The Ones We Trust (7 page)

“Oh, my God. What did they say? What did your
father
say?”

“Gabe told me to get lost, Dad cornered me in Mike’s backyard, and Jean asked me to help her tell Zach’s story.”

Mandy sits back in the chair, her eyes going even wider than before. “Like, ghostwrite it?”

I lift a shoulder. “I guess. We didn’t really go into the details.”

“And what did you say?”

“I told her I’d think about it.”

She smacks both palms on the desk. “Are you crazy? Call her up right now and tell her you’ll do it. Tell her you’ll get started tonight. I’ll help.”

“What about my father and Chris? What about Gabe?” She dismisses Gabe with a flick of a manicured hand, but I’m not so ready. “He’ll accuse me of scheming this outcome all along, of planning the whole thing. He probably thinks I hypnotized his mother or cast some evil spell that bewitched her into asking me. He’ll think I went there with the intention of walking out with a book deal.”

“Did you?”

“Absolutely not.” Regardless of my interest in Ricky—who he is, what he saw—I did not in any way sweet-talk Jean into asking me for help writing Zach’s story. Jean’s request came out of the blue, and it was all her own. I had nothing to do with it, other than maybe giving her the honest answers she wanted to hear.

“So, what do you care what Gabe thinks?” Mandy says, handing me her cell phone. “Jean’s the one you should be trying to impress. Call her. Say yes. You know you want to.”

I stare at her, but I don’t argue. As my best friend for almost two decades, Mandy knows me better than pretty much anybody on the planet, and she’s right. I
do
know. I roll Jean’s request around for the hundredth time, and the temptation is hot caramel on my tongue.

“And as for your father and Chris?” She shakes her head. “Whoever gave you that transcript was trying to tell you something, and it doesn’t reflect favorably on either of them.”

Another good point, and one that’s occupied the better part of my mind since tripping over the envelope on my front doorstep. I think about who would have purposefully breached OPSEC to give an unmarked, uncensored copy to me. Someone who has it out for my father or Uncle Chris? Possibly, but then why give it to me? Why not give it to the
Washington Post
instead?

There’s something I’m missing here.

Something that’s maybe in the transcript.

I dig through the papers on the desk in search of it, but there are over two thousand pages of printouts here, and Mandy has made such a mess of my piles, it will take me forever. “Where did you put the transcript?”

“I didn’t.” When I look up in surprise, she adds, “I never saw it. When you mentioned it just now, I figured you’d put it somewhere safe.” She takes in what feels like a frantic expression on my face, purses her lips. “Please, tell me you put it somewhere safe.”

“It was on the top of Zach’s pile. You must have seen it. About twenty pages smothered in pink highlighter.”

Mandy shakes her head, and the first niggle that something is wrong rises in my chest.

I lick my finger and flip through the top of each stack for a second time, and then a third, my eyes peeled for swipes of hot pink.

But on every page I come to, there’s only black and white.

“Okay, so when did you see it last?” she asks.

At the reminder, I pop out of my chair and rush over to the copy machine. The last time I touched the transcript was when I was making a copy for the Armstrongs. But when I lift the cover on the machine, there’s nothing there. The glass is empty.

“Those machines usually have a memory function, you know. Let me see.”

While Mandy fiddles with the buttons on the screen, I search my desk and the cabinets and bookshelves. I search under the rugs and in the magazines and under the potted peace lily in the hallway. I search in the recycling bin and the pile of mail by the microwave and in the junk drawer and under every piece of furniture in the entire house. I search everywhere I can think of. The only things I find are a few stray socks and more dust bunnies than I’d care to admit.

By the time I return to the office, my hands as empty as when I began, Mandy is pulling a fresh copy off the machine. But still. A transcript appears. A transcript vanishes. Both under suspicious, and suspiciously criminal, circumstances. A jolt of something creepy shoots through me, knotting my shoulders and wringing my stomach like a wet rag.

Mandy looks over, and I can tell her thoughts are colliding with mine. “Maybe you should call the police.”

“And tell them what? That someone snuck in and stole a document I wasn’t supposed to have in the first place? And anybody who doesn’t break a window or bust down a door is not going to leave prints.”

“Okay, but what if they come back?”

“Why would they come back, when clearly they already got what they came for?”

She holds the fresh copy in the air, an unspoken reminder that my statement is not quite true. “But who would give it to you in the first place? What do they want?”

“I don’t know, but I intend to find out.”

“How are you going to do that?” she asks, but she’s already smiling, already nodding as if she knows what’s coming, and she approves.

“I’m going to find Ricky.”

12

After a weekend behind my computer, I’ve made zero progress. I still haven’t found Ricky. I haven’t heard a peep from Floyd. I’ve stared at the transcript until the letters blur and run together. By Monday morning, I’m sick and tired of thinking about all of it, and my veins hum with cooped-up energy.

Outside my windows, the temperature has taken a nosedive, and the heavens are unloading a steady stream of rain, so I release my frustration the old-fashioned way. Upstairs in my bathroom with hard, physical labor.

I spend the day cutting and spacing the floor tile—a smooth, square porcelain that looks as if it might be stone unless you happen to notice the price per square foot, which was a total steal. I use the spacers Gabe threw into my cart just in case, and I start from the middle of the room as the internet told me to do.

I must admit, something about the work is soothing. Maybe it’s the rhythm. The buzz of the saw, the swish of the trowel, the rake of the mastic. Or maybe it’s the way it takes all my concentration, giving my mind a much-needed rest. Even though my loudest thoughts are still there, percolating under the surface—Maria’s shenanigans, Ricky’s whereabouts, my father’s objections, Jean’s request—the work drowns out their constant loops through my consciousness.

When the last tile is set, I push to a stand, stretch out my creaky bones and head down the hallway for the shower.

The doorbell rings as I’m drying myself off. I run across the hall, throw on some clean clothes—an ancient rowing sweatshirt and a pair of yoga pants—and hurry down the stairs in bare feet and wet hair.

The face that greets me on the other side of the door is just as wet. Actually, everything about him is soaked—his hair, his shoes, his bomber jacket of brown-and-black leather. Gabe, of course. I’m as surprised as I would be to find Elvis dripping on my front porch floor.

“Sorry to just show up unannounced, but I was out for a walk and...” A frigid gust sends a whirlwind of leaves and rain across the yard, and Gabe and I shiver simultaneously. He looks beyond my shoulder, casting a longing look down my centrally heated, dry hallway. “It’s probably really warm in there, isn’t it?” His gaze returns to mine, and to my locked-down expression, the way I shift to fill up the opening in the doorway. “Right. Of course not. Never mind.”

“What do you want, Gabe?”

I know I’m on the wrong side of rude, but the last two times I saw Gabe, he accused me of lying, called me names and basically threw me out of his mother’s house, so I don’t exactly feel inclined to let him into mine. He doesn’t look angry or combative, but still. Unless he’s here to thank me for sliding him Ricky, he can stand outside on my freezing doorstep in his wet clothes all night as far as I’m concerned.

And then he shoves his hands in the front pockets of his jeans and says something even better.

“I wanted to apologize. For losing my temper with you, twice now, and saying some things that were a little out of line.” My eyes widen, and he amends. “Okay, okay.
Way
out of line. Especially the part where I called you an army brat and threw you out of my mother’s house. And I might have said ‘fuck’ more times than I care to count, but in my own defense, I cuss a lot, so you probably shouldn’t take it personally. Regardless, I’m sorry.”

Everything about his change of heart seems sincere—his repentant tone, his remorseful expression, the way his gaze sticks to mine the whole time it took him to say it—but the thunderhead that rolled onto his expression when I told him about Ricky is still imprinted on my brain. I picture his big form silhouetted in his mother’s kitchen window, all rage and repulsion that a Wolff army brat would dare darken her door, and a question elbows its way up my throat. “How much of that did your mother make you say?”

One brow slides up his forehead, and he puffs out a laugh. “You don’t pull any punches, do you?”

“How much, Gabe?”

Another sharp burst of breath. “Okay, if you really want to know, it was my therapist. He urged me to come here and express my frustration and anger in a ‘healthy, productive manner.’” He pulls his hands from his pockets to make quote marks in the air, then gives me a rueful grin. “The apology, as shitty as it was, was all mine.”

I find myself softening just a tad at this little glimpse of the first Gabe I met, the one who was witty and friendly and personable, who didn’t take himself too seriously as he helped me gather all the items on my list. I liked that Gabe then, and I like him now.

But that doesn’t mean I’m ready to let either Gabe in just yet, literally or figuratively. Not until I know we’re on the same page. “I assume she told you what we talked about in the garden.”

He nods.

“As well as my answer.”

Another nod. He looks at me inquisitively, opens his mouth to say something, thinks better of it.

“You walked all the way over here in the freezing rain, Gabe. Why don’t you just say what you’re thinking?”

“Why does that feel like a trick question?” He follows up his words with a good-natured grin, but when I don’t share in his lightheartedness, his expression grows solemn. “Okay, fine. What I don’t get is how you can be so adamant you’re not a reporter one minute with me, and then one little request from Mom and you’re suddenly agreeing to write Zach’s story.”

“Okay, first of all, I didn’t agree to anything other than to think about it. I’m
thinking
about helping your mother write Zach’s story because I like her and she asked. And ultimately, I wouldn’t be writing anything. They’re her words. I would only be helping put them in the right order.”

“It would still be one hell of a byline.”

“It’s not about the byline. It’s about the story.”

“Which, if you help write it, is also your byline.”

“I already told you, I don’t give a shit about the byline.” I frown, shaking my head in frustration, and start to close the door. “I don’t expect you to understand.”

Gabe presses a wet palm to the wood, stopping it at half-mast. “It’s cold as balls out here, but I’m still here, and I’m listening. Try me.”

Gabe slips his hands into his jeans pockets and waits as if he’s not freezing his ass off, and I protest with a sigh, short and sharp, even as the words begin to take form in my head. The thing is, I
want
him to understand. I
want
him to know I didn’t walk into his mother’s house with the goal of walking out with a book deal. Other than the rhythmic patter of the rain and the occasional swish of tires rolling through puddles, the street is quiet, and Gabe’s eyes are wide and questioning.

I decide to give him the answer he came here for.

“Three years ago, my career imploded. I’m not telling you this because I’m looking for sympathy or encouragement or even understanding, because what happened was completely, one hundred percent my fault. My mistakes, I own them, and I deserved every bit of the fallout. But the thing is...all I’ve ever wanted to do was write, and not blurbs about hip replacements and dementia drugs like I’m doing now, but real stories, about subjects that
I
care about, that are relevant to me.”

Gabe clearly wasn’t expecting my answer, but he manages to look only slightly puzzled by it. “My brother’s story is relevant to you?”

I shake my head, immediately and emphatically. “Ricky Hernandez is relevant to me. Who he is, what he saw, is relevant to me. The
truth
is relevant to me. And whatever it is, if it’s as momentous as my gut is telling me it is, I can’t just sit on it. I have to send it out into the world. The public has a right to know the truth, even if it’s bad.
Especially
if it’s bad.”

“So if all that’s true, what is there to think about? Why didn’t you just say yes?”

He doesn’t sound accusatory, only genuinely curious, and so the truth simmers up before I’ve made the conscious decision to share it. “Because words can be just as deadly as warfare.”

Gabe doesn’t ask anything further, but from the way he watches me, earnestly and with a sudden tenderness I didn’t expect, I am pretty certain he knows about Chelsea. Maybe his mother told him, maybe he did his own research. I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. What matters is that he seems to understand.

“Well, hell,” he says, flashing me a bemused grin worthy of one of his big brother’s rom-coms, except not the least bit practiced. “Mom told me I was being an ass-hat, and now, as usual, she was right. I should have used that in my apology, now that I think about it. That even my own mother thinks I’m an ass-hat.”

I smile despite myself. “I doubt she used the word
ass-hat
.”

“Nah, that one’s all mine, too. But that apology from before? Let me just add that I misjudged you. I assumed you were giving us Ricky for all the wrong reasons, that you came over there looking for a story, and I’m sorry. I’m an ass-hat, and I’m sorry.” He blows into his hands, shifts his big body back, pointing it away from my door. “So anyway, now that I can no longer feel my extremities, I’m just gonna...”

And that’s when we hear it, a tinny
thock thock thock
that echoes up my street. Gabe looks over his shoulder, and the noise moves nearer, growing louder and sharper, crescendoing into an earsplitting roar as hail the size of golf balls kamikaze-dives from the sky, bouncing off the roofs, the pavement, the cars, the grass of my tiny front lawn.

He turns back with a half-cocked grin. “I didn’t plan that, I swear.”

I laugh, grab him by the sleeve and pull him inside.

In the shelter of my hallway, Gabe dries off as best he can with a towel I fetch him from upstairs, and I hang his coat over a chair in the kitchen to drip on the white tile floor. While I’m in there, I snag a bottle of wine, an opener and two glasses from the stretch of cabinets by the back door, and carry them into the living room.

I hold everything up for Gabe to see. “It’s not brandy, but it’ll warm your blood.”

“Nice, thanks.”

Gabe hangs the towel around his neck, and we settle on the couch. While he goes to work on the cork, I search for neutral ground, for something that won’t heave our fragile peace accord into a full-on nosedive like the Titanic, right before it snapped in two.

I settle on, “I really like your mother.”

He glances up from the bottle, grinning. “She really likes you back, which is kind of a big deal these days. She says no one was more surprised she asked you to help her with Zach’s story than she was, but you passed all her tests with flying colors.”

“With
her
,” I remind him. “I passed the tests with
her
.”

The cork pulls free with a light pop, and he pours a generous glass of wine, then another.

“Yeah, well, Mom has always been light-years smarter than I am, not to mention a great deal more levelheaded.” He shakes his head, thunks the bottle down on the table. “My therapist tells me I’m a work in progress, but between you and me, I think that’s psych-speak for
you’re a real asshole
.”

I laugh. “At least he’s diplomatic.”

“It’s because I pay him a shit-ton of cash.” He picks up the glasses and passes one to me. “So, Abigail Wolff, are we good?”

I think about his question, tip my glass toward his. “We’re good.”

We sip for a moment in silence, and I watch him over the rim, thinking how he looks so much like Zach but also doesn’t. They both share that famous Armstrong bone structure—angular and strong and utterly masculine—but Gabe’s angles are not quite as knife-edged, his forehead not quite so wide. Zach was the Hollywood version of Gabe—too shiny, too stiff, too perfect. Gabe’s good looks are real and rugged and raw, and now that I’ve seen both brothers up close, I’d choose Gabe over Zach any day.

“I’m sorry about your brother,” I say, and Gabe’s face takes on that solemn but standoffish quality I’ve seen a million times on the news. “I can’t imagine how much it sucks to lose a sibling, and then to lose him like that...” I curl my legs under me, turn to face him on the couch. “I’m really sorry. I wish I’d said it earlier, that first day at the market.”

“Nah, you were right. I’ve thought a lot about what you should have done differently, how I would have handled the situation in your shoes, but the thing is, I don’t know. There’s not really a good answer. We’re in uncharted waters all around.”

My head bobs in an enthusiastic nod. “You can say that again. How weird is it that I don’t know you, yet I know all these things about you?”

“You know things about me?” One brow slides up his forehead, and a grin twists his lips. It’s a cocky expression for sure, but it looks awfully damn good on him. “Like what?”

“Well, I know you went to Harvard on a full swimming scholarship, but despite your coach’s prodding and whispers of Olympic greatness, you ditched the pool for an MBA. After graduation, Goldman Sachs whisked you away to Wall Street, where you didn’t just climb but bounded up their corporate ladder. You were Manhattan’s most eligible bachelor for a few years, until you became engaged to some ketchup heiress—”

“Mustard,” Gabe interrupts.

“—sorry, to some mustard heiress. But for reasons I can only assume have something to do with your brother’s death, you gave all of that up to come home and stock shelves at a local hardware store.”

“Not something.” He shakes his head. “
Everything.
My reasons had
everything
to do with Zach’s death. Who gives a shit about penthouse apartments and fancy parties when we are getting our brains blown out every day? I didn’t then, and I don’t now.”

“What about the mustard heiress?”

“What about her?”

“How’d she take it?”

“Well, she married some French baron last month, so I’d say pretty well.”

A giggle pushes up my throat before I can stop it.

Gabe looks confused, as if maybe he can’t decide whether to be amused or offended by my laughter. “What?”

“Really?” I say, a little surprised it’s never occurred to him. I laugh again, one of those uncontrollable belly laughs that bubbles up because you’re trying to swallow it down. “Now she’s French mustard.”

Gabe laughs now, too, and whatever doubts I had as to the tenacity of our fresh start float like a bad odor out the window. Gabe refills our wineglasses, then settles his big body back into my couch as if he owns it. He swings an arm up and across the back, points a long finger at my face. “All right, then. Fair’s fair. You know all these things about me. Now tell me some things about you.”