woman he should be with, probably.
He replies to her in French and it makes me ache. First, because it's so goddamn hot, him and his perfect French accent, and second, because he is just so much. So smart, so accomplished, so much more of everything than I am.
"Who was that?” I ask. Does he hear this tiny bite of worry in my voice?
He looks over his shoulder for a moment as if he cannot even remember who he just spoke to. "That was Sabine. One of the nurses. I have to go in a minute, but tell me why you were calling.”
I can't. Now that I see a room full of people behind him, I cannot possibly sit here in the comfort of the Canalejas suite at the Four Seasons Madrid and tell him how trapped I feel by my terrible life of travel and designer clothes and adulation, how I’m scared to have Ben help me get out of it. "It was nothing," I reply. “I just wanted to talk.”