I opened the freezer and grabbed a container at random. I pried off the lid of some chicken dijonnaise and threw it in the microwave to defrost. As the timer counted down, I bowed my head and let the tight leash I’d kept on my grief loosen.
I wanted to fight. To rage. To destroy.
A good man had been taken. Another one, an evil one, had escaped without suffering his full punishment. And I could do nothing about either. With all the wealth and favors I’d amassed, I was once again powerless.
My hands fisted on the counter until my knuckles went white and a memory surfaced.
“Place is looking better,” Simon had told me when he wandered in through the open garage door.
I’d been covered in sweat and dust, sledgehammering my way through drywall and ghosts.
“Is it?” my twentysomething self asked. It looked like an explosion had hit the kitchen.
“Sometimes in order to build things back up, you gotta tear them down to the studs. Want some help?”
Just like that, the man who’d saved my life picked up a hammer and helped me raze the ugliest parts of my past.
The doorbell rang, and my head came up. The anger retreated dutifully back into its box. I debated ignoring whoever it was. But the bell rang several more times in rapid succession.
Irritated, I yanked open the door, and my heart stuttered. It always did when I saw her unexpectedly. Part of me, some small, weak splinter buried down deep, saw her and wanted to draw nearer. Like she was a campfire beckoning with a promise of warmth and goodness in the dark night.
But I knew better. Sloane didn’t offer warmth. She promised third-degree burns.
She was still wearing the black dress and glittery belt she’d worn to the funeral, but instead of the heels that brought her higher on my chest, she had donned snow boots. And my coat.
She pushed past me carrying a paper bag.
“What are you doing?” I demanded as she ventured down the hall. “You’re supposed to be at your sister’s.”
“Keeping tabs on me, Lucifer? I didn’t feel like company tonight,” she called over her shoulder.
“Then what are you doing here?” I asked, following her toward the back of the house. I hated her here. It made my skin crawl, my stomach churn. But some sick, stupid part of me craved her proximity.
“You don’t count as company,” she said, tossing my coat on the counter. I wondered if it smelled like her or if, by wearing it, she now smelled like me.
Sloane opened a cabinet, then closed it and opened the next. She rose on tiptoe. The hem of her dress inched higher on her thighs, and I realized she’d also removed her tights. I wondered for one brief, moronic second if she’d taken off anything else before I forced myself to drag my attention away from her skin.
I didn’t know exactly when it had happened. When the kid next door had turned into the woman I couldn’t evict from my brain.
Sloane found a plate and dumped the contents of the greasy brown bag onto it with a flourish.
“There. We’re even,” she announced. The tiny fake diamond stud in her nose twinkled. If she were mine, it would have been a real stone.
“What is this?”
“Dinner. You made your little point with your breakfast burrito. So here’s post-funeral dinner. I don’t owe you anything.”
There were no “thank yous” or “you’re welcomes” between us. We wouldn’t have meant them. What did exist was a compulsion to balance the scales, to never be in debt to the other.
I glanced down at the plate. “What is it?”
“Seriously? How rich do you have to get to not recognize a burger and fries? I didn’t know what you liked, so I got what I like,” she said, snatching a fry off the plate and polishing it off in two neat bites.
She looked tired and wired at the same time.
“How’s Karen?” I asked.
“Mom is holding up. She’s spending the night with a few friends at a spa. They’re having facials tonight and the works tomorrow. It sounds like a safe space to let her feel sad and…” Sloane closed her eyes for a moment.
It was more words and fewer insults than I was used to from her.
“Relieved?” I guessed.
Those green eyes fluttered open and bored into me. “Maybe.”
“He was suffering. It’s natural to be glad that part of it is over.”
She hopped up on the counter, planting herself next to my fast-food dinner. “Still seems wrong,” she said.
I reached around her and snagged a French fry from the plate. It was just an excuse to get closer to her. To test myself.
“Why are you here, Sloane?”
Even as I conspired to get closer, I was still pushing her away. The dynamic was taxing on a good day. On a day like today, it was fucking exhausting.
She took another fry and pointed it at me. “Because I want to know why my mom greeted you like you were a long-lost Walton today. What does she think she owes you? What were you talking about?”
I wasn’t about to begin that conversation. If Sloane had any hint of what I’d done, she’d never leave me in peace again. “Look, it’s late. I’m tired. You should go.”
“It’s 5:30 in the evening, you grumpy pain in the ass.”
“I don’t want you here.” The truth snapped out of me in a desperate rush.
She sat up straighter on the counter but made no move to leave. She’d always been too comfortable with my temper. That was part of the problem. Either she overestimated her invincibility or she underestimated what raged beneath my surface. I wasn’t going to let her stick around long enough to find out which.
She cocked her head, sending that long swing of blond hair over her shoulder. She’d changed up the tone, going from a faded raspberry to a silvery shimmer at the tips. “You know what I kept thinking about today during the services?”
She as well as her mother and sister had spoken in front of the crowd, eloquently, emotionally. But it was the single tear that slid down Sloane’s cheek, the ones she dashed away with my handkerchief, that had sliced me open and left me raw.
“A dozen new ways to piss me off, starting with invading my privacy?”
“How happy Dad would have been if we’d ever pretended to get along.”
It was my turn to close my eyes. She landed the strike with expert precision. Guilt was a sharp weapon.
Simon would have loved nothing more than to see his daughter and his “project” at least friendly toward each other again.
“I guess there’s no reason to start now,” she continued. Her eyes were locked on mine. There was nothing friendly in her gaze. Only a pain and grief that mirrored my own. But we weren’t going to mourn together.
“I guess not,” I agreed.
She heaved a sigh, then hopped off the counter. “Cool. I’ll show myself out.”
“Take the coat,” I said, holding it out to her. “It’s cold.”
She shook her head. “If I take it, I’d have to bring it back, and I’d rather not come back here.” Her gaze flicked around the space, and I knew she too had ghosts here.
“Take the fucking coat, Sloane.” My voice was hoarse. I pushed it into her arms, not giving her the choice.
For a second, we were connected by cashmere.