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“Well, you could leave. Just up and leave. You know how to do that.”
He glanced away, his jaw tight. And I felt righteous.
“Look,” he said. “I fucked that up and I know it. I mean, I live with it every day. But…” he stopped and again, because I was weak and foolish I looked over at him. Watched him lick his lips and shake his head like he had some kind of internal war.
“You know if you didn’t want to go to New Orleans with me, you could have just said. If I was just a summer thing, you could have just said.” The words slipped out of my mouth.
“Is that what you think?” he asked and took a step towards me. I put my hand up, not backing down but hell if I was gonna let this man crowd me. “You think I left because I didn’t want you?”
“Tyler,” I laughed. “What else was I supposed to think? You didn’t want a future with me so instead of being a man and telling me to my face, you walked.”
“No. Never.”
“Stop. Stop this bullshit right now. I’m serious, Tyler, you don’t get to rewrite the past.”
Miguel came stomping out the door and I spun away from Tyler, sucking down huge gulps of air. My stomach was in knots. “Let’s go, Miguel,” I said, aware that he was watching to two of us carefully. The air around us seemed to smoke. Miguel walked off to the car, waving over his shoulder at Tyler as he went. I didn’t wave.
I just barely resisted giving the man the finger.
“Jules,” he said and there was something in his voice. Some deep pain that I wanted to reject but I couldn’t. it spoke to the deep pain that lived in me. I stopped and turned.
“I’m not…” he shook his head. “I’m not saying I’m not responsible. I own it. But I thought your Dad would have said something to you.”
“What?”
“Just…talk to your dad.”
TYLER
“This is pointless,” I sighed, squirting a mountain of soap into my hands at the kitchen sink. There was a reason why there were so few basements in Louisiana—everything got wet and never ever dried out. Half the boxes down there were black with mold, the other half were practically disintegrating. Truth was, I spent most of the time I was supposed to be searching for gems just cleaning the place out.
But it was Thursday night, and after three days of searching for the gems, I was getting tired of pretending to care.
I heard my dad clomping up the stairs.
“The gems aren’t down there, Dad,” I said before he could start complaining that I was giving up.
“I think you’re right,” Richard said as he stepped up from the basement stairs into the hallway outside the kitchen. Spiderwebs dusted his hair. “But we haven’t checked the attic. Or Margot’s room—”
“You’re not going in Margot’s room,” I insisted, the very idea giving me the creeps. I could only humor my father so far.
Richard rolled his eyes and pulled open the fridge. “What we need is to recruit that Miguel kid—”
“Not an option.”
“Come on. He’d be better put to use inside the house.”
I leaned over the door of the fridge, making eye contact with my dad. “Stay away from him, Dad.”
“Oh, I’m a bad influence? And you’re what… Mother Teresa? What would be worse, teaching the kid poker or having him look for the gems?”
I laughed. “They’re about equal,” I said. “Juliette would kill me either way.”
Richard stood up in the open V of the fridge door. “This Juliette…who the hell is she?”
I reached around the old man and grabbed a beer. “She’s the police chief—I think that’s enough reason not to get her angry.”
“Cut the bullshit,” Richard said, shutting the door and leaning up against the far counter with a beer of his own. A sly grin crawled across his face. “Who is she to you? I watch every day when she comes and picks up that kid, and you don’t act like she’s no one. She gets out of that car and you look like the only woman left in the world just stepped onto the grass. So, son, who is she to you?”
I twisted the cap off the beer before taking a long slug of it, trying to swallow down the strange urge to tell Richard. To confide in someone, anyone, my father, for crying out loud—the pain I felt every damn day when Juliette showed up to pick up Miguel.
How when I looked at her, the weight of the mistakes I’d made nearly crushed me. And worse, infinitely painfully worse, was the way possibilities hung in the air around her like fireflies in tall grass.
“We…ah…we had a thing. A long time ago.”
“Ah,” Dad said, as if he was a daytime talk show host. “A thing?”
