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Colt makes a distressed sound like he’s fatally wounded.
“So, he’s told me you’re his foster brother.” Maisy leans toward the phone. “What was he like?”
I slide my lips together. If things were different, she wouldn’t need to ask because she would’ve been with me. I never would’ve been separated from her. I picture it for a second, like I have many times, what it would be like if we remained close friends. How we’d have our first kiss by the tree we loved to climb as our friendship grew into something else.
“He was a grumpy little shit,” Colton says with a chuckle. “Definition of doom and gloom. It was hilarious. Spill the tea, girl. What was he like before all the angst got to him?”
Maisy launches into a story about the time me, her, and Holden swindled our entire block out of money on our lemonade stand racket so that we could buy a video game we wanted, a plan I masterminded. I huff out a laugh. It was my idea, but she’s the one who organized us and brought all the customers in. Her whole body moves as she tells the story animatedly, her golden eyes lit up with fondness at the memory.
As they talk, I stay quiet, listening to the girl I never stopped loving and the first friend—family—I let in past the thorns stabbing into my heart meet each other. The way it makes my heart thud catches me off guard.
Colton shares another story of his own of the first time his parents dragged me to a Thorne Point high society party with their socialite friends and how he caught me sneaking canapés in my suit pocket.
It feels right that they’re meeting and sharing these halves of my life that make up the whole, like my shattered life is colliding back into itself to mend the broken shards.
“I’ll update you when I find out,” Colton says, breaking me out of my musings. “Later.”
The call ends and I stop playing, removing my hand from beneath the shirt she stole so we don’t get sidetracked again.
“He seems great,” she says, leaning against my chest as she curls up in my lap.
“Is this going to be a thing?” I tug on the material that looks way better on her than it does on me.
She grins. “Yup.”
The corner of my mouth lifts. Good. When she wears my clothes it makes something hot and possessive slot into place inside me.
Maisy gets up, collecting the stack of magazines she had in her bag and hooking an arm through her hippie style purse before coming back to the couch. She splits the stack in half and nudges it toward me.
She settles in the corner of the couch with her own half, tucking her bare toes beneath my thighs while she leans against the arm. “What are we looking for?”
“Anything. I tried to look these up before online as PDFs to see if they talked about what they were researching, but I couldn’t remember what they had samples of.”
We work in a comfortable quiet as we begin scanning through the medical journals.
“Wait, I think this is it,” Maisy says after getting partway through her share. She sits up, shifting to her knees to show me the magazine article. “Right here. I recognize it from the stashed patent files you showed me in your garage. Do you have the photos from that shipping facility?”
Tossing aside the magazine I was reading, I pull the laptop closer and bring up the images I took when I posed
as an auditor assessing the company internally. I click through images of the shipping operation until she stops me with a hand on my wrist.
“The synthetic opioid! That’s it.”
“Looks like they didn’t get to file the patent paperwork and the company pushed forward with producing it in large quantities.”
Is this why my parents were killed? All over this drug?
“This is what they were shipping out,” she murmurs. “A lot of it. When you were talking to the manager, I thought it seemed weird that they were only shipping out this. And only, what, five guys loading it onto the truck?”
I make a low noise of agreement, my heart thumping at this new development. For years I’ve tried to remember what those hidden papers in the old garage said, but my memories were too foggy from grief. It’s been right in front of me this whole time.
Rubbing my jaw, I glance at her. “We should go back there to see if we can find out more.”
Twenty-Seven
Maisy
The shipping warehouse turns out to be a bust. We’ve circled the building twice, but after Fox lifted me onto his shoulders to peer in through a high window it became clear we were too late.
