Lie to Me (33 page)

“You have been fighting me for this for five years,” Brison is saying. “I don’t fucking believe you’re giving it up.”

“Brison, why’d you take me out here?” I say. “Where’s Alex?”

My hand is on the door.

“Why?” Brison shouts. He hits the steering wheel with the palm of his hand and turns on me. “Why the hell would you give it all up for some woman?”

That’s the moment when I go from hating my half-brother to pitying him.

“I hope you understand one day,” I tell him. “For real, I do.”

Brison blinks and looks at me with that vacant, ‘no one’s home’ look, like I just popped him one. I don’t think he’s had a whole lot of experience with people wishing him well for no reason at all.

“I’ll be damned,” he finally says, sitting back in his seat and letting his hands drop.

“Where is Alex?” I ask him again.

“Marcus,” Brison says, starting the car back up. “Alex was never coming. My job was just to get you out of the house.”

Everything stops. Then:

There’s my hand flying out to grab Brison’s neck.

There’s my pulse roaring in my head.

There are a million bad thoughts running through my mind.

“Let me take you back,” Brison chokes out. I have him pinned back against the window, my right hand cocked, my left on his throat. “He’s not going to hurt her, Marcus, he’s not stupid. Just let me take you back. He thinks you’re going to be gone for hours.”

I curse. Brison doesn’t know this, but Alex doesn’t have to lay a finger on Harlow to hurt her.

“Go,” I tell him. “You better hope you’re right.”

chapter 20

HARLOW

I wake up knowing something is wrong.

Well, the first thing that’s wrong is that I’m awake at all. Marcus kept me up practically all night, and not that I’m complaining about that—not at all—but I am someone who needs her sleep. Or at least someone who needs more Marcus, as soon as I get up.

And that’s the second thing that’s wrong. I’m alone in my bed.

Our bed.

Thinking about it like that makes me smile. I turn over, blinking my eyes against the sun streaming in through my window, and listen intently for what he’s doing downstairs. I would not put it past him to make breakfast, and I’ll admit: I’m intrigued.

But no. Nothing.

So here is when the anxiety starts. Just a little twinge in my stomach, not a full-blown freak out or anything, nothing I can’t handle. And I know it’s unreasonable. It’s just like a muscle that I used to use every day that I’ve put on bed rest, and it’s threatening to cramp up in protest. But I remind myself of what I realized last night, of what I’ve been in the process of realizing ever since Marcus came back into my life: I don’t have to be afraid like that.

He has
not
left me.

Having faith in Marcus proves not to be so hard. But having faith in the universe as a whole is an altogether different skill. That one might take me a while.

Ok, so I decide to deal with it. I’ll just go find him. I force myself out of bed, my body aching in the best of ways, and wipe the sleep out of my eyes. I do a survey.

His clothes are gone.

Check that: Most of his clothes from last night are gone. His suitcase is still here, and his shirt is exactly where I dropped it last night, but his pants and jacket and shoes—gone.

So…that’s weird.

I roll off my bed and dig up some boy shorts and a tank top, thinking Marcus will probably take them right off again when he sees me, and it’s when I’m hopping around the room with my foot caught in the shorts that I hear someone knocking on the door. No, more like banging. Pounding.

He’s locked out? How would that even…?

I pad toward the stairs, running a hand through my tangled hair, already smiling, thinking about what I’m going to ask him to do to me when I see him, when I hear the door open. So I hurry up, bouncing down the stairs, excited to see my man.

And I find Alex Wolfe standing in my foyer. Looking up at me.

Smiling.

***

I am no stranger to the extremities of emotion. Having your parents die unexpectedly at a relatively young age will familiarize you with a whole bunch of things you’d rather not know about, especially if you’re already highly strung. But, once you’ve been through that ringer once, it’s nice to be able recognize something bad when you can feel it coming. It helps you prepare when you know what it is.

Unfortunately, sometimes it also triggers a memory.

For me, it’s physical at first. Seeing Alex Wolfe like that, smiling up at me like a predator, in my home… I don’t know exactly why I get this feeling of being hunted, of being cornered, with the world about to fall down in flames around me, but I do. I recognize it as “impending doom.”

I’ve only felt it a few times. When my parents died, when Marcus left, when Dylan had me cornered in a bathroom.

I mean, technically, Alex Wolfe should be no more than Marcus’s father, to me. If anything, I should have a positive association with the man, considering his involvement, however shady, with helping me gain custody of Dill. I know I owe him everything.

But my body doesn’t know that. My actual, physical body? It sees Alex Wolfe, and it says, “You’re about to lose everything.”

It takes everything I have to keep that under control. I feel it in my stomach first, this roiling nausea that heats me up from the inside until I can feel the anxiety start to burn through my skin, start to make me sweat. I grip the handrail of the stairs and try to ride it out.

But then comes the memory.

And the memory I most associate with this feeling of impending doom is what I can remember, however little, of the day I lost my parents.

It felt like dying.

I felt like this, sick, and like I was suffocating in the feeling, unable to catch my breath. It would slam into me and I’d fight, struggle for a while, trying to breathe in the thick, choking air, and I’d catch hold of Marcus, clinging to him like a piece of driftwood. I’d have a few moments like that, panting, heaving, crying, feeling grateful that that feeling had passed, and then I’d remember that it was true, that this was reality, that this was actually happening, and it would start all over again.

So basically a much gentler version of Hell, punctuated by brief moments of respite in Marcus’s arms.

What I try to think about when this feeling comes back is how I am grateful that I haven’t had to deal with anything else truly terrible happening in my life. I am so much luckier than many women, especially women in my situation, who end up in foster care, however briefly. I know I don’t have it so bad in the scheme of things, and I know that I’m just wired for anxiety, and that it’s something I have to deal with. So I try to think about how lucky I really am, and I try to remember that, whatever it is, I can deal with it.

Alex Wolfe, with that blood-curdling smile on his face, is making it very difficult to do that.

“How did you get in?” I ask him. I haven’t moved since I first saw him.

“It’s not a very secure door,” Mr. Wolfe says, shaking his head in disapproval. “It just opened with barely any pressure at all.”

I go from hot to cold in an instant.

“You broke in?” I say.

“No, I wouldn’t say that,” Mr. Wolfe says. He’s wearing a three-piece suit again, very dapper, even though it’s the end of summer. “The door opened, and I came in to make sure you were all right, Harlow. That’s how I would put it.”

I’m confused. That sounds a whole lot like the kind of breaking in that I would never be able to prosecute anyone for.

I feel a flash of fear, but I dismiss it as just my anxiety. As the ghost of fear from the last time I felt anxiety about losing everything like this. It’s just my own issues, my own memories, messing with me again.

Or maybe it’s just easier to think that I’m overreacting than it is deal with what’s actually happening, which is that Alex Wolfe has broken into my house and he looks angry.

“Mr. Wolfe,” I say, carefully making my way down the stairs. “I saw you at the fundraiser last night. I just want to say that I’m sorry if this causes you any inconvenience.”

Mr. Wolfe raises his eyebrows, putting one hand to his chest in mock disbelief.

“Why should you be sorry, Harlow?” he says. “You won the battle.”

This is his charming face. Suddenly I can see the family resemblance in that broad smile, the strong jaw, the light eyes, and I think of Marcus. And I tell myself that they must have more in common than just a great smile. After all, this is the man who stepped in and helped me get custody of my little brother. He can’t be as scary as he seems right now.

“Thank you, Mr. Wolfe, but…” I hesitate. I’ve never spoken to him about this in explicit terms because I didn’t want to jeopardize it, especially if Mr. Wolfe’s influence on the custody case was less than aboveboard—which, let’s be honest, of course it wasn’t aboveboard.

But it’s time.

“Mr. Wolfe, I know you got me Dill,” I say. “I never understood why, but please believe me that I’ve always, always been grateful. I don’t know, I guess I thought you took an interest because of Marcus, or… It doesn’t matter. The point is, I know I owe you everything, and I can never repay that. And that’s why I’m sorry.”

I’m surprised to find I actually am starting to tear up. There’s something cathartic about expressing gratitude, about apologizing. I’ve been carrying this debt around for so long, not knowing what I did to deserve such kindness, and therefore half-terrified that it would be taken away at any moment, that simply saying thank you has always felt impossible.

But I have to do it.

“Thank you,” I say. I swallow back the tears, press my lips together. “Thank you,” I say again.

And Alex Wolfe laughs.

“Don’t thank me yet, little girl,” he says, walking into my living room. “We’re not done.”

I’m starting to think my sense of danger isn’t all that off. I’m starting to think maybe this isn’t about memories after all.

“What do you mean?” I say, following him. Mr. Wolfe has sprawled out on my couch like he owns it.

“What I did to get you custody, Harlow, was bribe the judge,” he says, putting both arms back on the couch. He looks comfortable. “It wasn’t hard. It wasn’t even very expensive, given the favors Judge McPherson owed me at the time. Your brother cost me less than ten thousand dollars, Harlow, you know that?”

I’m speechless. I’m standing barefoot in front of the man who’s responsible for giving me my family back, and he’s telling me it was cheap. I don’t know how to react.

Mr. Wolfe doesn’t seem bothered. He spies a piece of lint on his pant leg and flicks it off, still talking.

“And what’s more, Harlow—and this is probably the most pertinent point,” he says, looking back up at me to make sure I’m paying attention, “but it would cost me about as much to take him away again.”

Oh God.

I can feel his words begin to wind their way through my system, shutting my awareness of everything else down. Everything else becomes nonessential. Everything but what he’s just said.

He could take Dill away.

“You really need a new couch,” Mr. Wolfe says, shifting his weight.

“What are you talking about?” I whisper. “Taking Dill away? You can’t take him away.”

“Oh yes, I can,” he says, standing up to his full, impressive height. He’s not as tall as Marcus, but he’s still over six feet, and he knows it. He makes me feel small. “I’m talking about the very many judges I happen to know very well. I’m talking about how easy it would be to have a social worker come around and make an unfavorable report about Dill’s care.”

Mr. Wolfe sneers at me and spreads his arm wide.

“This house, Harlow, it’s falling apart. You just had to have the septic system replaced,” he says, giving me a knowing, nasty look, “but who knows what else could go wrong? Who knows what Dill’s exposed to? You work late hours for little pay in a trashy little bar with no hope of a future and you bring strange men around the house. Strange men with questionable ties to certain criminal elements.”

Mr. Wolfe is getting angrier the more he talks. I’m having trouble following his words through my shock. I can’t get past the mortal panic of having him tell me he could take Dill.

“You’re the criminal element,” I say when I can get my mouth working again.

Mr. Wolfe smiles again and shrugs. “Yes. So? The ‘element’ in that phrase is important. Means they can’t prove anything. But they can take your brother away. Especially if I pay them enough. And Harlow, you’re looking a little out of it right now, so let me be completely clear: You drop this little project of yours of saving a dying fucking neighborhood and you accept my offer for this shithole of house, you leave my son alone, or I make sure little Dillinger goes to foster care and you don’t see him again until he’s eighteen.”

I stare at him. I’m numb. The world around me is still and unmoving, and I can’t even feel the panic anymore.

“Harlow,” Mr. Wolfe snarls at me, “do you understand?”

“You can’t do that,” I say flatly.

“I can, and I will. I’m done playing with you, little girl,” he says, and he comes closer, looming over me with his face twisted up into this ugly mask of anger, and now the resemblance to Marcus is the thing I find scariest about this. It’s a face that looks like Marcus, but with the expression of Dylan, when he pinned me in that bathroom.

I recoil in horror, my body jumping away, and Alex Wolfe pounces. He grabs my wrists and easily holds me motionless. At his mercy.

Alex Wolfe puts that face close to mine and says, “I indulged this little fantasy for the sake of my son, so that he could get it out of his system once and for all, but I can see now that I need to step in. This is over.”

“Marcus won’t let you do this.”

Mr. Wolfe laughs. It’s a different laugh, and some faraway, analytical part of my brain recognizes that this is his genuine laugh, not the one he uses to convince people he’s a good person.