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They twisted my heart painfully.
I thought about him on the drive home. Thought about him while I carried Emma to her room to continue her nap. How different would things be now if I hadn’t run in the first place? Knowing what I did now, the decision had been rash. Impulsive. Fueled as much by fear of rejection as it was by an altruistic desire not to bind him to me against his will. If I hadn’t run then, Emma would have had a father all along. And despite my fears, he wouldn’t have been standoffish or unwilling. He would have loved seeing her grow.
And yet, knowing all that, I’d run again.
The fear that had propelled me a week ago had faded somewhat. The blind panic had cleared, and I could look back on my decision through a clearer lens. I’d been afraid, yes. But again, I was also afraid of losing him by binding him to me against his will. Afraid that a marriage he went into out of a sense of obligation would be a hideous end to a beautiful love. A week ago, I would have rather lost him like this. I’d thought of it as quick, clean, and decisive. In reality, it was prolonged, messy, and painful.
I walked back into my room in a daze and sank onto the bed. I wouldn’t blame him if he never forgave me. And he very likely wouldn’t. Landon wasn’t a forgiving man. If he really did love me like he claimed, I doubted that it could survive this second betrayal.
The thought of his hatred was almost enough to make me want to stay hidden, but I had to go back.
I couldn’t do this to him again.
Before I could change my mind, I went downstairs to use Robert’s computer to book a flight back to LA. I hadn’t brought mine to Croatia, and so it was still sitting in the guest room of Landon’s apartment. Unless he’d had someone clear out my things, which was a distinct possibility. I wondered about Emma’s room for only a moment. There was no way he’d have touched that. I didn’t know how he felt about me, but I didn’t doubt for a moment that he loved her.
I didn’t know Robert’s password, but I knew him well enough to know it would be written down somewhere. I checked under the keyboard, behind the monitor, underneath the mousepad and was surprised not to find it. Robert didn’t usually hide it so well. I pulled out the desk drawers one by one, but none of them revealed a post-it note with a password scrawled across it. It wasn’t until I turned my hand palm up and felt along the bottom of the desk that I stumbled across the fluttering edge of a post-it. It was pushed way back, so far that only the tip of my middle finger happened to brush it. Extending my arm further, I managed to tweak it between my middle and index finger and pull the sticky tab free.
To my surprise, the password was a long, complex mash of numbers and letters. Robert usually stuck to something like Emma’s name and the year. Something simple. Frowning, I carefully punched each key, careful to remember where I was at in the password. Part of me was amused that Robert had taken the trouble to have such a difficult password and yet still put it on a post-it under the desk. Part of me wondered about it.
Maybe that was why when I successfully logged in, instead of going straight to the travel site, I poked around a little. I looked at his browser history first. It told me what I already knew – that he and my mother were shopping for a place of their own in Morocco. From the looks of it, they weren’t picky about where. There were listings from Tantan to Tangier. Judging by the size of places they were looking at, they expected Emma and I to be with them. Although Mom always liked a statement piece of a house, even when it was just the two of them.
Next, I moved the cursor until it hovered over his Mail icon. It wiggled impatiently, ready to leap open, but I hesitated. Looking through his browser history was one thing. Looking through his mail was another. I took my hand off the mouse and interlocked my fingers, tucking them behind my head like I needed to restrain them or they’d double click of their own volition. Did I really want to do this? ToRobertof all people? The man who had raised me more than my own mother had? The man who had protected me a thousand times in a thousand different ways?
The answer was easy. Of course I didn’t. I would give anything to be the carefree Cami of just a few months ago whose only concerns were whether Emma was eating enough vegetables and going to bed early enough. I’d even be happy to be the Cami who was watching the Lavigne empire implode, thinking how terrible it was, how innocent her parents were. But the last month had taken its toll. Living with chronic fear had changed me on what felt like a cellular level. Heartbreak had altered my molecules. I didn’t trust anyone.
Exhausted tears sprung into my eyes as I unlocked my fingers and double-clicked quickly on the mail icon before I could change my mind. The screen blurred and reconstituted itself as the tears slipped down my cheeks. I couldn’t say why I was crying. There was certainly nothing to cry about in Robert’s inbox. It was filled with endless email alerts from sites he’d subscribed to and exchanges between him and the realtor they were working with, but there was very little personal correspondence. There were emails between him and the team of lawyers that was working on their appeal, too, but I only skimmed those.
By the time I got back to mid-March, I’d decided there was nothing to find. Relief and shame swam up my throat as I leaned back in the chair, covering my face with my hands. Landon’strust no oneattitude had rubbed off on me more than I’d realized. Of course Robert wasn’t hiding anything from me.
Taking a steadying breath, I straightened up in the chair again and reached for the mouse, ready to exit and log off and forget that this had ever happened. I’d find a way to make it up to Robert somehow, I thought. I’d take him to dinner, just us, and tell him how much he meant to me. How grateful I was to be his daughter. Things he knew but that I’d never put into words.
And then, just as I was about to log out, there was ading.
My eyes went to the notification automatically. A text alert. Robert’s computer was connected to his phone. I read it almost without meaning to.
And it changed everything.
29
LANDON
It took several days, and a quarter million dollars wire transferred to an offshore account, to get the help I needed. I had turned to a source I kept in my back pocket without ever intending to actually use them. A shadow organization that lived outside of any law that had ever been created by man or God. It consisted of a few select individuals who could do what even the United States government could not.
I didn’t know how.
I didn’t want to know.
To my surprise, my mom came over. I hadn’t told her that Cami and Emma had gone, but someone must have called her – likely Con – because two days after I sent the money, I got a call from the concierge. She was in the lobby.
“You can always send her up,” I said sharply. I could just picture her, mouth drawn tight, her head held high with injured nobility as she waited for the gatekeepers to let her pass. I went to the elevator, expecting to hear about it first thing when she got off.
To my surprise, she stepped off the elevator without a word and held out her arms. I stared at them. It had been a long time since I hugged my mother. She wasn’t the affectionate sort. I’d always known she loved me because she drilled it into my head, but she did the opposite of what she taught her creative writing students to do – she told instead of showed.
“Well, come on then,” she said impatiently. Her palms turned upward, the hug threatening to become hands thrown in the air.
She was too small to step into her embrace easily, but we tried. I bent down. Her arms formed a rickety cage around me. Her hands patted my back once, twice, three times. Then, as though satisfied that she had performed the hug adequately, she opened her arms and I stepped back out of them.
Bemused, I led her into the apartment. Unlike Cami, she approved of the design. Growing up, we’d had a small, scrabbly back patio, but I hardly ever saw it. She kept thick, heavy drapes on all the windows, including the sliding glass door that led out to it. They were her one nod to decor. The rest of the house was sparsely furnished and decorated. Funny how I hadn’t realized how closely I’d patterned the apartment on my childhood home until now. In every other way, they were polar opposites.
