Chapter 28

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

ROSIE

Anthony looks like I just slapped him in the face, but the hurt slips away, leaving behind a cold, detached expression. It’s the same look I saw on his face the first time I went into The Peanut Bar.

My heart is beating as fast as a trapped rabbit. Guilt and horror and self-recrimination pound through me with each beat. I can still feel the press of Anthony’s lips on my face and hands, and I just told him he should marry someone else. I don’t want him to marry someone else. The thought makes me want to puke and tear down the world. But I got a dose of terrible, awful, no-good news in the form of a few texts from a local number.

It turns out I’m not the only one who’s witnessed your dubious waitressing skills. Wilson tells me he saw you at a “special” party.

Consider this a caution from a friend. If you marry Anthony, you’ll both regret it.

Tick-tock.

We’ll discuss it on Women-Drink-Half-Off Wednesday.

As soon as I saw the messages, the truth dawned on me. Wilson was at the circus party. He was the one wearing the dumb Simba mask. He knows .

Of course, if Nina gets him to tell the cops about my side hustle with Joy, he’ll also have to reveal that he and his friends hired us, but he’s rich and connected, and he won’t be the one who gets in trouble. Even if the charges don’t stick, all they need to do is run my prints through the system, and…

I feel tears pressing at my eyes. “It’s not that I don’t want to, I…”

“You changed your mind after you saw something on your phone. Who sent you a message?” he asks coldly, starting to close the picnic basket. He’s not looking at me. He won’t look at me.

I reach for his hand, and the picnic basket tumbles over. A plate tumbles out and falls at exactly the wrong angle, breaking on a stone jutting up from the ground. He goes to pick it up, and it slices his hand.

“Anthony!” I reach for a napkin from the basket, but he shakes his head and takes it from me, pressing it to his hand before wrapping it into a half-formed knot.

“Anthony,” I repeat, tears falling down my cheeks.

“Who was it? Wilson?” He smiles without the slightest bit of humor, his eyes slate gray and flat. I hear Nina in my head, telling me that at the end of the day Anthony will always be cold. Logical. Nina’s a bitch , I tell myself. Nina’s wrong. “Did you decide to take Nina up on her offer? I saw the way he was looking at you yesterday. It must be some kind of record, stealing two women from the same man.”

The cloth napkin is bloody where it’s pressed to his wound. I’m worried about him, and I’m pissed, and my heart feels like a confusing coil in my chest. I don’t know where it begins and where it ends, only that it’s a mess.

“You know it wasn’t him.”

“I don’t know anything .”

“You’re being a dick,” I point out. “You haven’t even given me a chance to answer.”

Something passes over his face, and he glances outside the garden wall. But nothing’s visible in that direction other than a gnarled tree, the branches stripped of leaves.

His gaze sticks on it before he looks back at me, his face pale, and nods. “You’re right. I haven’t.” The rest of his rage fades when he gets a good look at my face.

He takes a half step toward me, his hand raised as if to touch my cheek, but he stops himself.

Tears still falling, I decide to tell him everything. He deserves to know. He deserved to know before, probably, but it’s only now, when I’ve probably already lost everything, that I have the strength to share it all. “I told you. My uncle…he was a criminal, and I… What I didn’t mention… What I haven’t told anyone is that I helped him cook his books for a couple of years. Because I climbed that hedge maze when I was eighteen, and I got arrested for drunk and disorderly. He bailed me out without telling my brothers, but he had something on me, and he never had something on someone without using it. He’s gone now, but my fingerprints are on file from that arrest. That’s really bad, because my brothers and I have been using a different last name to hide from my uncle’s successor. Nicole said she could take care of the fingerprints problem for me. I…I hoped…. thought …she’s basically invincible, so I figured she could really do it, but it looks like it's not going to happen before next weekend.”

I’ve shocked him. He might be able to laugh off Dom getting baked in the building he owns, but this is something different. My uncle was a capital-C criminal, which makes me just as bad by association. I let him use me, and Roman and Jay took up the torch and used me too, only they didn’t ask for permission.

Anthony’s jaw works, but he doesn’t say anything for a long moment. Then he clears his throat and says, “Your parents were gone, and he took advantage of you.” Anger pulses in the words, as if he’d like to take my long-dead uncle to task.

I nod, my eyes tearing up. Because I’d come to that conclusion a long time ago. “But at the time I liked feeling important. I’ve always been good at finding deals and loopholes. Even then.”

“We’ve all done things we regret,” he says, finally reaching out, his good hand smoothing down my cheek before cupping it.

“I know you have to satisfy the terms of the will, Anthony. I don’t know who has to sign off on it, but I’m guessing they’ll want a thorough background check, and if they ask for fingerprints…”

“Simon wouldn’t go to much effort,” he says, his tone tight, but he lowers his hand from my face, his fingertips glancing off my skin. “But you’re probably right about the background check. Would it come up clean?”

“I’m almost positive,” I say, because Nicole and Damien have confirmed our identities are solid. “But if I ever get arrested, they’ll know I’m not Rosie James, I’m Rosie O’Malley.”

“That’s why you were so worried about getting picked up by the cops the other night,” he says, running a hand over his beard. I have the burn of it all over my thighs. I’ll probably be feeling it for days.

“Yes,” I say, more tears coming. I hate tears. I hate the weakness of it, of myself. Because for every time I look in the mirror and tell myself that I can kick life in the balls, I remember all the times when I was small and weak and let other people have their say. “And…” And this is the part that will push him away from me, even if all the rest can’t, but I have to tell him. I’d promised to be honest, and sure, I may have delayed that honesty slightly, but I still owe it to him. “Nina just texted me.”

“ Nina? ” His surprise would have been incredibly amusing under different circumstances. Right now, it’s another handful of salt, thrown into my seeping wound. A bitter wind whips through the garden, nearly tearing one of the roses off its supports.

I run my fingers over the zipper of my coat, needing the feeling of something solid and grounding. “Wilson was at this party that Joy and I catered last weekend.”

Something passes through his eyes. “It was Joy’s special tea. Nina threatened you.”

I nod, and the horror of the situation I’ve put us in lands on me like an elephant. If I’d been more cordial earlier, if I’d made less of an impression on Wilson, if I’d refused to spend more time with them…

If, if, if…

The end of it is that I’ve allowed Nina , of all people, the power to destroy us. I’ve put myself in a position where she could probably get Joy and me arrested just out of spite. And even if Anthony listens to me and marries the accountant, both Nina and Wilson will know it’s a sham. They’ll probably make a laughingstock of him at his own wedding.

Anthony turns and punches the wall with his bloody fist, and horror loops through me. I’m not afraid of him—I’m horrified for him. I can tell he only did it to hurt himself. To expel whatever he feels inside at the thought of Nina threatening me. Nina, messing with his life again from the outside.

It must hurt like hell, but he barely flinches, and he doesn’t make a sound. He just grips the side of the wall with his other hand, his head tilted down, the napkin on his hand covered in blood. He looks impossibly beautiful right now—rumpled and tortured—and impossibly far away from me, and it’s all my fault. Everything’s falling apart, and this time it’s because I ruined everything…

Loser .

“Anthony?” I say, crying, touching his shoulder. I don’t know what I'm asking for. Maybe for him to fix this, even though I already know he can’t. He can’t make Wilson unsee me. He can’t rewind time and tell me not to be an idiot.

He looks at me, his eyes glassy. “What happens if your name gets out?”

“I don’t know,” I say, my voice small. “Maybe nothing. But maybe… There’s a chance someone might come for us. And your inheritance—”

His expression hardens. “Shouldn’t you have thought about all of this yesterday?” He shakes his head, his expression dark. “But you don’t think about things, do you, Rosie? You just do them and let other people clean up the mess.”

Pain lances through me as he lobs the worst thing about me—the thing I hate about myself—at me like it’s a paint grenade. I take a step back.

I need to leave.

I need to get away from here, from this place that suddenly feels like it’s full of loss instead of possibilities—the could-have-beens clinging to me like broken spider silk.

Numb, I stoop to grab my purse and take a step away from him. His eyes are wild as he watches me. “You’re leaving? ” It comes out like an accusation, like he’d hoped we could figure out how to rewind time after all if only we tried hard enough.

“I don’t see any point in staying,” I say, more tears coming. “You’re right. I’m a loser, a fuckup, and you would have been better off if I’d left you alone.”

He flinches. “That’s not what I meant, I…” Defeat slips over his face. “I don’t want you to be in any danger. You’re going to keep staying with your brother, right?”

“Yeah,” I say, numb.

“I’ll drive you.” He grips the soaked cloth around his hand.

“I have my car, and you need to get to a doctor,” I say, worried, because there’s a lot of blood. There are spots of it on his shirt now. “You might need stitches. You can’t…you shouldn’t drive like that.”

His gaze dips, and that’s when I realize I’m still wearing the gorgeous ring he gave me. Maybe it really is cursed, or maybe I’m the curse. Regret pulsing through me, I lift my hand and take it off, the ring giving way easily, as if it wasn’t nearly as attached to our partnership as I was. It feels cold and hostile in my palm as I hold it out to him.

He pauses, conflict roaring in his eyes, and then takes it.

“I’m going to take the Jeep home,” I say.

His jaw works as if he wants to say something that will stop me or take all of this back. But I know what I’ve done, and I don’t give him the chance. I just take his good hand and lift it to my lips. I kiss the knuckles before I step back, tears still stinging my eyes, because, with aching clarity, I know that I could have loved him. Maybe I already do.

I turn my back on him, feeling him staring at me as I let the blankets fall behind me like a shed skin. Feeling him everywhere.

When I get to the front of the house, the guard eyes me and then gets up and approaches me. “Are you okay, ma’am?” he asks gruffly.

“No, but no one hurt me,” I insist.

No one but myself.