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He follows me out of the room, and when we get to his office door, he leans by the side of the door with his arms crossed, watching me as I enter the numbers into the keypad. After all those attempts, the green light and the quiet click of the mag lock coming open feels almost surreal.
“It works,” I tell Luca, looking up.
The smile on his face is almost proud. “Of course.”
I open the door and walk into his office.
48
Stolen Gift
Luca
Willow’s excitement is almostpalpable as she pushes open the door and enters my office, and yet it’s still nothing compared to the nervous energy that’s been buzzing inside me for days. I’ve barely been able to contain my excitement and impatience.
I’ve never been known for my generosity, and in all honesty, generosity has never been as exciting to me as it is when it comes to Willow. Maybe it’s because I know she doesn’t want anything from me, or maybe it’s because of how proudly self-reliant she is—but something about her makes me want to be recklessly, outrageously generous. If she was the kind of woman to covet jewellery, I’d lay strings of diamonds at her feet, but nothing so simple for Willow Lynch.
This gift had to be special, it couldn’t be anything else.
Her steps falter as she notices the screens, and then she stops altogether.
She’s barefoot in a simple pair of black jeans ripped at the knees and a cropped red jumper with long sleeves. Her damp hair is loose on her shoulders, and her face is free of make-up but for the permanent smear of mascara around her eyes.
“What’s this?”
The question falls from her like a thing of lead, heavy and dull. I stand behind her, crossing my arms over my chest, watching the screen over her head, trying to see what she’s seeing, trying to catch a glimpse of what she might be thinking or feeling right now.
“This is Richard Thornton.”
“I know who he is.”
Her voice is cold and hard. My eyebrows twitch into a frown, but I smooth them out. This was probably the last thing she expected—of course, it’s going to take her a minute or two to process what she’s seeing.
To help her understand, I cross over to the desk and press Play on the video waiting on one of the monitors. The screen flickers to life, showing Richard Thornton’s face, bloodied and deformed with swelling, after I was done with him during that first and final meeting of ours. He faces the screen, and his voice echoes through my office.
“I’m—I’m—I’m so sorry, I should never have done what I did. I’m sorry, Willow, I was a piece of shit, Iama piece of shit, what I did to you and your mum, it was wrong, I know that now. Your poor mother, she didn’t deserve what I did, neither of you did, and I know it was wrong to hit you, to say all those things, I’m sorry, please forgive me.”
I didn’t give Richard a script when I told him to look into my phone camera and apologise to Willow Lynch. Maybe I should’ve. It was a shit apology, but the point of theapology wasn’t to be poignant—it wasn’t even to earn Willow’s forgiveness. He doesn’t deserve her forgiveness.
The point of the apology was to show Willow that the man who had hurt her was hurt in turn, that he knew why he was being hurt, and that she would never need to worry about him ever again,
My gift to Willow.
Except that Willow doesn’t look like someone receiving a gift. She physically recoils from the screen, stepping back with each word Richard speaks until her back hits the filing cabinets lining the wall behind her.
Her face has gone deathly pale, and her eyes are wide and dark in the bright, clean lights of my office. She looks like she’s about to collapse or like she’s about to be sick.
She looks like she’s about tocry.
I hit my keyboard and stop the video, crossing over to her. “Lynch.”
I try to take her shoulders but she squirms away from me, sliding along the filing cabinets, eyes wide and dark and hunted. This isn’t the Willow I know, the force of nature, the raging hurricane in human form. This is a Willow like a cornered animal, an animal you don’t know whether it’s about to whine or bite.
“What have you done?” she says.
The air is thick with her palpable anguish, charged electricity before a thunderstorm. My initial excitement is long gone, replaced with a sinkhole of dread in the pit of my stomach.
“I made him pay.” I swallow back the pleading lilt in my voice and shake my head. “I made him pay for what he did to you. Isn’t that what you wanted? He’ll never hurt you again. He’ll rot in prison for the rest of his life, and every day he spends in there will be a living hell. You never have to see him ever again, you’ll never even have to think of him. You’re free.”
