‘Cause being related to Slade Jarvis? Now that’s a hell I wouldn’t put my worst enemy through.
My father moved to let me pass without so much of a word. I thought I saw a few gray hairs glinting in the sun, right around his temples, where there hadn’t been a single one before. I held his gaze and my cocky grin, savoring my triumph, knowing that I’d done what I set out to do. That I had won.
I didn’t let him see it in my eyes or in my swagger, but at the same time, I wondered to myself: if I’d really beat my father, once and for all, then why the hell did I feel so shitty?
Why the hell couldn’t I get the look on Iris Walker’s face out of my head?
~ ONE ~
Iris
SEVEN YEARS LATER
“Dad, come on. You know it’s the right thing to do.”
My stepfather looked down his nose at me, the wire frames of his glasses dangling precariously close to the tip. He looked like he’d aged ten years in the past three days. Ever since Kellan left home, our house had practically become a morgue.
You would’ve thought my younger brother died, and maybe for Dad, that was, in a sense, true. He certainly wasn’t the kid we once knew.
Dad shook his head and fixed his gaze outside the breakfast nook window again, like staring at the front lawn would magically make Kellan appear there. This was part of the Waiting Game, the one our family always played whenever Kellan took off on one of his benders. He was never gone for more than a week at a time—apparently, that was how long it took for him to run out of drug money and come crawling back home on his knees, begging for more. Or he’d call us from the drunk tank at the police station to plead for bail money so he wouldn’t have to spend the night.
Whatever the case, my little brother had a self-destruct mechanism set for seven days. No matter what else he got himself into, we could rely on him to end up at our door a week later, just like clockwork.
Until now.
Three days ago marked one week since Kellan left the house. He’d used his usual ruse, promising Mom he was going to a job interview or the Army recruiter or whatever it was this time. Kellan used the guise of bettering himself as an excuse to relapse, and when his cellphone went straight to voicemail that night, we braced ourselves for another week of the Waiting Game.
But now ten days had passed, and still no one could reach Kellan. Not even me. And I had one hell of a bad feeling about this.
“We don’t have any other choice,” I continued, even as my stepfather looked away from me to his newspaper. “Not one that I see, anyway. We’ve already called all the hospitals and police stations. And I doubt you or Mom are going to be able to smoke him out. We need a bigger gun.”
My stepfather snorted. “Fine choice of words.”
I sighed and closed my eyes. It had been seven years since my parents caught me and Slade in the pool house, doing… what we’d done. Dad had sworn me and Mom to secrecy, along with Slade. Kellan was never to hear a word of it, and when Dad kicked Slade out the next day, he used Slade’s going off to Harvard as the perfect excuse. Still, for all his talk of secrecy, he was so obvious with his disdain for his own son that everyone knew how he felt. He thought Slade was an asshole. Dangerous. And maybe he was.
But he was smart, too, and capable. And there were times were he had been incredibly sweet and kind to me. I hated the idea that it was all just an act to screw me, literally and figuratively, just to get back at his father and my mother. When he first left I clung to the belief that those were true parts of him, and that what he’d done at the end had just been him acting out in… whatever. But over the years, after never hearing from him again, I’ve all but lost that hope. Maybe he was the complete jerk that his dad seemed to believe him to be.
One thing is for certain, Kellan had never stopped looking up to him, even when Mom and Dad basically forbade us from even mentioning Slade’s name. I knew my little brother felt abandoned, like he’d lost one of the most positive male influences in his life almost as quickly as it arrived. He’d never been the same after Slade left. That day marked the beginning of Kellan’s downward spiral.
Slade might be the only one of us who could bring Kellan home. Knowing that was one thing. Convincing my parents it was true was another.
My mother sat down at the table with us, two mugs of coffee in her hands. She handed one to my stepfather and said, “Kellan’s life is enough of a mess as it is, Iris. Adding yet another unstable element to the mix… I just can’t see how that would make things any better.”
“Exactly,” Dad said, kissing my mother’s cheek before taking a sip of his coffee. “Kellan needs roots. He needs someone who can set a good example.” His eyes darkened and his brow creased. A shadow of a memory flitted over his face. “Not someone who forces himself on his own family.”
“He didn’t force me,” I mumbled, and not for the first time. This was a regular argument, once upon a time, but over the past few years it became obvious he was never going to change his mind. I saw my stepfather start to open his mouth and quickly added, “And anyway, that’s not the point. The point is Kellan doesn’t know about that. All he knows is that the big brother he looked up to more than anyone else in the world just disappeared from his life one day, and that you wouldn’t even let him ask why. He’s not going to come home if either of you go after him. It’s obvious who he needs.”
My stepfather leaned close to me over the table, lowering his voice and squeezing my mother’s hand so tight I saw his knuckles whiten. “If you think I’m inviting that… person into my home, after what he did to us, to you…”
I furrowed my brow in disbelief. “He’s your son,” I reminded him. “And he’s a doctor. You don’t know what kind of trouble Kellan’s into. Mom found pills in his room just the other week. Who knows how long that’s been going on? He needs treatment, Dad.”
My stepfather sat back and his face fell. He eyed my mother through his periphery. “Is that true?” he asked her. “About the pills?”
I looked at my mom. She averted her gaze. Shit. I didn’t know she hadn’t told him.
When she failed to answer, my stepfather let out a long sigh through his nose. He looked out the window again at the empty drive, at the absence of my brother’s car, at the clouds moving in over the horizon. A storm was coming. Maybe in more ways than one.
As much as my mother and stepfather didn’t want Slade here, I didn’t want him around even more. It wasn’t because he’d “forced” himself on me—I was a willing and eager, albeit naïve, participant in what happened between us. But being played for a fool, having my heart torn open, being used just to settle some kind of score Slade had with our parents? I never wanted to see his smug, arrogant face ever again. No matter how handsome it was.
Slade was the walking, talking embodiment of everything I’d tried to forget for almost a decade now. I’d done a lot in the past seven years. I’d graduated from college, started my own business as an interior designer—no, screw that, I had a thriving business, and that was even more impressive than just starting one. I was a smart, beautiful, self-possessed young woman who didn’t take shit from anybody, and Slade Jarvis was everything I wanted to leave behind.
But he was exactly what I needed—what our family needed—right now. And I’d do anything for Kellan if it meant keeping him safe. Surely, my parents felt the same way?