Page 100 of Seeing Harper

“Why would you do that?” Travis asked irritatedly.

“Because somebody had to protect her. You’ve obviously forgotten your priorities, or at least I hope you’ve forgotten. Because if you’ve moved this tree farm above your own child in priority intentionally, then you have a much bigger problem than me not allowing her to keep her word to you. You have no right to demand she keep any word to you after the way you’ve treated her.”

His brows rose in surprise as he got to his feet. “This is not the time…”

“It’s exactly the time. Sit down Travis,” she said, slapping her hand on the heavy oak table they were sitting at.

Joel stood from his place. “Perhaps I’ll go for a walk to give you some privacy.”

“You will sit down, too!” Libby ordered.

Joel shared a look with Travis, then sat down hesitantly as Travis gave him a singular half-nod.

“Honey, you’re obviously upset. What is this about?”

“Well, I was going to blast this entitled prick, but I’ve since decided that you’re the problem here, not him.”

“Now, hold on. Like I told Travis, I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“Shut up!” Libby half-shouted. “I know exactly what you’ve done. And I also know you see nothing wrong with it. You’ve probably done it dozens if not more times in the past and never had a complaint at all. You actually think that any woman would be pleased to have your attentions. Well, my daughter doesn’t feel that way. And if you’d been anyone else she’d have knocked your ass out and left you on the ground where you stood the first time you tried to insert yourself into her personal space thinking you had a right to. But she didn’t. You know why? Because this male,” she said, pointing at Travis, “who is her own father, put her in the position of having to carry responsibility for his family tree farm. So, she felt like she had no choice but to endure your unwanted advances.”

She looked away from Joel to pin Travis with a glare. “You even sent him to pick her up and asked him to take care of her, giving him the perfect in to insist that she spend time with him.”

“I was trying to make sure that she wasn’t alone and overwhelmed in a city she wasn’t familiar with. And I don’t appreciate you…”

“I don’t give a damn what you don’t appreciate, Travis! When has Harper ever been overwhelmed with anything? I’ll answer that for you. Not once, not until this asshole thought he could press for what he wanted and get away with it. That in itself should have told you something. But you just swept the possibility that what she told you was the truth under the rug. Because you didn’t want to have to do without whatever it is you think he can do for your farm. He spoke the words, Travis, ‘you’re not making it seem like you’re easy to get along with and that’s not looking good for your father to do business with us’. How in the hell can that be misconstrued? It was his last ditch effort to force her into tolerating him and submitting. If you can’t see that, you’ve lost part of your common sense and I’m seriously concerned about your mental welfare.”

“You just don’t understand. It was not said in that context,” Joel said.

Libby swung her gaze to Joel again. “I thought I told you to shut up. If you don’t shut up and sit there until this is finished, I plan to phone your company and tell them all about every single thing that I’ve decided is bullshit.”

“This is getting blown all out of proportion. Nothing happened.”

“Because she wouldn’t let anything happen. And she’s been apologizing ever since,” Libby said, looking at Travis again. “Because your selfishness has made her think that by standing up for herself in the minimal way that she did, she let you down. You put this damned farm ahead of your daughter’s welfare. You let her take the sexual harassment he continually heaped on her because it was easy to ignore since she wasn’t actually physically assaulted, and you convinced yourself it wasn’t like you had anything to defend. And that is fucking inexcusable. You don’t have to be physically assaulted to suffer the effects of the harassment you had to endure, and then when your father trades your welfare for a chance to work with the asshole that harassed you, imagine how much worse it becomes. But you know what? She was the honorable one. She didn’t knock his ass flat. And she kept her promise to you and came here this morning to do what you asked of her, because she respects you, and loves you. And you put her in the position of having to endure every bit of disrespect he was brave enough to push on her, because he thought he could manage to explain it away. I firmly believe that had he not been worried about pushing it too far and having you question him, we’d be dealing with a much more severe outcome, and I’d be in prison for murdering the fucker that raped my child, had she not been strong enough to fight him off.”

“I am not going to sit here and listen to these unfounded accusations!” Joel said defensively.

“Shut up!” both Travis and Libby shouted before they stared at each other.

Travis took a moment to collect his thoughts. “Do you actually believe that I’d honestly put her in danger like that?”

“She’s not even sleeping in her own home because of the man that you invited into it. Can’t you see that? I think you’re so obsessed with this farm — what’s going to happen to my farm, who’s going to take over the farm, I have to make sure it’s agriculturally at its peak so Harper will have to take it over — that you don’t see a damn thing except this fucking farm anymore!”

Travis snarled.

“Don’t pull that shit with me. Doesn’t rattle me in the least, never fucking did. And if you’re still, by some unbelievable measure of lack of commonsense, or loyalty, if you want to call it that, questioning all the accusations that have been firmly laid at this master player’s feet despite him doing his best to smooth them over, and despite Harper trying to tell you about what happened to her when she spoke to you on the phone before you downplayed them, take a look at this.” She handed Travis her phone on which she’d already pulled up the photo she’d taken of Harper’s phone and her messaging thread with Clay.

Travis looked at it for a moment. “What am I looking at, Libs?” he asked. Hoping his use of her pet name would calm her down a little and let her know that he was listening.

“That’s a message thread of conversations between her and Clay. You’ll notice the time stamps.”

“Okay…”

“You’ll also notice that two are deleted and all the times the messages came in and the times the last two were deleted. They are all shown there.”

“Oh, come on. You think I dug in her purse and deleted her messages?” Joel asked.

“No, of course not. She set her phone down on the table and went to the restroom. You picked up her phone and deleted the last two messages there. You left one, you deleted the other two,” Libby said.