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I hear, “Motion detected door one,” again before the front door opens and closes.
Lex nods. “At first glance.”
My mom clasps her hands together, saying, “It worked.”
“What worked?” Breckyn asks, rounding the same corner my mom just did. “Holy shit, you actually made it out.”
We hug, not as tight or as long as my mom and I did. It’s almost overwhelming, the sensation of touch again. Thankfully, it wasn’t last night with Lex. All we fucking did was touch. Once I started, I couldn’t stop.
“And huge,” my sister adds after we separate. “What were they feeding you in there?”
I gesture to the bowl in front of Primrose, telling her, “Not much better than that.”
“Must’ve been all those jailhouse fights.” Breck laughs. “We thought you’d never get out. Charlie and I even had a bet going.”
“They did not,” my mom says, opening the fridge to take out a bottle of apple juice and pouring some into the sippy cup.
What the fuck is happening right now?
“So…you all…”
Everybody stops to stare at me.
“He doesn’t know?” Breck asks Lex, who just shakes her head.
“Maybe if you’d called and checked in on your family,” my mom says with a hint of disapproval.
“Those calls would’ve cost you money.” I wouldn’t even see them the times they tried to visit. I couldn’t. In my mind, I failed them. In my mind, I became my father. I risked their lives for an obsession.
Breck scoffs. “We got loads of that now.”
Do they? How? Did Lex give them all the money I stashed at her mom’s?
“I heard about Silvy’s closing.”
TV was a luxury I rarely earned. If we were lucky enough to get newspapers, we’d get them two or three months, sometimes longer, after publication, and we didn’t always get Fox Hollow’s, so most of the news I got was from word of mouth—mouths that were apparently only repeating what Lex wanted me to hear.
Finally, Lex speaks, saying, “Yeah. We closed it down.”
Lex obviously got the contract back from Cyrus’s safe, but again, who’s “we”?
“Why? What happened?” My mom loved Silvy’s.
She shrugs. “Nothing. It was named after a man. We opened Gwen’s Florals the next day. No business was lost.”
I look to my mom. She’s smiling so big her eyes crinkle at the corners. “Can you believe it? It’s back in the family.”
Breck says, “Perfect timing, too, with property values on the rise.”
“So you did end up going into real estate?”
Breck ignores me to ask Lex, “You didn’t tell him anything?” To me, she says, “I work for Lex.”
She calls her Lex now, too. I thought I was the only one.
“ForLex?”
“Yeah, at Apex Realty.”
