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“Yes. For one thing, I’ve got to take Emmett the new check. And for another, I’ve got a hankering for a nice, dark lager. See you next week, dear.”
Logan wandered into Woody’s on a quiet Tuesday night. Emmett was surprised to look up and see the reclusive lawyer sitting at the bar. He hadn’t been at the Halloween festival, but there was no doubt he knew what happened. Emmett figured he’d been hiding out until things settled down.
“Hey, Logan,” Emmett said, turning to face his customer. “Can I get you something to drink?”
“Scotch. Neat,” Logan said.
“That good, huh?”
Logan shook his head. “I doubt it’s even that good, but I don’t want to crawl home on my hands and knees.”
“Fair enough.” Emmett poured Logan’s drink and set it down on a paper napkin in front of him. “How’s the fallout been?” he asked. To be honest, Emmett hadn’t really kept up with it. He’d been more focused on his own life and how it had suddenly gone awry.
“Surprisingly negligible,” Logan said. “I guess in my mind I had thought that a scandal like this would actually hurt Norman Chamberlain’s reputation, but he seems to be made of Teflon. Nothing sticks.”
“How did you find out about it?”
“Grant and Pepper came by the house after the video clip aired. I kind of held my breath waiting for something to happen, but nothing really did.”
“Really?”
Logan shrugged. “Well, Blake and Simon came by the house to see me. They seem to be taking the news okay. They apologized on their father’s behalf, and like Grant, told me they wanted to build a relationship with me. A few people have pulled my mother aside at church or in the grocery store and told her how bad they felt about Norman’s treatment of her. But that’s about it.”
“Norman hasn’t shown up to see you, has he?”
Logan nearly snorted his sip of scotch. “No. I don’t imagine that he will, either. He probably knows that if he waits long enough, people will forget or not care.”
“I know it’s disappointing for you, but it’s probably disappointing to Lydia, too. I imagine she was hoping that clip would cause an embarrassment to the family. Maddie seemed to think that she was trying to settle the score for what happened with Ivy.”
“I wasn’t surprised. I should’ve known something like this was going to happen when Grant and I saw her with her phone. It was just a matter of when, not if, she’d expose it. It was a perfect opportunity, really. How is Maddie taking all this? Lydia was her best friend, wasn’t she?”
Emmett sighed and leaned against the back counter of the bar. Crossing his arms over his chest, he said, “I don’t know. I know she was really upset Halloween night. But we broke up the next day and I haven’t spoken to her since then.”
Logan’s brows went up in surprise, his blue eyes widening and bringing to mind Maddie’s own baby blues. “That’s a shame. I thought things were going well for both of you. What happened?”
“Stupidity,” Emmett said. When he got down to the core of it, that’s what it was. “Stupidity and stubbornness. She found out I was lying to her and she didn’t take too kindly to it.”
“Why did you lie?”
Emmett thought he knew the answer, but when he went to tell Logan, it eluded him. “I don’t know. When I first came to Rosewood, I just wanted to fly under the radar. I didn’t want anyone to treat me differently.”
“Why would they? Are you a runaway prince in hiding or something?”
Emmett snorted. “No. I just used to live a different life—a lucrative one that tended to draw the wrong kind of attention from women who wanted more to do with my money than me. When I started over, I was just Emmett, the cool guy who owned the bar. Maddie made me so crazy because she reminded me of those fancy women. There was something different about her, though, a spark of someone I wanted to know better. And I wanted Maddie to want me for me. I guess I was being a chicken shit. I thought if she knew the truth, things would change between us. That she’d expect me to change.”
Logan narrowed his gaze at Emmett. “Wait a minute . . . you broke up with Maddie because you were afraid she’d find out you were rich and you’d break up?”
Emmett frowned. “It sounds stupid when you say it like that.”
“Well,” Logan said, “I can tell you from personal experience that lies don’t help anything. You might think that keeping something from someone is bet
ter, that you’re protecting them, or yourself, but it just makes it worse. Why didn’t you just tell her the truth when she pushed you?”
That was the question Emmett had asked himself repeatedly over the last week. He hadn’t come up with a satisfactory answer yet. “Because she made me mad. She jumped to conclusions, assuming the worst and not listening to anything I had to say. Instead of fessing up and ending the argument, I accused her of being hypocritical and greedy.”
“So, you fell on your sword instead of telling the truth, but you just spilled it to me without much provocation. Does that mean you’ve changed your mind?”
“You mean this conversation isn’t protected under lawyer-client privilege?”
