“I have to go. I’ll call you next week, but I figure it shouldn’t be long before Emme’s in my custody. That bottle of vodka was a genius idea, so thanks for that. Anyway, once I have access to that money, we’ll plan a trip.” She ends the call and closes the laptop, pushing out of her chair. I wait until a door closes on the other side of the room before I check to make sure she’s gone.

  Coast clear, I rush over to the laptop, flipping it open, crossing my fingers as the screen comes alive again. An online game of poker flashes across the screen. I glance over my shoulder to make sure I’m still alone as I click on the next tab, smiling when I find her email open. That’s what you get for not logging out.

  The conversation I recorded is damning enough, but I’ll take any additional hard evidence that will nail her coffin closed. I scan the list of emails and note a starred one regarding a private school in San Francisco. I hope she’s not thinking about moving. Clicking on it, I skim the email between Linda and an administrator inquiring about on-campus placement. Apparently she plans to send Emme to a boarding school should she get custody. I snap pictures and print out the email so I have a hard copy before I perform a search for any others that match the email address. I find a few more and print them as well.

  I close the browser at the sound of voices drawing closer, flip the laptop shut, and leave the room the way I came in, hoping what I’ve gathered is going to be helpful in keeping Emme with Dax.

  The hallway is empty but for a few parents straggling in. The assembly begins shortly, so I give the person at the box office my name and she passes me over the reserved ticket. Apparently it’s assigned seating.

  I’m surprised to find it’s an actual theater, although I suppose this school has a fairly hefty tuition, and it’s arts based, so it makes sense that they would have a real auditorium.

  The usher shows me to my row, and of course I’m right in the middle, so everyone has to stand so I can get to my seat. The lights are already dimmed, making it difficult to see, but based on the profile, I’m beside Dax.

  He shifts his attention from the person to his right to lift his jacket from the armrest—he’s still dressed in a suit, presumably because he came directly from work. His eyes flare when they meet mine, brow furrowing as his mouth turns down and then lifts slightly in a wry, unimpressed grin. He might be angry with me, but it doesn’t seem to affect the chemistry that pings between us as his eyes rove over me in a familiar, hot way.

  I swallow past the lump in my throat and take the seat next to him.

  He leans in close, warm minty breath caressing my cheek. “Emme invited you.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He huffs humorlessly and shifts in his seat, dropping his elbow so it’s no longer on the armrest, touching mine.

  I hate the horrible churning in my stomach and the burn behind my eyes at his quick dismissal. “I know you’re still upset with me, but I need to speak with you after the assembly.”

  “I’m not interested in a conversation.”

  I put a hand on his arm and he turns his head slowly, his glare directed at where I’m making physical contact. I want to erase his anger, make him understand that I didn’t mean to hurt him. I move my hand to my lap. “It’s not about us.”

  “Well, that’s good since there is no us.”

  My heart feels like it’s been punctured. Before I can say anything else, the lights go down and the curtains open. The stage is filled with students, all dressed in white shirts and black pants. Emme is front and center, scanning the audience.

  Dax lifts his hand in a half wave when she finally spots him, and she smiles, her gaze shifting to me, and it widens even more. There’s no way I’m going to make it through this without crying.

  And then they start to sing. I’ve always known Emme has a beautiful voice. She sings in the car whenever she likes the song. She belts out the lyrics when we play Just Dance, and she hums a lot. But this is something completely different; this is the kind of music that reaches inside and touches your soul.

  I can’t hold back the tears when Emme steps forward for her solo. I recognize the song, vaguely. Her voice is hauntingly beautiful as she climbs the notes and dips down, taking us with her on an emotional journey. This is how she’s dealing with this loss, I realize. She’s found something to soothe the ache inside, maybe just a little.

  I glance over at Dax, whose expression borders on tragic. I want to offer him some comfort, but I don’t think it will be received well. Instead I root around in my purse for another tissue since the one I have is already soaked with tears. Thank God for waterproof mascara.

  Dax leans over, lips at my ear. “Here.” He hands me a fresh tissue.

  I sniff and meet his eyes. “Thank you.”

  For a moment he holds my gaze and I see the same thing I’m feeling reflected in his eyes, deep sadness, regret, and longing.

  When Emme’s solo ends, the crowd rises to a standing ovation. Dax whistles and claps, maybe louder than anyone else in the room, and I hope like hell the information I’ve come across is going to be enough to end this battle with his aunt.

  He picks up a huge bouquet of flowers and we wait as everyone files out of the auditorium. We’re seated close to the front, so we’re last to leave. I can feel Dax behind me, and I have the urge to reach back and find his fingers, to lace us together. I want to force him to listen to me and understand that what we have—had—was never about me making partner and everything about falling in love with him and Emme.

  But I doubt he’s going to give me airtime for that, and I have a much more pressing issue I need to alert him about.

  “I really need to talk to you,” I throw over my shoulder.

  “I’m taking Emme out to celebrate. It’s not a good time.”

  It’s too loud and there are too many people around to find privacy. When we finally escape the auditorium, Emme’s already waiting in the foyer, bouncing excitedly. She throws herself into my arms, wrapping me up in a huge hug with her skinny arms.

  “You were amazing up there.”

  “I missed you,” she mumbles into my hair.

  “I missed you, too, sweetie, so much.” I hold her tighter, fighting another wave of emotion and losing the battle.

  When we finally let go, I have to brush away the fresh tears. Dax stands off to the side, his expression unreadable until his sister turns to him, and then his smile lights up a black sky like fireworks.

  My chest aches, hollowness eating at me because I know they’re not mine the way I want them to be, and I made it that way.

  He holds out the bouquet, and her happy shriek is a sound I want to hear more of.

  Emme turns to me. “We’re going out for something to eat, can you come?”

  I glance at Dax. His mouth flattens into a line. “I think Dax probably wants a little time with you.”

  Emme’s smile falls. “But I haven’t seen you in forever. Please, Kailyn? She can come, can’t she, Dax?”

  Emme sends an imploring look her brother’s way. His cheek tics, but he forces a smile. “Of course Kailyn’s welcome to join us. It’s your night.”

  “Yay!” Emme throws her arms around me again. “Can I ride with Kailyn? Can we go to the diner down the street? I was too nervous to eat before the performance, and now I’m starving!”

  Thank you, I mouth to Dax as she drags me toward the door.

  He nods, but his smile has vanished again.

  The diner is busy, full of other students and their parents who had the exact same idea we did. Emme sits beside me in the booth and chatters away. Once we’ve ordered she’s dragged off to sit with a few of her friends. “I’ll be back in a few minutes!”

  “She seems like she’s doing well.”

  “She has really good days. This is one of them.” Dax arranges his silverware, but doesn’t look at me. “You had something you needed to talk to me about.”

  I look around the diner. “It’s about Linda.” I reach into my purse and pull out the emails I printed off.

  Dax leans back in his seat and crosses his arms over his chest, regarding me coldly. “What about her?”

  “I overheard a conversation with someone before the assembly and it sounded rather suspect, so I recorded it. I also found this.” I push the printed sheets toward him.

  “What is this?”

  “An email chain between Linda and a principal at a private school.”

  “What?” Dax skims it. “How’d you get this?”

  “She left her email open on a laptop in the library.” I set my phone on the table between us. “I haven’t had a chance to listen to it, so I have no idea if I caught anything helpful or not.”

  “Helpful how?”

  “In building your case to keep Emme with you.”

  “Emme keeps earbuds in the front pocket.” Dax points to her backpack.

  I unzip the compartment and smile when I find the little pouch I gave her to keep her girl supplies in when it’s that time of the month. Tucked in beside them are earbuds. I slip the jack in and pass Dax one bud, pushing the other in my ear. He leans forward, forearms on the table, head down and inches from mine as I cue the recording. I turn the volume all the way up, cross my fingers, and hit Play.

  It’s not the clearest recording, and the noise in the diner makes it hard to hear. I pass Dax the other earbud and he listens again, and then again, eyes on mine as his expression hardens. He yanks them out. “What kind of person wants custody of a grieving teenage girl so they can cash in on her trust allowance?”

  “Not a very good one.”

  He scrubs his face with his palm. “She can’t get custody of Emme. There’s no way.”

  I glance over my shoulder, checking on Emme, who’s still engaged in conversation with her friends. She’s actually sitting beside a boy who seems to be hanging on her every word. I wonder if that’s Clark. Or Liam. Or Jimmy. She has quite the fan club.

  “Come sit on this side.” Dax slides over a few more inches and I move into the space beside him. I quickly pull the rest of the emails between the private school administrator and Linda. He stops at the one about boarding options. “She plans to send her to San Francisco? When has she had time to plan all this?”

  I tap the time stamp. “It looks like she started as soon as she filed for custody.”

  “Can I keep this?”

  “All of it is yours. I just want Emme to be safe and with someone who loves her and wants what’s best for her. I didn’t want to hurt her, or you. Whatever else I can do to help, I will.”

  He places his hand over mine and squeezes, eyes soft. “Thank you.”

  It’s not forgiveness, but it’s a step in the right direction.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Forgiveness

  Dax

  Emme is beat when we get home, so she heads to her room, too tired for TV or anything else. Thankfully tomorrow is Friday, and I’m assuming the performance tonight will mean an easy day at school.

  I’m hopped up on adrenaline, and my head is spinning, so once she’s in bed, I grab a beer from the fridge and head down the hall to the office with the folder of printed emails Kailyn gave me.

  I drop into the leather executive chair with a sigh. Kailyn. I don’t know what to think. She seems to have gone to a lot of trouble to get this information for me, but why? Does she genuinely want to help? I hate not knowing what parts of our relationship were real and what was contrived to further her career. I don’t think anyone can fake the kind of chemistry we have, but even that I can’t be sure of. And now I’m questioning it all over again, because she came to the performance for Emme.

  I massage the space between my eyes as I boot up my father’s desktop. Since the funeral, I’ve put off dealing with the majority of the financial stuff that wasn’t directly related to Emme. There are accounts that need to be managed, savings to be transferred, and bank statements to be reviewed. But none of it has seemed pressing since Linda sued for custody of Emme. While I wait, I rifle through the emails from Kailyn, organizing them by date. The first email to the private school was sent the day after Linda filed for custody. She is un-fucking-believable.

  The screen on my father’s desktop finally registers a login and I punch in his password, which is stuck to the corner of the display with a Post-it. I’m not sure what I’m looking for, other than something that will explain why Linda needs this money so badly, and why she feels it’s rightly hers.

  The folders with my father’s documents are neatly labeled and organized, as was normal for my parents. I scroll through them, noting one with my name, one with Emme’s, and lower down is Linda’s, which would make sense as she was supposed to be Emme’s legal guardian until about six months ago. I click on Linda’s, and several subfolders pop up. I pause when I reach one labeled Loans. Clicking again I’m met with at least twenty separate documents, each individually dated, going as far back as fifteen years ago. I open the most recent, dated not long before my parents passed.

  Apparently, Linda borrowed five thousand dollars from my parents. I open the next one down, dated several months earlier, and find yet another loan, this time for seven thousand dollars. Another one, dated a few months before my thirtieth birthday, is substantially larger, at fifteen thousand dollars.

  There seems to be a lull, a period of two years in which no loans were issued, but before that my parents sporadically lent Linda money. Sometimes it was a few thousand dollars, but more than once they were in excess of ten thousand.

  I’m sure if I went back through my parents’ bank records I’d be able to track all the money they loaned her over the years, which is a lot.

  Before I think too much about what I’m doing, I pick up my cell and call Kailyn. It doesn’t even finish ringing once before she answers.

  “Hey. Is everything all right? How are you?”

  “I’m…okay.” That’s not really true right now, but it’s an automatic response. “How are you?”

  “Happy to hear your voice,” she says softly.

  Her honesty pulls my attention back to her. “What’re you doing right now?”

  “Uh, not a lot, how about you?”

  “I found some stuff on my dad’s computer.” I hit Print on the loan documents. I’m sure there must be a folder in my parents’ filing cabinets with signatures. The most recent are signed, scanned PDFs, but the older ones are drafts with no signatures.

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “Financial stuff connected to Linda that might explain why she wanted custody so badly…” I trail off as I note the time in the corner of the screen; I didn’t realize it was almost midnight. “But it can wait.”

  “I’m not going to sleep anytime soon, if you want to talk it through.”

  “My parents loaned my aunt a lot of money.”

  “What constitutes a lot?”

  “Tens of thousands over the past decade and a half. And that’s just based on the documents in one folder. I have no idea if there’s more that’s unaccounted for.” I rub my temple, the dull throb telling me a headache is on the way.

  “I can come over.” There’s a short pause. “If you want help going through what you found. Or it can wait. I can shift my appointments around tomorrow morning, unless now is better.”

  “Now is better.”

  “I can be there in fifteen.”

  “Okay.”

  While I wait for her to arrive, I rifle through my parents’ filing cabinets. At the back of one I find a thick folder with Linda’s name on it, but before I can open it, Kailyn texts to signal her arrival. I find her on my front porch in a pair of black leggings and a ratty It’s My Life hoodie, hair in a messy knot on top of her head, wearing her glasses, holding two takeout bags and a tray with coffees.

  She smiles a little uncertainly. “I brought fuel.”

  “Good thinking.” I take the coffees from her and step aside. “Come in.”

  We stand there for a protracted moment, staring at each other. Neither of us certain what to say, maybe. Tension lingers between us; unanswered questions hang in the air like thick fog. I’ve missed her, more than I wanted to admit.

  “Want to show me what you found?” Kailyn asks.

  “Yeah, follow me.” I incline my head toward the office.

  “Oh, wow,” she murmurs as she takes in the papers lining the desk; the endless loan documents, the emails she printed out from the boarding school. She raps on the desk with her long, polished fingernails.

  “And I just stumbled across this right before you got here, but I haven’t had a chance to look through it.” I offer her a chair and we pull up close to the desk as I flip the thick file folder open. Inside are printed copies of the loan documents, bank statements from my aunt with maxed-out lines of credits, credit cards with outrageous balances, and agreements between her and my parents that she would pay back the money.

  I rub my temple as all the pieces finally click into place. “She has a gambling problem.”

  Kailyn stops biting the end of her pen so she can respond. “I was about to say the same thing. It would explain the trip to Vegas and the comment about doubling what they lost last time.”

  “It makes sense, doesn’t it? Now I know why she’s so desperate to make me into some kind of villain and take custody of Emme.” I motion to the sea of papers spread out before us, still reeling. “This proves Linda’s intentions were purely selfish. She planted a bottle of vodka on a thirteen-year-old for Chrissake.”

  “There’s no way she’ll get custody now, not with all of this and that recording.”

  “I wouldn’t have figured this out without you.”

  “You would’ve, it may have taken longer, but you would’ve found all of this eventually and put it together.” She squeezes my forearm. “I just want Emme to be where she belongs, Dax, and that’s with you.”

  She seems so sincere, but it’s hard not to wonder how much of this is her wanting to help and her still working the partner angle. “Is that all you want?”