“If I didn’t know you better, I’d think you were stalking me. And maybe, you are.”
He stood straighter. “I remembered your car from the other night at The Hamburger Stand.” He shrugged. “So, I decided to take a chance.”
“You’re not worried I’ll call the cops on you?” I tightened my fingers around the handles of my tote bag that was slung over my shoulder as I crossed the parking lot. I needed something to steady the rapid beating of my heart.
“All the police in Palm Beach know me,” he replied, and the lightness in his tone told me I should take his comment as a small attempt at a joke. “So, you wouldn’t be surprising them.”
“In that case”—I held up my phone—“I should call them.”
“They’ll probably enjoy getting a call from you about me.”
I laughed. “Really?”
“Well, I mean, I was a pretty wild teenager. Remember?”
A delicious chill ran through me at his mention of the past. “Yes, you were.
But I won’t call them tonight. Not this time.”
“Thank you for not adding to my reputation.” He gave me a mock bow. “And I suppose you wonder why I keep tracking you down.”
“Yes.”
Davis stepped into the street, and a large floodlight on the adjacent property tuned on, illuminating his fine features. His nose was sharper than I remembered, his jaw squarer. “I can’t shake the feeling that I’m missing something. I never got to say goodbye when you left, but it’s not only that; I want…closure. You were my best friend, Sam. I’ve missed you. Will you tell me why you had to leave?”
I gulped. I didn’t have time to dwell on the way that my name sounded on his lips, or the way his voice made me feel whenever he spoke it. Instead, we’d suddenly arrived at the impasse I’d hoped to avoid with him—the direct question about why I’d been evasive and noncommittal since seeing him again. I pushed down the twinge of nervousness in my stomach. “Like I said before, it’s complicated.”
“Tell me something that isn’t.”
“I don’t want to get into this.”
“Too bad.” He scrubbed his face with one hand. “Listen, I’m not going to stop bothering you until you tell me why seeing me again seems to make you so nervous and upset. Your body language alone, well, I’ve never seen someone react so strongly to me, in such a negative way.” He glanced at the street, shaking his head. When he lifted his eyes again, I thought I saw an ounce of desperation in them. “But if you tell me why you’re so upset around me, I promise I’ll leave you alone for good.”
Somehow, I doubted that. The Davis Armstrong III I knew had more stubbornness than he liked to admit.
He closed his eyes. “You know what I keep thinking about? What I can’t get out of my mind? I keep remembering that night, when we were thirteen.” He opened his eyes. “The night I knew I felt differently about you than I did the girls at school.”
“What night?” I cocked my head, flipping through my memories. “When we were thirteen? I don’t remember—”
“You wouldn’t. And I don’t expect you to. It’s such a small thing, really, but it was the night everything changed for me. Your mom took us to get ice cream at Harper’s Shop on Clematis. We walked there from the island because it was a nice night, not too hot.”
“I used to love going there.” The memories surfaced, and I recalled the way the creamy ice cream tasted, and how much of a treat it had been to go to Harper’s. “Mom liked it too. She’d go there whenever she had a little extra money in the budget.” I paused. “But I haven’t been there in years.”
“That’s too bad. It’s still there. Same spot, best soft serve ice cream in South Florida.” He waved a hand. “Anyway, your mother was feeling generous and insisted on paying for my cone, even though I had plenty of money. You got a strawberry swirl, and I got a chocolate. It was all going fine until we walked out of the store.”
I sucked in a deep breath. I could guess what he was going to say next, but I wanted to hear it from him—hear how he recalled it. I hadn’t expected him to remember something I considered trivial so vividly.
“If I remember right, you were about to take a bite of your cone, and you saw a little girl staring at us,” he said, his voice falling a little bit in volume. “And something about the expression on her face made you give it to her. Right then and there. You offered your whole ice cream to her, and her mother was shocked. She said they’d just moved to West Palm from Puerto Rico, and that was the first kind thing anyone had done for them.”
Blood warmed my cheeks, and I felt embarrassment flush through my body. “It was”—I looked away—“it was nothing.”
“No, it wasn’t nothing, Sam.”
“Anyone would do something like that.” I allowed my eyes to meet his. “She looked hungry, and she was in worse shape than I was. It was—”
“It was selfless. Kind. A good thing to do. And I think it was the first time I saw anyone go out of their way to be nice to a total stranger.” He stepped closer to me. “It’s how I knew you were different.”
“It was one time. Once out of maybe a thousand memories—”
“It changed things for me, and that’s all that matters.” He regarded me under the unyielding brightness of the floodlight. “I knew whatever happened next, I wanted you around. First as my best friend, and then—” He waved a hand. “Never mind. It didn’t work out the way I hoped. In fact, it barely worked out at all.”
“I’m sorry I walked out of your life.” I gulped. “But I had to.”
“Tell me why, Sam. Give me the reason. I deserve that at least.”
He was right, he did. Trey wasn’t the problem in all of this—it was his father. He wasn’t the one who sent lawyers to our house that night and demanded we sign a document that irrevocably changed our lives. He didn’t offer us money in exchange for silence. His grandfather did. And his father.
But his father was dead.
He’d died six years earlier at his own hand, and we hadn’t mourned him. We’d known the truth. Some people didn’t deserve the courtesy of remembering the “good times.”
Still, telling Davis the full, ugly, unabashed truth would devastate him. It would spear his heart. The way I remembered it as a teenager, he’d done nothing but idolize his father, a man who in his early years had somehow managed to double the family’s business holdings and made the Armstrongs one of the richest families in America. I didn’t want to destroy the image Davis had in his mind of him. I had no idea what things had been like in the years before his death, but if he still adored his father, it wasn’t my place to disparage him. He may not believe me, and I don’t want Davis thinking I’m a liar.
So, I hedged.
“Your dad was a complicated man. I don’t know how much you’ve been told about that.”
Davis nodded. “I’m well aware.”
“He wasn’t always easy to work for.”
I hated that I was about to commit a lie of omission, but I didn’t see any other simpler way to put this subject to rest. Davis was going to keep insisting I tell him something until I finally did. And what he didn’t know about the exact truth wouldn’t hurt him.
“My mom said sometimes when he drank too much, he’d make a lot of demands. He could be prickly.”
Understatement of the decade.
Davis laughed to himself. “If you thought he could be that way to you and your mom, trust me, he could be double that to me.”
“I doubt that,” I said under my breath. “But anyway, yes, he was a complicated man.” This little white lie was getting easier to tell. “And one night, he took out his drinking on my mother. He was—he went beyond the normal anger and severity. He pretty much blew up at her. She had enough, and she quit that night. I remember it like it happened a week ago. She was so upset when she came home. She was done. A few attorneys showed up at our house soon after, and insisted that she sign a non-disclosure agreement, since they didn’t have one on file for her. They also insisted we never contact your family again—and your family would sue us if we did.”
There. I’d said it. I’d given him an explanation. Well, half of one.
Davis stared at me for a few seconds. “That’s it? That’s all it was?”
I released a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. He believes this. “Yes. That’s what happened. She knew how powerful your family was, and she didn’t want to get tangled in a legal mess.”
He shook his head as if in disbelief. “All this time, I’ve been thinking it was something so much worse than that, something abhorrent or irreversible.”
“No.” I took care to keep my voice steady. I needed to give him no indication I’d left anything out of my story. He’d bought it, and he needed to keep buying it. “That’s pretty much it. He was a very driven man, and he insisted on taking these extra precautions. He wasn’t sure we could be trusted.”
Don’t ask too many questions, don’t ask too many questions…
It felt almost like betraying my mom to dismiss what happened to her, but I didn’t know how else to phrase it. I was damned if I told him the truth and damned if I didn’t.
“My father was an asshole sometimes. He was a far from perfect man, and there were often moments when I regretted being his son.” Davis’s mouth twisted. “But he’s dead. And he did that, no one else. Nothing else. Whatever agreement he made you sign, it’s null and void now.”
I gawked at him. “You’re kidding.”
Surely, it’s not as simple as this?
“I’m the sole heir to all of the Armstrong holdings. Every company, every asset. Grandfather might not retire for years, but he’s made thousands of business decisions since then. Hundreds of contracts.” He paused, as if solidifying something in his mind. “And I sincerely doubt he still cares about something that happened over a decade ago.” He waved a hand. “Practically ancient history.”
My stomach lurched. “I don’t know about that.”
“I do.”
“But he—” I went back over what I remembered about the contract. It had been years since I pulled it out and read it, but most of the points remained burned in my mind. “It was ironclad.”
“Not anymore. Grandfather asked me the other day if I’d take on a role with the company. He wants me to start working in Pittsburgh in a few weeks and take over some of our business there.”
I blanched. “He does?”
Davis nodded. “But I’ll simply tell him I won’t go until the agreement regarding you and your mother is nullified. He wants me to get involved with the company as soon as possible, so since you’re not bound by whatever bullshit agreement my father forced you to sign, I think we can take a major step forward.” Davis spread his hand. “How about that drink?”
“Okay,” I replied. “I think we can swing that.” After all, who would possibly police an old contract after all this time?