Page 41 of Fair Game


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“She’s hiding something.”

His head snaps around when I say it. “You don’t mean that.”

“I don’t mean she’s with Bettencourt. I mean…I think she has her own set of plans. And I don’t think she’s going to wait until nightfall.”

11

ELISE

The thingabout baking is that it’s an exact science.

It’s not like cooking, where you can leave out the cilantro or enhance things with two extra sticks of butter or add a dash of paprika whenever you feel like it. Compared with baking, cooking is whimsical. It’s about mood more than measurement.

In baking, the measurements count. The weight of the flour counts. The proportion of sugar and salt. Time in the oven. Straying from the recipe almost never leads to success.

I’ve obviously been spending too much time living out my innocent-baker fantasy, because all I can think is that I’ve been willfully ignoring the universe’s recipe for dealing with my dad.

He has to die.

More specifically, I have to kill him.

When Charlotte came to Gabriel’s, I told her I didn’t know if taking my dad down meant killing him.

That wasn’t entirely true. On some level, I did know. I just didn’t want to admit it to myself.

A man from Mason’s security team brings the midnight blue SUV to the front of his building. He’s not happy when I insist on leaving unaccompanied again.

That makes two of us.

I’d much rather be sitting on the ottoman next to the couch in Mason’s living room, watching Gabriel sleep.

“Creepy,” I tell myself in the rearview mirror. I don’t laugh at my own joke.

My first destination is to a credit union in Brooklyn, nowhere near my bakery. It’s the only one of its kind. There are no other branches. In other words, the kind of place my father would never pay attention to.

I keep the pistol in a safe-deposit box.

I got the concealed carry license in the first year after I moved out. In the middle of the permit classes, I knew for sure that I’d never shoot anyone who broke into my bakery, or even my apartment up above.

The part of me that had been shaped by my father insisted on getting the license anyway. It was that part of me that purchased the pistol and a box of ammunition. Not as an insurance policy, exactly. Guns are never a guarantee.

But I’d been afraid, that first year. Afraid that I wasn’t really free of my father. Afraid he’d…I don’t know. Show up at the bakery and drag me home.

I step out into the gorgeous afternoon, bathed in fall sunlight and the bitter irony that my father didn’t have to drag me back, after all. I’m going home of my own free will.

And, you know. The confluence of circumstances that has made killing my own father the only way to guarantee the safety of the people I love.

I turn the radio up loud on the drive to the mansion I grew up in. The music doesn’t block out the heavy feeling of inevitability.

Gabriel and his brothers—at least Mason, though I won’t be surprised if they go looking for Jameson first—are going to find evidence of my dad’s crimes. They’re not going to stop until they find it.

That means they’ll also find evidence ofmycrimes. In one way or another, I was involved in almost everything my father did. It doesn’t matter that all of it happened before I turned eighteen. People were hurt. Peopledied. And once the world knows about my father, they’ll know about me.

Gabriel will know about me.

When he understands the magnitude of what I’ve done, he won’t want anything to do with me.

It wasn’t just one game I played with my father. It was dozens. Hundreds. I gave in to the way he hurt me, even though I knew it was wrong.

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