I nodded, understanding. Even feeling relieved that I could walk away from this room. From Mel.
“But I still have my old phone. I never took it out of my work bag.” Alex shoved the iPhone at me so hard that I had no choice but to take it. I could hear the video already playing. “My break’s over.”
And with that he left.
I should’ve just sat there in Mel’s office last week, nodded along when Green said she’d overdosed. Thanked him for the update and then left to begin my life in a post-Desiree world.
But I hadn’t. And now I had to watch.
I heard Alex before I could see anything. “This right here is why I hate being out after midnight. People like this shouldn’t be on the road.”
The video was dark since it was shot so late at night. The camera was moving, Alex clearly rushing to catch up to a pair of red brake lights.
“You see them?” Alex said on camera. “That car careening past me going at least sixty? Thank God there are no other cars. I thought they were gonna blow past the light, but he stopped. Almost. In the middle. Of. The. Intersection.”
My heart sped up as the camera got closer to Desiree’s car, as if I was the one running. Not Alex.
Please don’t let it be Mel. Please.
It became my new mantra. I repeated it over and over in beat with each step Alex took.
He was within a few feet when the light turned green. And even though I knew better, there was a brief moment when I wanted the car to peel off. So we couldn’t see who was behind the wheel.
But it didn’t. And Alex caught up.
Just as he reached its bumper, the car shot off again. But he’d caught enough. An arm hanging out the driver’s side window.
I continued staring at the screen long after the video had stopped.
The arm had been white.
Twenty-Nine
I went bungee jumping for my twenty-first birthday. It’s scary as hell as soon as you fall back. That fear that your worst nightmare might come true at any second. But then you get over it, and there’s this moment when you just let go. Surrender. Feel like the weight of the world is finally off you and you’re free.
And just when you’re about to reach full don’t-give-a-shit mode, you get to the end of your rope and you’re yanked back to reality.
I hadn’t felt anything like it since—until I saw that video. Saw an arm not brown enough or tattooed enough to belong to Mel Pierce.
The free-fall euphoria lasted much longer with my feet on the ground, long enough for me to convince Alex to send me the video, grab Erin from her plum window seat, and get out of there. It wasn’t until we got back to the Caddy that two questions made me recoil. “If Mel wasn’t the driver, who was? And why does he have someone following me?”
“We can go back to your place.” Erin buckled into the driver’s seat. “The guy in the van should answer the second question.”
She, of course, had taken the revelation in stride, donning the same stoic look she always wore when she wasn’t pretending to be someone and something she was not. As with everything, she was both right and wrong. I needed to ask questions—just not of some stranger who’d been lurking outside my house. I needed to ask the stranger who’d been lurking outside my life.
Erin was about to start the car when I put my hand on her arm. “I need to go see Mel.”
We drove south, then east. I gave myself the same pep talk as I had before. I could do this. I would do this. Have an actual conversation with my father. By the time Erin dropped me off and went to find a parking garage, I was ready. I hadn’t called Tam to let her know I was coming. I didn’t need anyone or anything getting in my way. The security guard let me go straight up. He didn’t even call first. I was in the system.
The walk down Mel’s Hall of Hits was quicker this time. When I got to the white receptionist, I smiled but didn’t stop. Just kept going straight to the door. Barely paused long enough to ask my one question. “Can you buzz me in?”
She paused, unsure. “Is Mr. Pie—”
My smile went up two notches. “Why wouldn’t he? I’m his daughter.”
I waited. After a second, I heard the buzz.
She didn’t have time to alert the office Slack. I got double takes as I walked by, glances as quick as they were furtive. The group that’d previously set up shop across from Tam’s desk had taken their road show to a random desk a few feet from the door. I turned as I walked by, smiled at them since I knew they saw me. “Afternoon,” I said.
Tam was at her desk, playing her position in the defensive line. She had her ever-present mug of coffee, which she damn near spit-taked when she saw me. “Lena, did we know you were stopping by?”
I still didn’t stop. “Nope.”
Mel’s double doors were closed, but not locked. I walked in, not having to glance back to know the shocked expression on Tam’s face.
“I’m not meeting with him unless he gives us a guarantee.” He was there at his desk, both his feet propped on it as he spoke on his landline. His sunglasses were off so I could see his eyes—my eyes. They looked in my direction and stayed there. His expression didn’t change one bit. “Melina’s here.” He hung up before the person could respond. “Here to make a citizen’s arrest?”
And that’s what finally stopped me. Of course he knew.
I turned to close the door. Neither of us spoke until I took the seat across from him. And then he went first. “Yeah, I know. My child thinks I would kill my own children. Free told me.”
“Free? Not one of the men you have following me?” I barely recognized my own voice, hadn’t heard the sadness in it since I was a kid. “Yeah, I know too.”
But he was shaking his head before I could put the period at the end of the sentence. “Those men are there to protect you.”
“I’m twenty-eight years old. I don’t need you to protect me, Mel.” I left off the “anymore.”
He finally took his feet off the desk. “Mel.” He said his own name. “I’m Mel. You’re Lena. Lena Scott.”
It was the first time he’d acknowledged it. I’d wanted a reaction for ten years. It was nowhere near as satisfying as eighteen-year-old me had thought—had hoped—it would be. He grabbed his sunglasses from the desk, started to put them back on but stopped himself. Didn’t say anything for a while.
“That hurt like hell,” he said. “You changing your name like that.”
It was as vulnerable as I’d ever seen him. “Yeah? Well, you missing my graduation hurt.” An understatement but it was all I could get out.
“Your mother told me not to come.”
That was news. Not surprising news, having lived with my mother, but news nonetheless.
“Since when did Mel Pier—” I stopped myself. “When did you ever listen when someone told you not to do something?”
“I sent a gift.”
Tiffany solitaire diamond earrings in platinum. They were still in the box. “No one said you had to sit next to her, hold her hand, sing ‘Isn’t She Lovely.’ You should’ve come. Instead, you went to brunch. I know because I fucking read about it in Page Six the next day.”