"You told her to get rid of it. You went to her. You promised me you wouldn't, and you went to her. All these years, I thought you’d listened to me, but tonight I realized that you don’t listen to anyone, do you? No one can tell you anything.”
Rob's reply was higher than normal. The confident, lecturing tone was gone. In its place was something squeezed and desperate.
"Ethan, listen to me. Put that down. Let's talk about this. You're not thinking clearly."
Wrong thing to say. Absolutely the wrong thing to say. Ben felt his stomach drop.
"Don't tell me what I'm thinking." Ethan's arm was pointed directly at Rob’s chest, so close he couldn’t miss. “You told her she was ruining my life, didn’t you? You made her think I didn't want her."
"That's not what happened." Rob's voice cracked on the last word. "I was trying to help. Both of you. You were about to throw everything away."
“Fuck you,” Ethan spat, his lips curled in derision. “You went to her when I told you not to. Did you kill her, too, you son of a bitch? You sure as hell weren’t sad when she died. If anything, you celebrated because it was all so easy for me now. You fucker. Did you kill the woman I love?”
The question hung in the air between the men, a blinking, dangerous, neon sign.
Ben had barely let himself think it, let alone articulate his thoughts, but Ethan had put them out into the universe. But he couldn’t deny that it had crossed his mind. Just for that singlesplit second, before he’d pushed it away, not wanting Kelly to know he’d had a thought like that about her own brother.
Had Rob more than just talked to Lori? Had he…killedher, too? Ethan seemed to think so.
The heartbroken man’s hand trembled. The gun trembled and swayed with it.
Rob stood frozen, his hands still raised, his mouth open but for once producing no sound.
The parking lot was quiet except for the hum of the light and the distant, fading strains of music from a wedding where the bride and groom were probably dancing, completely unaware of the drama unfolding in the parking lot.
Ethan had a gun and over ten years of grief bottled up inside of him.
There was a good chance this wasn’t going to end well.
Chapter
Twenty-Nine
This wasn’thow she’d pictured the evening. She hadn’t thought it would go well, but she’d never dreamed she’d be behind a Chevy Suburban in a parking lot, watching her brother beg for his life at gunpoint. Ben had put her there, telling her to stay put, but a parked SUV was only safe if the person with the gun didn't decide to start shooting in her direction.
Through the gap between the Suburban and the sedan next to it, she had a clear view. The floodlight mounted on the metal pole turned everything beneath it stark white and shadowless, like a stage under a single spotlight. But this was no play on Broadway, this was real life.
Ben stood about ten feet behind Ethan, his body still, waiting for the right moment.
Ethan's arm was extended, the gun trained on Rob's chest.
Rob was on his knees.
Kelly had never seen her brother on his knees. Not literally, not figuratively, not once in thirty years of knowing him. Rob Bateman did not kneel. Rob Bateman stood at the front of every room he entered. He sat at the head of every table. He planted his feet and delivered his opinions from a position ofunassailable authority, and the world either agreed with him or got a lecture about why it should.
But here he was. Knees on the asphalt. Suit rumpled. Face wet. Hands raised in that halfway position that wasn't quite surrender and wasn't quite pleading but was somehow both. His mouth was moving, and the words came out in a high, thin stream that bore no resemblance to the confident baritone she'd grown up hearing at dinner tables and holiday gatherings.
He looked small. That was the thing that struck her first. Rob, who took up every room, who filled every conversation, who crowded out every other voice with the sheer volume of his certainty. He looked small and ordinary and terrified.
What on earth had her brother done?
Ethan's voice cut through the parking lot air, raw and scraped hollow with genuine pain.
"Tell me what you did. Say it out loud. Say what you did to her."
Rob shook his head, a frantic, desperate motion.
"Say it, you fucker. Say it, or I’ll kill you now.”
