There’s a boxing match happening in my chest right now.
In one corner, my feelings for Erik are pounding their gloves together, getting ready for war. On the other side stands this huge pissed-off sucker ready to be done with Ashley and Erik and the whole lot of them.
Erik is buried in an avalanche of legal troubles, but he still finds the time to send his little spy over here.
Ashley rests her muscular forearms on her knees, as if to imply that dough isn’t all she could pummel into submission if she had a mind to.
“What do you think about that?”
“About what?” I snap.
“All of it.”
My smile is a razor and my words come out cutting. Screw tact.
“Listen, Ashley, I don’t know what the fuck’s going on with you and Erik, but I hope you know this is next-level fucked up. Why would I set Erik up? Oh, let me think: he’s the only person keeping my mom out of the damn hospital. What’s the next logical step? Yeah, that’d be a real genius move.”
“Wait a second—”
“Are you in love with him?” I hiss.
“What?” she laughs, tossing her hands up in an I-can’t-believe-we’re-having-this-conversation way. “I’m just concerned, Camille.”
“So he sent you?” I challenge.
“No …”
“So then why are you here?” Now it’s my turn to play the detective. If only I had a notebook or a pen or, hell, a pistol to gesture with. “I find it difficult believe that his chef really cares about him that much.”
“Just like how it’s difficult to believe how dedicated his ‘housekeeper’ is?” she counters.
“You’re avoiding the question,” I snap.
“Erik is my half brother. That is why I am here.”
For the second time since Ashley walked in, I sit back in the chair like she’s just whacked me with her rolling pin.
How tangled is this web I’ve walked into? Is the butler his fucking brother, too?
But then, it could easily be part of the deceit.
“Did Erik tell you to say that? Soften up my defenses?”
“No.”
She stares at me with complete openness. If I’ve got an internal lie detector, the needle doesn’t move an inch.
“I keep it secret because I don’t want Adrian and the other staff treating me differently. I had my own restaurant, once, but a drunk driver and I met one night and I came out the worse.”
Her eyes glass over for a moment, as though reliving it.
“I’m still having surgeries and physical therapy. I can show you the scar, if you like.”
“No, no,” I mutter.
But she’s already lifting her shirt. They crisscross all across her belly, a faded pink landscape with newer, deeper scars overlaid on top of those.
“That’s awful.” I touch her hand. I can’t help it. Maternal instinct: one. Anger: zero. “I’m so sorry.”
“What is done is done,” she says, lowering her shirt. “Camille, sweetie, I do not think you turned Erik in. But I do think you are too hard on him. You think he overreacted to your lie about the detective, but you have to understand, he has been lied to by a woman before, recently, and it almost cost him his life.”
“I do understand that,” I reply. “But everybody has a past. It doesn’t make everyone act like jerks.”
“Do you think Erik is a bad man?”
I look away. In the reflection of the new TV I seem small, distorted, as if I am becoming somebody new.
“I don’t know how to answer that,” I say after a long pause, even though I had no trouble answering when Mom asked me earlier if he was a good man. Then I didn’t even think about it. So what’s the difference? My head hurts when I try to parse it all.
“Think of it like this. He is a good man … to those he cares about.”
She stands up, wincing slightly. I wonder how severe her pain is and why I’ve never noticed it before. Too in-my-own-head, I guess, or trying to claw into Erik’s. I’ve been so selfish.
“The casserole just needs to be heated up,” she tells me as she walks to the door. “Twenty minutes at 330 degrees should do it. And, Camille, please do not be so hard on him.”
She is gone before I can reply, leaving me with a writhing mass of worry and guilt and resentment and longing so fierce it might as well be physical: a balloon of want getting bigger and bigger until I feel like I’m pressed flat against the wall with no room to think.
I should have helped him more.
I can’t raise this baby without him. No, that’s not right. I could do it, if I had to.
But I want our child to have a dad, one who’ll stick around and play catch and do all the regular, wholesome, good-ol’-American stuff that my father never stuck around for.
I’m going to have a Bratva boss’ baby, and that scares me so bad I can’t even imagine the future, a mental block bigger than a rhino charging through my mind.
Around and around all these possibilities go until I feel stifled.
I need some fresh air.
The second I open the door, the guard is on me. He walks up the lane with his hands raised like I’m a nervous animal that might bolt any second.
But nervous animals can bite, too. This asshole needs to be careful.
“I can’t even have five minutes outside?”
“It is for your own safety,” he says, a tattoo of an engraved dagger on his neck shifting with the words. “Please, madam.”
“What if I refuse?”
He makes a tut-tut sound that seems bizarre coming from such a large man. “That would not be a good idea.”
I think about fighting, but I don’t have the energy. Thinking about Erik in that cell, plus all these roughhousing desires and possibilities and—ugh, I just feel zapped. Drained of battery.
When I walk back into the living room—the guard closing the door behind me for good measure—Rob glances up from the TV.
A baseball game is on, but he’s
