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By the time I recovered to answer him, I could tell it was already too late. His eyes were now loaded with full-blown suspicion.
“Of course!” I said, and damn it, my voice was too high-pitched again. I sounded like I was lying, and I could tell from his face that he wasn’t buying it.
He crossed his hands over his chest. “Really…”
“Yes, really, and why do you even care anyway?” I glanced around, trying to find something to keep me busy. This would be the perfect time for Keith to give me some impromptu work, but with the way he so quickly disappeared from the break room, I knew he wasn’t coming back in any time soon. I didn’t think any of my coworkers were brave enough to defy Zane’s orders either. I already saw the way they eyed him with fear when he came in, and I didn’t blame them. Zane looked like a bruiser.
Ivanna had given me a look of concern when she walked out, but I knew it wasn’t enough to drag her back here.
“So, you’re the new boss?” I asked when the silence stretched too far without an answer. “Why did you choose to buy a business back here?”
He wasn’t originally from here, and I knew he and my sister lived somewhere in New Mexico. Why would he come back to a place where his only claim to it was his dead wife, who he barely gave a fuck about when she was alive?
As he continued watching me darkly without answer, the familiar anger rose when I thought about Kelly and everything this bastard put her through. My poor sister always had issues with depression, issues she hid under a smile. But she was also one of the kindest, most selfless people I ever knew. She was the one who cleaned my bruises when I scuffed them, who once stayed up with me the whole night singing lullaby after lullaby when I was sick with the flu. She had her problems, sure, but I remembered her as a glowing ray of sunshine whose only problem, as my mother complained, was that she tended to pick absolute strays as boyfriends.
Like Zane Kazan.
I remembered being simultaneously scared and fascinated by Zane the first time I met him. He was a handsome man with dark looks and a brooding persona. I remembered being taken by his golden eyes, staring at them for hours as he talked with my dad. I would try to figure out if that was their real color. I wanted to get close to finding out more about him, but I couldn’t so much as say more than a few words to him before choking up.
There was something unapproachable about him. Every time I overcame my fear and made several attempts to talk to him, they would end with short answers on his end, as though he couldn’t be bothered with making small talk with a kid. Which, fair enough, could be annoying. But still.
It couldn’t have hurt him to try to get along with us.
But the worst thing about him was that his coldness extended to how he treated my sister. Kelly was always a bubbly, vivacious woman around others, but around him, she was subdued and shy. While he cracked a smile once or twice when she spoke, he never seemed like he was head over heels for her or anything. And though I now understood that Kelly had bipolar disorder for some time, I still thought his lack of affection for her was part of what drove her to do what she did.
She might have taken her own life, but it was his lack of care that led her there. I knew for a fact that she cried out to him for help and reached out for his hand. He could have pulled her back from the ledge.
But instead, he’d pushed her over.
“When was he born?” Zane’s voice dragged me back into the conversation.
“Huh?”
“Your son. When was he born?”
“May 15th.” The answer came out automatically.
“So he’s ten years old.”
“Yes.” I knew he was trying to catch me in a lie, so I raised an eyebrow audaciously. “I thought I told you that yesterday.”
“You did,” he said offhandedly. “Gave birth to him in the hospital?”
“Yes,” I said, hoping he was not crazy enough to go and check hospital records all around the town.
“And then you brought him home?”
“That’s typically what you do after giving birth to someone.”
I saw his eyebrow rise at my insolence, and then some emotion flashed in his eyes. “How could you have done that when you went to prom the next day?”
I gaped at him. Shit, I’d completely forgotten that Kelly gave birth a day before prom. I remembered rushing out of the building when I heard she’d gone into labor, and I missed school for the next few weeks because we were helping to take care of Casey after Kelly started experiencing postpartum symptoms.
“Um, well, yeah. I missed prom that year,” I said.
“No, you didn’t,” he said. “There’s a photo online with you tagged in it. And your stomach was suspiciously flat in it too.”
“How did you know that?” I stammered.
