Whitney steps closer, eyes pleading now. “Please. There is no better version of this. If Chrissy doesn’t take the fall, then all of it comes apart. Everything. Including you.”
I look at Maverick, searching his face for some sign of doubt, some opening, some evidence that the brother I’ve loved my whole life is still standing somewhere underneath the hard resolve I see now. But all I find is certainty. Exhausted certainty, maybe, but certainty all the same.
“This is the only way through,” he says. “You have to trust me. I don’t even know every detail, and I don’t want to. The less I know, the safer everybody stays.”
“What about Bennett?” I ask, and this time my voice shakes with something colder than grief. “What did he really know? What did he actually do?”
Maverick’s jaw flexes. “He knew enough. More than he let on. He wasn’t some innocent bystander watching things happen around him. He wanted Phillip gone. Maybe for you. Maybe for himself. Maybe for both reasons at once. But he wanted it.”
The nausea rises so fast I have to brace a hand against the wall.
The loaded gun in the closet flashes across my mind. The careful answers. The folder in his office. The way he always seemed to know exactly how serious things were without ever admitting he did.
“But why?” I ask, almost too quietly to hear.
“Because Phillip had become a liability in every possible direction,” Maverick says. “The debts. The club. The business mess. The threat to Whitney. The threat to you. Bennett knewthe whole thing was getting ready to blow open. He just decided to help choose where the blast landed.”
I close my eyes for a second, but that only makes everything sharper. My husband. My brother. My best friend. All of them tied together in this monstrous thing while I wandered around thinking I was the one chasing the truth.
“And you,” Maverick says.
I open my eyes. “Me?”
His face changes then, not softening exactly, but shifting into something sadder. “You don’t remember our last conversation at the taco truck?”
“I… no. Not all of it.”
He nods like he expected that. “You told me Phillip’s schedule. You told me Bennett had a gun in the house. You said you’d been dreaming about killing him and waking up wanting it to be real. You said you couldn’t stop thinking about what it would feel like to take a life after what he took from Whitney.”
The words hit in fragments, none of them landing cleanly. “No,” I whisper. “I don’t remember saying that.”
“I’ve never seen you like that before,” Maverick says. “You were exhausted, frantic, half out of your head with grief and rage. I left there thinking any minute you might snap. Christ, Mac, you talked about using Bennett’s gun.”
I shake my head, but even as I do, I can feel it, the awful possibility of it. The sleeplessness. The drinking. The nightmares. The way my thoughts had started bleeding into waking life until I wasn’t fully sure what I had only imagined and what I had actually said. Bennett thought I might have killed Phillip. Maverick thought I might kill him next. Is that who I had become in their eyes? Is that who I really was in those moments?
Emotion claws up my throat so violently I can hardly swallow past it.
“We couldn’t see another way,” Maverick says, and this timethere is no hardness in his voice, only exhaustion. “Somebody had to end it before he got to you.”
The three of us stand there in the musty dark, surrounded by secrets so large they feel structural, like the shack itself was built out of them. My mind keeps trying to force the pieces into some cleaner shape, but there isn’t one. Only this. Only what happened. Only what all of us did, or allowed, or set in motion by accident and grief and love and rage.
“So what now?” I ask finally. The words come out barely above a whisper. “What happens now?”
Maverick runs a hand through his hair and looks suddenly older than he did when I walked in. “Now we wait,” he says. “The club handles the rest. Chrissy gets arrested. The case gets tied up. And we move on.”
Move on.
The phrase is obscene.
But some awful part of me understands what he means.
Whitney reaches for my hand then, her fingers cold and trembling around mine. “We’ll get through this,” she says, tears gathering in her eyes again. “We always do. We have to.”
I look at her. At Maverick. At the two people standing closest to me in the world and furthest from who I thought they were. Then I think of Bennett waiting back in the life I built with him, the life that now feels polished over something much darker than I ever wanted to know.
None of us are who I thought we were.
Maybe none of us ever were.
