A Smile as Sweet as Poison (15 page)

Hazel tried again, hitting the refresh button five times in a row only to get the same result. Someone had taken the video down on her behalf. She eyed the bedroom door, knowing in her heart that it wasn’t a barrage of emails that finally erased the damning evidence of past mistakes.

The tickets to Missouri were the least of what she owed to Ward.

* * * *

The silence in the car was deafening. Hazel toyed with the thought of switching on the car radio but didn’t make the leap to action. Outside her window, Los Angeles was a fast-receding blur of tall concrete and powder-blue skies. She saw herself reflected in the glass, too, mascara-thick lashes dark against ashen cheeks.

“Do you still listen to Momo Wu?” she heard herself ask.

Dylan, in the driver’s seat, did not reply. He had been practicing Mandarin since before they’d met, struggling to connect to a culture and language that would’ve been his if the adoption hadn’t gone through. Their relationship was still in its larval stages when he flew to Shanghai to find his birth parents. It wasn’t something he talked about, even now.

Hazel wished she hadn’t asked. Touchy subject or not, they hadn’t talked much since last night. Dylan’s brand of polite silence was still fractionally less painful than Ward’s cold shoulder, but it hurt more. Ward, for his part, had avoided Hazel by leaving for work early. He hadn’t even given her the chance to say goodbye, much less apologize.

It was a kindness to have Dylan drive her to her apartment so she could pack, and from there to the airport. It beat paying for a cab, or leaving the Volvo in the airport parking lot to set her back a small fortune. Hazel tried to tell herself that was enough. If Dylan wanted to give her the silent treatment, so be it. He had more than acquitted himself as a—friend. At most, that was all they could ever be.

“No,” he said after a moment. “No, I thought a change was in order.”

“Why?”

His reflection in the passenger side window was faint and ghostly, but Hazel could distinguish his slumped shoulders from the scraggly dogwood on the side of the road.

“After Shanghai, I didn’t really see a point.”

Hazel turned to look at his profile. “Why not?”

“It was a pipe dream. I was pretending to be someone I’m not.”

Someone Chinese.
Hazel flattened her tongue to the roof of her mouth. She knew a little of what it was like to feel on the outside, but Dylan and Sadie dealt with isolation in a much more present way. They couldn’t fade into the crowd. In Dunby or at the prestigious, elite private college where Dylan had first met Ward, they stood out like sore thumbs.

“You didn’t find your folks?” she asked, tentatively. The impulse to cover his hand with hers over the gearshift was quickly dismissed.

“I found them. Well, my birth mother.” Dylan sighed. “She wanted nothing to do with me. It was ridiculous to assume otherwise. She gave me up because she didn’t want me—and here I am, as Californian as they get, barely able to string together two words of Mandarin…” He looked out the windshield, staring at the cars in front with a grim expression. “So no more C-pop. You’ll have to get your fix elsewhere.”

It might have been a joke, but the barb slid home with effortless finesse.

“We still talking about music?” Hazel wondered.

Dylan was slow to answer. When he did, he sounded more run-down than nettled. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t know what you want anymore. I don’t know what Ward was talking about last night…”

Hazel choked on a breath. She had convinced herself that Ward would come clean to Dylan after she retreated to the bedroom. He’d been riled enough to sacrifice whatever promises he might have made. Hazel’s debts to him more or less guaranteed she couldn’t play at being offended if he spilled the beans.

But he hadn’t.

“He did something for me,” Hazel confessed, pressing a hand to the staccato rattle of her heart. “He helped me with something important…”
Because I begged him. Because I wasn’t too proud to admit I was in over my head then.
Ward must’ve expected her to greet news of a trip to Dunby with the same relief. He didn’t understand that debts were accruing too fast for Hazel to keep up.

Why should he?
The rich talked about deficits and liability as desirable obligations. They didn’t cringe with every credit card bill.

“And you can’t tell me what that is,” Dylan surmised. He cut his eyes to Hazel as if to persuade himself of the conclusion.

Hazel shook her head. She wasn’t strong enough to broach that subject. Not like this, not in the car, about to embark on a trip down memory lane in the one place she knew she wasn’t welcome.

With a sigh, Dylan flexed his hands around the steering wheel. “He mentioned Sadie’s getting married. You didn’t say anything.”

“I know.” She had no easy excuse for it, either.

“Is that what this is about? A commitment thing?” he asked as he overtook a red sedan. “Is that why you don’t trust us? Because—”

It took Hazel a few good seconds to puzzle out his meaning. When she did, she couldn’t stop him fast enough. “Dylan, we’ve only just met. We barely know each other… I don’t want to marry you.”

“Oh.”

Hazel felt like kicking herself, but bewilderment was no compelling reason to lie. “I’m sorry if—”

“No, no.” He heaved a breath, relief slackening his hold around the wheel. “To be honest, me neither. I mean, years from now, sure, but—”

“Yeah.” For the sake of her fragile mental health, Hazel was going to pretend she hadn’t registered that last part. She refused to consider the path that kind of thinking could lead her to.

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

Dylan nodded. “I have to trust that you two know what you’re doing or we might as well end this right now, yeah? I’m not ready to do that, so…okay.”

You can’t force yourself not to mind being kept in the dark
. Hazel thought of three years of slowly meandering down a slippery slope. She thought of little sideswipes chipping away at her dignity until she was so low she’d gladly suffer the red bead of the camera and the white burst of flashes that came later, the intolerable certitude that she deserved every humiliation.

Willpower was a mighty thing. Dylan had survived four years in a college filled with the likes of Ward and convinced himself it wasn’t so bad. If he put his mind to it, he’d believe that Hazel had acted in his best interest—whether or not that was the case.

“It’s about me,” she admitted. “Something I did, a long time ago. If you want, I’ll tell you when I get back.”

“You don’t have to.”

“No, I do.” Hazel tipped her head back against the leather seat, the Tesla purring smoothly around them. “You should know who you’re sleeping with.”

Dylan scoffed. “Hey… I already know that.” He took a hand off the steering wheel to seize her fingers in his. “I know you, Hazel. And I like being with you. Everything else is just—minutiae. We’ve all done things we regret.”

Not like this.
Rather than contradict him, Hazel turned her palm over and let their fingers slide naturally into perfect alignment.

Dylan liked holding her hand. She clung to that knowledge as though to a life raft.

* * * *

Too kind for his own good, Dylan offered to stay with her until she went through security, but Hazel turned him down. She didn’t want tearful goodbyes any more than she wanted to do something stupid—like ask him to come along to Missouri. They kissed in the car, then Hazel darted out and stalked away briskly on legs that didn’t entirely feel like her own.

She had no bag to check in and her rucksack contained whatever clothes she’d been able to pack in a rush, plus a nicer pair of flats to change into once she arrived. The TSA waved her through without any hassle. She toyed with the thought of window-shopping through the Duty Free area while she waited for the boarding call, but the price tags were prohibitive and only served to remind her that she was flying out on Ward’s money.

After browsing the shelves for a while, she bought a stuffed giraffe anyway. It was slightly lopsided—probably not by design—and seemed somewhat lonely among round-faced teddy bears, monochrome orcas, and the odd pink rabbit.

Armed with her christening gift, Hazel took the plunge and called Buddy to let him know she was coming.

“You don’t have to pick me up—”

“Are you kidding?” he scoffed. “My baby sister doesn’t visit every day, does she?”

“You’re three hours away,” Hazel pointed out, trying to be the reasonable one for a change.

Her brother laughed. “And you’re, what, five? Sis, I’ll be there. Try not to get lost on your way out of baggage claim.”

“I’m not twelve.”

Miles away and living an entirely different life, Buddy snorted, as though the sister he remembered fit neatly into what the expected of the woman Hazel had become. He wasn’t wrong. Her sense of direction had never been great.

It was how she’d wound up tangled in a relationship with two men way, way outside of her league.

“All right,” Hazel conceded. “I’ll see you at the airport.”

“Hey, sis?”

“Hmm?”

“Glad you decided to come. It’ll make Ma’s day.”

I highly doubt that
. She hung up with a stitch in her side and butterflies in her stomach. She was committed now. She couldn’t turn back.

Chapter Eleven

Green and gold fields fanned out on either side of the road, an endless succession of wheat and corn spanning the breadth of the state from north to south. Here and there, they passed a snarl of squat brick buildings erected around a church, or a farm crested on the top of a hill like a distant sentinel. This was mostly flat country, the ribbon of the interstate snaking around crops and clumps of trees that would’ve had environmentalists fighting tooth and nail to preserve in the city.

Buddy drove past the Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge just as the sun was beginning to slant across the flatland in the west. Amber-orange rays bounced off the shimmering waters of the Castor River, translucent despite the pollution Hazel had heard so much about on the news.

She thought of taking a picture and emailing it to Dylan with some pithy remark about misinformation. She didn’t follow through.

One text message to his number and Ward’s was all the conversation they’d had since Hazel had boarded her flight. Neither one had replied.

“Bet you got no idea where we are,” her brother needled when he caught her glancing out of the window.

“We just passed Scott City.” Hazel had glimpsed a sign at the last off-ramp.

“Uh-huh. And where’s that?”

She rolled her shoulders into a shrug, yawning. “Want me to ask if we’re there yet?”

“It’s what you use to do with Pa, remember? You were a little terror. Kept jumping over the seats like a monkey.”

“That’s ’cause you kept pinching me.”

“No, that’s what you’d tell Mom when she lost her shit,” Buddy countered, the same
I didn’t do it
expression on his face he’d worn fifteen, twenty years earlier.

He had aged well—Whitley men always did. His star quarterback good looks had settled over the years into something a little more respectable than intimidating. All the same, with his square jaw and blue eyes, Hazel didn’t doubt that there were women in Dunby who still sighed wistfully when he walked into a room.

It had been the case all through high school. Small towns needed their celebrities and Buddy definitely made the local A-list. He had founder blood in his veins and the kind of bullish vigor every father in town tried to inspire—or beat—into their sons. He could’ve made girls fall at his feet if he’d put his mind to it, but dating had never been a priority for him.

Their mother’s grooming had awakened in Buddy the same awkwardness and guilt that Hazel had felt when she’d fallen off her pedestal. They were the only Whitleys left to carry forth the family name, a duty that grew heavier and heavier every year.

At least Buddy had done his bit for the family gene pool.

“What?” he groused. “You’re staring.”

Hazel shook herself. “Sorry, it’s just…you look happy.”

“Duh. I just had a kid, sis.”

“No, I know… Happier than the last time I saw you.” It had been Buddy who’d driven her to the airport in St. Louis. Buddy who had sat beside her while she waited for the check-in to open, crammed into a too-narrow plastic seat at four in the morning. They hadn’t talked much then. He hadn’t hugged or kissed her before she’d boarded her flight. He hadn’t asked any questions.

Whitleys weren’t supposed to run away, but Hazel had. She hadn’t stopped running since.

“Like I said,” Buddy repeated, “I just had a kid.” Sunlight played on his wheat-blond hair, making him look so much younger than his thirty-two years. But he was their mother’s son and under that all-American, corn-fed exterior lay a core of steel. He didn’t have to say
I don’t know what you’re talking about
for the lie to fester between them.

Hazel trained her gaze on the windshield and beyond, to the rolling dales pocked with green and rusted boughs, and the corrugated signs pointing the way to Sikeston, Portageville.

Dunby.

* * * *

Poplar trees shook and sighed in a gentle breeze as Buddy switched off the engine.

“Here we are. Home sweet home…”

How many times had she walked this street as a kid? How many times had she dreamt herself back here and woken up in a cold sweat?

Hazel pushed open the passenger side door and hopped out. Here was the jut of sidewalk where she’d twisted an ankle in third grade. There was the yard where Mrs. Pacheco’s dog had bitten her hand. Across the broad, tree-lined lane, stood an all brick, Georgian-imitation house, too big for the two souls who now lived in it.

The bottom dropped out of her stomach when she saw the white door swing open.

“Ah, and here’s the welcoming committee,” Buddy muttered under his breath. He had her backpack over one shoulder, strap folded in his broad fist, and he was twirling the keys to the Ford in the other. He elbowed Hazel in the ribs. “Better not keep her waiting.”