Wishing Well(9)

His fingers flared again, a common symptom of his thoughts. “Alas, I was already in jail by the time it was found. I requested it be sent to you immediately. My staff are loyal, Meadow. I doubt even they turned its pages.”

It didn’t make sense. Vincent was too much of a control freak not to ask what Penny had written about him. He was too much of a collector to allow even one of her thoughts to escape his grasp. If anything, he would want to bask in the confusion he’d created in her head, would want to luxuriate in the spoils of his psychological games. If it were true, if the diary wasn’t discovered until after he was arrested, then perhaps he’d neglected to ask about its contents, had feared the recorded calls and conversations in jail would capture some detail in the diary that would ensure his conviction. There was always the possibility, but Meadow doubted it.

“Do we have time to even discuss it?” she asked, “What with your impending death approaching so quickly?”

His grin widened, his perfect, white, straight teeth gleaming like that of a jackal about to bite. “Any good story is well rounded. Perhaps something in her memory will jar something in mine, knock it loose so that I can deliver it to you as a present wrapped in the finest of paper.”

Sardonically, she countered, “Or perhaps you simply want to enjoy knowing what you did to her on every level imaginable. Especially now that there is no escape from the executioner.”

“Perhaps,” he agreed. “But that is your decision to make.”

Wondering how he would react to what she knew, from what the diary contained, Meadow relented. “Fine, I’ll tell you her side. I’ll speak in place of the woman who can not.” Leaning closer, she added, “I’ll be happy to divulge just how much she hated you in the end.”





CHAPTER FIVE


Penny


Life started and ended with Blake Jameson, my boyfriend, my best friend, the soul mate I ate mudpies with in kindergarten and gave my virginity to in the tenth grade. With his wild blond hair, always long and windswept like a surfer, and tan skin that brought out the blue in his eyes, Blake was a constant for me, a puzzle piece that fit, an extension of who I’d always been.

He hung the moon and scattered the stars. He was the sun and I was the Earth absorbing his warmth.

Blake was there when people had attempted to bully me. He’d protected me and knocked a few heads together. He’d loved me even more than my own family. Closer to me than my own identical twin, Blake was the peaceful center in my chaotic storm. He was the island in my turbulent sea, the oasis within my desert. He was my life and my protector, my every dream, and my shelter.

He’d been at my side when my father died, had held me and rocked me when I screamed. His presence soothed me at the funeral when my father was laid to rest, his words had reassured me when my mother met a man across the Atlantic who she believed could replace the man who’d raised me.

And when the time came for my mother to uproot and live in a foreign land, it was Blake who convinced me to stay. Both my mother and Meadow had hated my decision, but they couldn’t understand who Blake had been for me.

That’s how I’d stayed in the States when my mother and sister left, it’s why I’d let my family fly away while I remained rooted. I truly believed Blake would be the man I married, believed I’d have his children, and we’d grow old together, our hair turning silver as the different parts of our bodies shriveled into decay.

It was only a year after my family left me that Blake decided to leave me as well.

He’d met someone else. He’d apologized and cried. But even my tears, my hurtful words, my begging and pleading hadn’t been enough to convince him that he was ruining my entire life.

Simple as that.

Blake was the reason I’d stayed in the States in one year. And Blake was the reason I became homeless in the next.

Too ashamed, too hurt, too destroyed, to call my family and beg for help, I’d convinced myself I could make it on my own. But with no job experience, only a high school education and no permanent address I could call my own, finding employment had been impossible. Not that I could have managed much of a job. I was too heartbroken to be anything more than a useless shell, a ghost walking down the sidewalk, a woman who hadn’t just lost the love of her life, she’d also lost everything she owned.

The street isn’t exactly a welcoming place, and the minute you close your eyes, what little you do have is plucked by the vultures, stolen away and gone.

It’s how I’d ended up walking down Stratford Avenue in the pouring rain. It’s why I didn’t have two dimes to rub together, didn’t have a phone, didn’t have a hope for salvation beyond the small tattered overhang I found that did nothing to protect me from the storm.

At nineteen years old, I was a failure already.

I’d been so busy freezing my ass off and scowling at well-dressed assholes looking at me like I was the scum that scuffed their pretty, leather loafers, that I hadn’t even noticed Vincent Mercier when he’d first approached. It wasn’t until his shadow fell over me, blocking the one street light that lit the needles of rain that I glanced up to spy one of the most beautiful examples of the masculine form I’d ever seen in my life. If not for the rain dripping from his thick brown hair and the charcoal grey suit glued to every hard, broad surface of his body, I would have believed he’d walked off the set of some popular television show or perhaps stepped straight from the pages of a fashion magazine.