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“I’m an old man. Made a lot of mistakes. I’ll probably make a few more before I’m done. I’m not trying to make it right with the man upstairs. Too late for that. I think…this place. It’s not just about nostalgia for me. It sometimes feels more like a do-over. You know what I’m saying?”
I don’t. Not really.
“If your old man feels better, I’d like to fly him down here. As my guest. I want to sit right here and have a pizza with him. I think we’d both like that, don’t you?”
I don’t, no, but again I keep that to myself.
And then Nicky Fisher leaves me.
Chapter
29
I took the liberty of letting the owner order for us,” Hayden said. “This place has the best tapas.”
Rachel nodded, trying not to seem too distracted. She left the phone on vibrate and willed it to sound. David had been gone for far too long. The fear that he’d been captured—or worse—hardened in her chest. She pushed it away and looked into Hayden’s green eyes. He wore the idle-rich uniform of khaki pants and blue blazer with some kind of crest on the chest. His hair had thinned and was now plastered against his skull. He was still handsome, still boyish, but there was more softness now. His jowls sagged a bit. His complexion had grown ruddier. Hayden was, she thought, transforming into one of those old family portraits they kept at the Payne Museum.
They exchanged pleasantries. Hayden commented on her new hairstyle. He claimed to like it, but that didn’t feel like the truth. She’d told him about her divorce in an email, so they didn’t have to cover that. Hayden had discovered a few years ago that he had a son via a B-movie Italian actress he dated a few years back—a boy named Theo—and was now helping to raise and support him. Hayden had spent most of the last decade overseas, purportedly watching over the family’s European interests, but mostly Rachel figured that he was skiing in St. Moritz and partying on the French Riviera.
Maybe that wasn’t fair.
When they moved on to the story that destroyed her journalism career, Hayden said, “Going after your old enemy.”
“I pushed too hard.”
“Understandable.”
“I know I should have told you…”
He waved it away. Hayden had been there, all those years ago, the night of the Halloween party at Lemhall University during their freshman year. They had, in fact, met that night by the beer keg. They flirted a bit. She knew who Hayden Payne was—everyone on campus knew the scions of wealthy families—and so it had been fun. Hayden had been charming and sweet, but for Rachel, no sparks commenced.
She dressed as Morticia Addams, and she probably drank too much. But that wasn’t the issue. She’d been roofied, she’d later learn, and somewhere, maybe two hours after she met Hayden, her night derailed like a runaway train. She felt stupid, even now, falling for not watching her drink closely after all the warnings.
There was a young humanities professor named Evan Tyler, whose mother was on the board of trustees. He was the one who slipped the drug into her drink. The rest of the night was a blur. She had vague recollections, visions that she saw through internal gauze—her clothes being torn off, his curly hair, his mouth on hers. She could feel the weight of Evan Tyler on top of her, crushing her, suffocating her. Rachel had tried to say no, tried to scream for help, tried to push him away.
That was the image that ended up seared into her brain. Evan Tyler. On top of her. Grinning with maniacal glee. The image still visited her in her sleep, of course, but it popped up when she was awake too, an awful jack-in-the-box, startling her whenever she felt relaxed and at ease. Even now. Even after all the years, that image—that maniacal grin—was always with her, walking a few steps behind her, taunting her, sometimes tapping her on the shoulder when she felt any confidence. It followed Rachel day and night for days, months, years, fueling her anger, urging her to work harder and harder, to do the story, to seek justice, to smother that awful maniacal grin, to pressure everyone and anyone, including Catherine Tullo…
But right then, on this horrible Halloween Night, when she couldn’t breathe, when it might have ended up even worse for her—or maybe, who knows, she would have passed out and forgotten it all—Evan Tyler suddenly vanished from atop her.
The weight was gone from her chest. Just like that. Poof, gone.
Someone had tackled him.
Rachel tried to sit up, but the brain impulses still couldn’t reach the muscles. She just lay there, her head lolling to the side, where she heard Hayden let out a primal scream. Then Hayden punched Tyler and then punched him again and then again. His fists just flew, spraying blood across the room. There was no tiring, no letup, and Rachel was sure that Evan Tyler would have been killed if two other guys hadn’t heard the commotion, burst into the room, and pulled a bloodied Hayden off him.
Evan Tyler was comatose for the next two weeks.
Rachel still wanted to press charges, especially after she heard that she had not been Tyler’s first victim, but the school wanted it swept under the rug. Tyler was in a coma, after all, with facial fractures that would take months to heal. Hadn’t he suffered enough? His mother was an important woman. Did Rachel really also want to drag the school through the dirt? What was the point in that?
Rachel didn’t care about any of that.
She did, however, care about Hayden.
That was the issue. The beating had gone well beyond the act of stopping a crime, and while the Payne fortune would certainly assure a soft landing, Hayden’s family wanted it kept quiet for all the obvious reasons. So that was how it went. Deals were made. Money might have exchanged hands.
Swept away for the greater good. Over. Onward.
Except for those images of Evan Tyler, who would later become president of the college, seared into her brain.
