“I never told her what to do,” Andrew countered. “She considered it a wedding gift. Take some of the heat off me. Give her a little taste of the fun.”
Callie didn’t doubt it. “Was she fucked up before you met her, or did you make her that way?”
Andrew paused before answering. “She was special from the beginning.”
Callie felt her resolve start to falter. It was the pause. He was controlling everything, down to the cadence of their conversation. He wasn’ t worried about the gun. He wasn’t worried about her potential for violence. Leigh had said that Andrew was always three steps ahead. He had lured her here. He had something awful planned.
That was the difference between the two sisters. Leigh would be trying to calculate the angles. All Callie could do was stare at the bottle of tequila, longing for another mouthful.
“Excuse me for a moment.” Andrew took his phone out of his pocket. The blue light glowed back in his face. He showed Callie the screen. His security cameras had obviously alerted him to movement back at his house. Leigh’s fancy car was parked in his driveway. Callie watched her sister walk toward the front door, Glock at her side, before Andrew made the screen go black.
He told Callie, “Harleigh looks distressed.”
Callie put Sidney’s gun down on the bar. She had to hurry this along. Leigh had made good time. She would drive even faster when she turned back around. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“I could still smell you on Sid’s fingers when I got home.” He was watching her closely, hoping for a reaction. “You taste exactly as sweet as I thought you would.”
“Let me be the first to congratulate you on your oral herpes.” Callie turned the shot glass back over. She poured herself a proper drink. “What do you want out of this, Andrew?”
“You know what I want.” Andrew didn’t make her guess. “Tell me about my father.”
Callie wanted to laugh. “You picked the wrong fucking day to ask me about that asshole.”
Andrew said nothing. He was watching her with the same coldness that Leigh had described. Callie realized she was pushing him too much, acting too reckless. Andrew could reach for the gun, there could be a knife under the bar, or he could use his hands because, up close, she realized how big he was, how the muscles rippling under his shirt were not for show. If it came down to physical blows again, Callie did not stand a chance.
She said, “Before yesterday, I would’ve said Buddy had his demons, but he was an okay guy.”
“What happened yesterday?”
He was pretending like Sidney hadn’t told him everything. “I saw one of the tapes.”
Andrew’s curiosity was piqued. “What did you think about it?”
“I think …” Callie hadn’t let herself process what she thought, other than disgust with her own delusions. “I told myself for so long that he loved me, but then I saw what he did to me. That wasn’t really love, was it?”
He shrugged off the question. “It got a little rough, but there were other times you enjoyed it. I saw the look on your face. You can’t fake that. Not when you’re a kid.”
“You’re wrong,” Callie said, because she had been faking it all of her life.
“Am I?” Andrew asked. “Look at what happened to you without him. You were destroyed the moment he died. You were rendered meaningless without him.”
If there was one thing Callie knew, it was that her life had meaning. She had grown Leigh a baby. She had given her sister something that Leigh would’ve never trusted to give herself. “Why do you care, Andrew? Buddy couldn’t stand you. The last thing he said to you was to drink your NyQuil and go the fuck to bed.”
Andrew’s expression showed that the blow had landed. “We’ll never know how Dad felt about me, will we? You and Harleigh robbed us of the chance to get to know each other.”
“We did you a favor,” Callie said, though she wasn’t so sure. “Does your mother know what happened?”
“That bitch doesn’t care about anything but work. You were there. She never had time for me then, and she doesn’t make time for me now.”
“Everything she did was for you,” Callie said. “She was the best mother in the neighborhood.”
“That’s like saying she was the best hyena in the pack.” Andrew’s jaw clenched, the bone sticking out at a sharp angle. “I’m not talking about my mother with you. That’s not why we’re here.”