Gavin
The sky stretches out overhead like a crisp, white sheet. There’s an oppressive heat thickening the air, and even the AC in my truck is no match for its oven-like aggression. Demi and I showered and dressed. She introduced me formally to Reeva before running me the hell out of that place. She didn’t pack a single bag, so I’m still not sure where we stand. We left her car back there. I’m not in a hurry to reunite her with it, either.
“So what’s in Brody?”
Demi said she’d tell me everything, but that she had to show me something first. The next thing out of those perfect lips was take me to Brody.
“You’ll see.” Her demeanor darkens with every passing mile.
Brody isn’t known for a lot. There’s a steel mill on the losing end of town and not much else. Tucked on the hill to the left there’s Hayworth, a sleepy town with a net worth that puts all of Loveless to shame. If Hayworth were a colossal mansion, Loveless would be a tent under a bridge. Although, I know for a fact several Hayworth residents have a summerhouse at the lake. They rent them out during the winter, and I stock the firewood. At least I used to. There’s no telling what kind of bullshit deal I got myself wrapped up in. If I had more time, I would have had Reese’s father write something up. He and Warren’s dad are law partners. Apparently damn good ones.
I follow the road that bisects through town all the way to the end and pull over in a dirt field that overlooks the massive sprawl of the mill. A gargantuan sign, about two houses long, reads Brookhurst Steel. I kill the engine and slip down in my seat a notch, waiting for the hammer to fall. Demi is certain I’m going to hate her, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why.
“How did you know exactly where to go, cowboy?” Demi flicks the scruff on my cheek as if she’s flirting. “Come on.” She nods for me to follow her out, and I do.
The sun squats over our heads and shits fire. I glance back in the truck for a ball cap, at the very least for Demi, but I’m currently deficient. I’m worried we both might pass out. It’s one of those triple digit days that makes me long for fall.
Demi walks around front and points to a series of boulders near the truck.
“Give me your hand,” she says it with a smile, and I find it odd she’s so glad to be hiking through mustard weeds as tall as she is.
This isn’t making sense, but I’m with Demi, so to hell with it. I run right alongside her and help her up as we climb the blue granite wall all the way to the top. She cups her hands over her eyes and stares out at the steel mill, wide as it is long with its skeletal ladders, its wide, piped tubing, large enough to fit a grown man inside. There’s a smokestack spewing out friendly cloud-like puffs and bundles of shiny metal stacked near an open gate, neat as three balls of yarn.
“It’s beautiful.” Demi is breathless as she drinks it all in.
“It’s—nice, I guess?” I spin her toward me until her smiling face is looking up at mine. “Either you’re extremely easy to please, or you have an unnatural attraction to steel.”
Her back trembles with a laugh. “My name is Demitria Brookhurst. It’s very nice to finally meet you, properly, Mr. Jackson.”
I turn my ear to her as if I didn’t quite catch it. The sign over her shoulder, reading Brookhurst Steel, glares as if it’s sending a signal into space.
“You’re a Brookhurst?”
“The only surviving member.” She catches my gaze as the stone beneath us radiates an invisible fire. “Let’s take a walk.” We hop down and head over to the protective shelter of a hundred-year-old oak with its low hanging arms stretched out to greet us.
I press down on the lowest hanging bough, no higher than four feet off the ground, and help Demi up first.
“Shoot,” I say, not really sure of where she might go next. Demi is full of twists and turns that I couldn’t understand if I had a roadmap.
Demi sits about a foot away. Her hand clutches onto mine as if it were the very last time, and I’m sure she’s convinced herself it is.
“After my mother died”—she drops her gaze to the dried stubble below—“my father raised me all on his own. He took me on every business trip he could. We spent summers in Europe. I celebrated my tenth birthday eating French fries and crepes in Paris.” Her lips purse at the memory. “He came to every recital, every play I was in. He never missed a parent-teacher meeting.” She swallows hard as if the story is about to take an abrupt turn. I know how it ends—the same way the story with my family ends. “He dated Nora for such a short time, I couldn’t take them seriously when they said there would be a wedding. But there was one. Nora and Josh entered our world, and nothing was ever the same. She wanted more of him than he could give, but my father wanted to please her. He begged me to understand his sudden absence in my life and assured me it wouldn’t always be that way.” She looks up slightly pissed. “He was right. Nora not only took up a bulk of his time, she didn’t mind spending his money. Her ex didn’t leave her and Josh with much, which explains why she was liberal with the credit cards. Soon the house was filled with enough jewels to make Van Cleef and Arpels emerald green with envy. You could line the walls with all the dead animal carcasses she dragged in. Both PETA and I wanted to lynch her. My mother never owned a fur.” Demi sighs. “Nora just seemed to take everything too far—so did Josh,” she bleeds those last few words out. “Anyway—the day my father died was just an ordinary Tuesday. Nora was coming down on me like hellfire, and he was about to leave on another business trip. When my father was away she did terrible things, Gavin.” Her voice grows cold and hollow. “She did things you should never do to another person.” I wrap my arm around her and pull her in tight. “My father was oblivious. For whatever reason, he loved her. I missed him even when he was alive. That night—it was hours before he was set to drive to New York for a big meeting—I looked right at him and said if you love me like you say you do, you’ll take me with you.” Her shoulders sag. Her voice is thick with regret. “He was adamant that I not go. So, being an immature fifteen-year-old, I pulled the brat card. I told him if he loved me, he would take me to dinner at my favorite restaurant. I wanted a deep-dish pizza from Pitones. It was late, and he insisted I stay home. He wanted to treat me like a princess one last time before he left.” She shakes her head at the thought. “Come here. You’ll want to be on solid ground to hear what comes next.” She carefully leaps down and takes me with her. “Gavin, my father died on March 11th. Does that sound familiar to you?”
The wind knocks right out of my lungs.
Demi gives a long blink. “The reason I took off that day last February was because Zoey was torn to pieces. She was bawling while looking at a picture of your parents.” She digs her fists into my shirt. “Gavin, I recognized that couple. They were burned into my memory, long ago. And, at that moment, I realized that not only did I kill my father—I killed your parents, too.”
My knees threaten to give out. A wave of nausea rolls through me, and I let out a hard moan to keep from vomiting.
“You have every right to hate me, Gavin.” She pushes me away. “Go ahead. Say whatever you want.” She pleads while her hair rises from the humidity. Her tear-stained face smothers with grief.
“Demi.” I stagger a moment. “I can’t hate you.” I wrap my arms around her with a violent force. “I love you too much for that.” A breath hitches in my throat. “You didn’t do this. You weren’t in that car,” I moan the words into her neck.
“It’s my fault, dammit!” She roars so loud, her voice reverberates off the branches.
“Wait a minute.” I pull back. “The man whose car collided with my parents, his name was Bradley Brooks.” My chest pumps with relief. “You have it wrong, Demi. That’s a cruel twist not even fate would be heartless enough to dole out.”
“That’s him.” Her shoulder hikes up on one side. “Nora made sure his real name never came out. His death was kept so private that if you ask a dozen employees about him, half will insist he’s still alive. Most of his billions were safe-havened so that no one would ever get away with much if they tried to sue.” She holds herself and begins to shiver. “After the accident, Nora went through great lengths to make sure you and your sister walked away with nothing. The insurance agencies did their jobs, and she never so much as inquired about how you might be doing.” Demi steps just out of my grasp.
“You knew about us?” Something sick in my heart warms at the idea.
She gives a slight nod. “I only knew you existed. I had no clue what your names were or where you lived. Don’t you see? Fate was cruel enough to dole out this heartbreak.”
Her words buzz around me like a swarm of angry bees. I’m not sure what to think. This is twisted. This is the most tragic scenario I could think of, and, in truth, I could never have dreamed this one up.
“Come here.” I reel her in gently until my arms fold around her where they belong. “Demi, I don’t know why things worked out the way they did, but, I promise you, not one part of this tragedy is your fault.”
“I sent my father out,” she whispers.
“And maybe he stalled at a green light a little too long or my dad took a turn too fast, and, that, Demi is what led to the tragic chain of events. Two grown men sitting behind the wheel, everything went wrong—none of it your fault.” I ride my hand up her back. “Did you know your father’s brakes went out?”
She pulls back with a hint of surprise.
“No. I didn’t know that.”
“It was a tiny detail on the police report. I have a copy.” I don’t tell her that I’ve read it a thousand times—that I could recite it, line by line, like some tragic Biblical passage. I can feel her body giving, and I hold her up by the waist.
“I guess there’s always a little more to the story.”
“If he went to New York, he would have been in a wreck. He could have hit a tree. There were a million things that could’ve happened to him that night, whether or not he brought you dinner.”
“But he didn’t.” She looks up not buying a line of it. “He hit a Chevy Malibu.” A sad smile comes and goes. “And that’s the night the lights went out in your world and mine.” She tucks her chin over her shoulder, looking toward the mill.
“Maybe so”—I gently steer her eyes toward mine—“but you’ve brought it back to me, a thousand times brighter.”
Her lips quiver as she swallows down a laugh.
“Now that we have all of that on the table, what kind of trouble are you in?” My heart pounds right out of my chest, making the ground beneath me tremble. Demi knows how to throw a mean curveball, and I wonder if I’m ready for what comes next.
She looks over the hills in the distance, clothed in green felt as far as the eye can see.
“On my twenty-first birthday, a trust in my name is supposed to kick in.” She narrows her eyes at the mill as if it were her stepmother. “It allots me one thousand dollars a month for the rest of my life.” Her left brow fishhooks into her forehead. “The will was rewritten two weeks before my father died. I’m going to contest it, Gavin. And I want Nora to relinquish my share of the mill. She said my father left it in her care until she passes, but I don’t buy it for a minute. Something isn’t right. My father would never leave me in the cold. That was his business, and I’m his only true heir.”
“Why didn’t you contest it right away?”
Demi pulls her arms over herself and shivers. “She chased me out of there with less than a hundred dollars in my pocket. I figured come my twenty-first birthday I’d be in a better position.” She looks at her shoes and blinks so fast I can feel the breeze. Something doesn’t sit right. Demi is holding back. “Not only that, I thought I’d be finished with school. But I never could make the right decisions and, well, here we are.” She buries her face in my chest. “I swear to you, this is everything—the whole truth, Gavin. The whole, horrible truth.”
I pull her in. “Don’t worry. We’ll fight this together.” Demi molds to me as we hold on for dear life right here in Brody at the doorstep of her father’s steel mill. He and my parents died on that same fateful night, colliding into one another at top speed on a desolate highway. Our hearts broke at the same moment in time. Demi and I have been fighting this heartbreak together all along. “Let’s go home,” I whisper.
“To Loveless?”
“To Loveless.” I press a careful kiss over her lips before glancing back at the mill.
I wish I could say this entire nightmare is behind us, that it was over in every single way but her stepmother, her jackass of a stepbrother still stand in the way.
They won’t for long.