“He murdered my father.” I kicked a baggage cart.
“Chariot murdered mine as well.” Rafael fixed me with the same cold expression he’d worn when he’d shot Avi. “Tell me you won’t kill him, Ashira. None of us get the luxury of revenge.”
Rafael was right and I hated him for it. But there was nothing stopping me from killing 26L1 when this was all over.
I smiled grimly. “You have my word.”
Chapter 25
“Dad’s dead.” I dropped down on Talia’s couch, my black socks with the hole in the toe a stark contrast to her white plush rug.
Growing up, our home had been cozy and cluttered. It was a place that was well lived-in and well loved. Her apartment these days was ruthlessly maintained by a housekeeper. I’d never seen a speck of dust or a dish left out on the counter, and her furniture was the latest in high-end contemporary design, where comfort had somehow been left out of the aesthetic.
“Here.” She handed me a piece of Scotch tape, measuring that she had enough wrapping paper to cover the box of dishes. “When I fold the paper over, tape it down for me.”
“Did you hear me?” I said, waving my tape-covered fingers in front of her face.
“Tape it.”
I secured the edges of the paper with the silver wedding bells on it together. “Who’s getting married?”
“The Shulmans’ daughter.”
“Mazel tov. Dad is dead. Care to comment?”
“I’m well aware that my husband’s dead.” She ripped off another piece of tape, affixing it to the edge of the table, and spinning the box around to wrap the next side.
“How?”
“He never came back.” Rip.
I took the tape away from her. “Yeah. That’s what happens when people leave. But you couldn’t have known for sure. Didn’t you even wonder if he was still alive? Hope?”
“What was the point? He was dead.”
“You didn’t know that.”
She slammed her hand down on the coffee table and I jumped.
Other than the crinkling of paper and the occasional rip of tape, we sat in silence.
“What makes you so certain?” she said at last, rolling the extra wrapping paper up.
“I visited Uncle Paulie. It led me to some information that confirmed Dad’s death.”
She caught her thumb on the edge of the tape dispenser and winced. “Paulie could have killed you. Whatever happened to him, that man is not the same person who snuck you M&Ms.”
“True. He’s broken. But he’s not dangerous. At least not to me.”
The bag with the bows crinkled as Talia pulled out a silver one and stuck it to the package. “I don’t want to know how Adam died.”
“That’s good, because I wasn’t going to tell you.” I systematically unraveled one of the frilly bows. I was a damn good private investigator. I got answers. I’d just never thought about how much this stuff hurt. People asked me to find cheating husbands, lying wives, missing kids, or delinquent relatives. I did, and then I always wondered why my clients where so upset when I got them the answers they already suspected. If you already knew on some level, why did an outside source confirming it break you emotionally?
Now I understood. There was something to be said about people’s tremendous ability to deny reality, even when it was right in front of them.
For our capacity to hope.
“I wasn’t, you know, blind to your father’s faults,” Talia said, swallowing. “But he was just so damn charismatic.” Some of her bitterness leached away as she added, “And he loved us so much.”
“Then why weren’t we enough?” My voice quivered and my body felt heavy and off-center. A black ball had settled into the pit of my stomach, making it ache.
“If I had a dime for every time I asked myself that, my retirement fund would be set.”
“Do you know what he’d gotten himself involved in?” I wound the strings of the unraveled bows around my hands, snapping them tight like a garrote.
“No, but he wasn’t sleeping. When he left, I thought, okay. He’s in trouble, but it’ll work out. He’ll be back. Then the months passed with no trace of him and that was it.”
“What if he’d stayed away because he didn’t want to hurt us?”
“Oh, honey.” She took my hands in hers. “You’ve never been in love like that. Not as a romantic partner and definitely not as a parent. Your dad was dead because he couldn’t have stayed away. No matter what he’d intended when he left.”
A lump rose in my throat. “But you’ve always been so angry at him.”
“One doesn’t negate the other. He didn’t trust in our love. In us, no matter how hard that was.”
I mulled that over, staring down the wedding bells on the wrapping paper like my life depended on them. “I’m dating Levi.”
Dead silence.
“No one can know,” I blurted out, barrelling on. “And I’m keeping the dog.”
I shot her a glare, just daring her to fight back. Give me a target. I didn’t need my family. I had my team. I’d survived without one parent. I’d be fine.
But Talia didn’t deliver one of her usually scathing remarks. She didn’t yell, didn’t sigh disappointedly, and didn’t give me the bullet-point list of the myriad of ways I was screwing up my life. Instead, she brushed a lock of hair out of my face and pressed a kiss to my forehead. “Okay.”
I was so stunned I didn’t realize my mouth was open. After a few tries to form sentences, I crossed my arms, blinked several times, and then said, “Maybe we could try breakfast again sometime. Patios are nice for the dog.”
Talia smiled. “I think that could be arranged. Work talk stays at work.”
“That would be good.”
I didn’t stay. I made it through the hallway and downstairs into the apartment lobby on autopilot before I realized: I couldn’t go home. Priya was still mad and it wasn’t fair to deny her space. But where else could
