Rebound (Boomerang #2)(72)

“How is it so easy for you?”

“Because I love you, Chloe.”

She whirled and ran, snatching the keys off the hook.

My family went quiet as we tore through the kitchen and headed out the front door. Chloe jumped into the driver’s seat of my car and I didn’t want to tell her no. She was so upset. So mad at me. I just wanted her to be happy. So I took the passenger seat. As she gunned it out of the driveway, I saw Grey. Grey at just fifteen, skinny as a flagpole, standing in the driveway.

And it was too fast. Everything was. Our words. Her tears. The car. We’d only gone a few miles when she lost control and the tree came flying. And everything went black. And then after—on the bloody ice, where I found her, where she was thrown from the crushed convertible. In the ambulance, at the hospital and the morgue and the church and the cemetery, how all I could think was that I could’ve stopped it. I made her cry, and I made her run, and I made her lose control on the ice. I made that tree fly.

I should have been driving. I deserved to take the blame.

So I took it.

I made Grey swear he’d never tell the truth, that he saw Chloe drive away. Then I lied to my parents and hers. To the lawyers, who blamed the icy roads over the alcohol level in my blood—which wasn’t all that high. Not nearly as high as Chloe’s.

No one asked questions.

They grieved for Chloe. They grieved with me, for my beautiful wife.

We packed her death away in the lies I created for four years.

And it has been destroying me.

Grey scratches his jaw, pulling me back to the present. “You’ve got to let the bad shit be what it is sometimes, Adam.”

I hear myself laugh. “Wow. That should be cross-stitched on a pillow.”

Grey smiles. “Damn right, brother.”

“You were saying I shouldn’t be the rescuer, the middle man. So what you’re telling me, Grey, is that I should kick you out?”

His eyebrows rise. “Oh, hell no. I’m not going anywhere. It was just an example.” He pushes up from the table. “Come on,” he says.

“Where to now, Buddha?”

“The water. I’m tired as shit of surfing alone.”





Chapter 41



Alison


My father’s asleep in the study, Forbes magazine draped across a knee, and his reading glasses sliding off the bridge of his nose. I listen to his guttural breathing, watch his chest rise and fall. He seems so different to me now. His face—chapped from so much time in the sun and wind, with circles of white around his eyes from always keeping his sunglasses on—looks like a stranger’s face. His jaw looks more slack. His hands, clasped over his stomach, look like an old man’s hands.

For three days he kept himself away. On “business,” though the only business he seems to have lately is ruining people’s lives. And when he returned, he made sure to do it on an evening when we have company—my mother’s book group. Which makes me realize, as though I needed more proof, that I’ve been totally played.

A feeling washes over me—a strange, acute kind of buoyancy that makes me feel like a balloon, filling up, up, up, about to float into the stratosphere. It’s the sensation I have when the Ali Cat powers away from the dock or when Zenith used to break into a gallop, the two of us in perfect sync. I feel exultant and filled with possibilities.

I go and sit down next to my father, remove the glasses from his face, close the magazine and tuck it away beside me. And then I shake him awake. Not gently.

He starts and blinks at me, slowly bringing me into focus. “Jesus Christ. You could have given me a heart attack.”

“Don’t do this to Adam.”

He sighs. “Alison, please.”

“I mean it, Dad. It’s not right to blackmail your way into owning a company. You have to know that.”

He sits up then, fixing me with a glare that once would have withered me on the spot. Instead, a glassy calm settles over me. I’m here with him, but I’m also gone. Some part of me has broken free for the first time, truly free, and I know he can’t sway or scare me anymore.

“Did Blackwood come to see you?” He pounds the couch between us with his fist, but it’s like the gesture of a little kid. “Damn it, I told him to keep away.”

“Of course he came to see me. He was angry, and he had every right to be. What you did was wrong.”

“It’s business.”

“It’s still wrong. To him and to me. If I’d known what you had planned I never would have gone in there.”

He chuckles, and the sound stiffens my spine like a fork scratching against china. “Which is why I didn’t tell you what I had planned.”

I know this. Of course I know this. But hearing the words, put so bluntly, still comes as a shock.

“So you used me.”

He shakes his head. “Stop being so dramatic. I employed you. A smart employer understands the assets at hand and makes the best use of them.”

“You’re talking about me like I’m no one! I’m your daughter!”

“I’m well aware of that,” he says. “Are you?”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you need to get your priorities straight. It’s our family business. You should be happy we’ll get to guide the future of Blackwood Entertainment. I’ll put you in charge of Boomerang. That’s what family does. We help each other succeed.”