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“Do you want me to leave?”
She shakes her head and presses connect, putting the call on speaker.
“Jaz, Honey? Are you there?”
“I’m here.” A soft smile crosses Jasmin’s face at his warm, deep voice on the line. “You’re on speaker. I’m sitting with Rose.”
“Rose,” the warm voice says, “I wish we were talking for the first time under different circumstances.”
“Me too.” I curl my lips as much as I can manage at Jasmin as she grabs my free hand and holds it.
Alistair sighs. “I’m so sorry. Dad, he… Shit.”
The agony in his voice is palpable. It reaches through the phone and joins us in the room as though it’s sitting here with us. A dark force taking up a seat on the sofa. I bet Alistair’s eyes are red and puffy too, and that he didn’t get any sleep last night either. Jasmin told me they spent hours waiting together at the hospital.
I hope someone made sure Dax got checked over. He wasn’t hurt,but… I squeeze my eyes shut as they sting.
“They’ve arrested him,” Alistair says. “His entire business, his assets, they’ve all been frozen. They’ve been working on getting him for years. Fuck, I even wanted him to get caught. I was even looking into things, I was—”
“But he’s still your dad,” I finish for him, opening my eyes and inhaling slowly.
“Yeah.” The line crackles as his breath vibrates through the speaker. “Yeah, he’s still my dad.”
Jasmin squeezes my hand tighter, her eyes shining with fresh tears as she looks at me.
She knows.
Everyone knows now, including Alistair.
Dax is Julian Young’s biological son. And Alistair’s half-brother.
It’s all too crazy to believe. But after everything that’s happened with Brett, and Dad, and then Casey before this… Crazy seems like my new normal. Anything less wouldn’t fit.
“The police have just been here. They already asked Rose and I a load of questions at the hospital.”
“They’ve been here too, Babe. Going over the same stuff,” Alistair says.
“They kept asking about the trip to New York, making out Dax took something there.” Jasmin looks at me in disbelief as she talks. “It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. They wouldn’t even tell us what they think it was.” She looks at the phone and Alistair’s photo on the screen. He’s got brown hair and green eyes. He must take after his mom. But his jawline is similar to Dax’s. And his nose too, come to think of it.
The longer I look at the screen, the more resemblance he has to Dax. I stare until I’m forced to turn away and look out of the front window instead.
It’s all too much.
How is he?
“He never would,” Jasmin continues talking. “He just wouldn’t. And besides, he’s not stupid. He knows if he got caught with anything, he’d be straight back to jail with his record.”
I sit as the two of them continue talking, no longer listening, my entire body blanketed in numbness. The kind that your body might use as a survival technique when you’ve had a shock. When the reality is too horrendous to process without you becoming hysterical.
“Go on, I’ll catch you up.”
I sit frozen as my mind replays that day.
“Why don’t you smile at Mr. Fun and see if you can cheer him up?”
Dax didn’t take his bags through customs in JFK airport.
I did.
