“Ruby used to say that to me,” I continue. “‘You’re a McTavish now, Camden. That makes you special.’ But I saw what being ‘special’ looked like to this family.”
It looked like Ben wrecking a boat on Beaver Lake, slamming into some poor kid on a Jet Ski who never walked again. No matter that Ben was drunk, no matter that he should have been arrested. The kid lost his legs, but thanks to the McTavish fortune, he had a full bank account for life.
It looked like Howell’s wife, sunglasses hiding black eyes, but new diamonds always appearing in her ears, around her neck, before the bruises even faded. Howell was a mean drunk but a regular at Tiffany’s.
It looked like Nelle, placidly watching the police haul away one of the cleaning crew on robbery charges. Then, later that same evening, appearing at dinner wearing the very same bracelet she’d claimed had been stolen. “I found it in my jewelry box,” she’d said with an elegant shrug, and nothing more. There was no phone call down to the station, and certainly no guilt at having jumped to conclusions.
It looked like Libby sitting on the edge of my bed, expecting me to be enthralled, assuming I’d be seduced.
And yeah, you know what? It looked like Ruby, picking some poor kid out of the foster system and hanging a golden anchor around his neck just to piss off her family.
“She hated it,” I tell Jules, sinking down on the bench in front of Ruby’s dressing table. “The idea of me leaving. I think it was the only time she ever raised her voice to me.”
You’re a little old for teenage rebellion, Camden, and frankly, I’m tired of this discussion. Transfer to Duke, transfer to Wake Forest, but you have responsibilities to this family, and I will be damned if you abandon them!
“I stopped taking her calls. She stopped paying my bills. I got a job working at a restaurant in Chapel Hill only to have the manager call me into his office after my first shift and say that he needed to let me go.”
I laugh bitterly, shaking my head. “It took two more jobs that shitcanned me after only a day to realize what Ruby was doing. As long as I was in North Carolina, I was within her reach. In trying to make it hard for me to leave, she only proved why I couldn’t stay.”
“Is that…”
Jules’s voice is whisper-thin, and she stops, takes a deep breath. “Is that why? So that you could be free?”
It’s not an absolution, but it’s not a condemnation, either. She hasn’t gotten up, hasn’t run out screaming, and fuck knows I shouldn’t be dumb enough to hope for anything more, but that’s what the little spark in my chest feels like right now.
“I don’t know,” I tell her truthfully. “Maybe? I didn’t … it wasn’t something I planned. I didn’t come here that night to … to do that.”
But I’d just lost another job, my credit cards were frozen, my bank account was locked. I’d told myself I didn’t need her money, I could make it on my own. I didn’t care if I slept in my car and ate cheap hot dogs and canned chili for the rest of my life, though of course, I didn’t realize how na?ve that was. For one thing, the car wasn’t mine, and a phone call from Ruby would’ve had it on the back of a tow truck within the hour. And if I couldn’t keep a job for more than two days, I couldn’t make enough money to buy hot dogs, much less a new car, and the more jobs I lost, the harder it would be to get new ones. Everywhere I turned, there was some new, Ruby-shaped roadblock in front of me. Every path of escape had slowly been cut off.
“I didn’t realize how hard it would be,” I tell Jules now, and when she blanches, I lift a hand, shaking my head.
“No. No, I don’t mean that … part. I mean, just leaving. I didn’t understand how every part of my life was tied to Ruby. To what she’d given me. To what she could take away. When I came up here that night, all I wanted to do was talk to her, to see if we could find some kind of compromise. I thought there had to be a way, you know? I thought…”
I thought I could find the right words to make her see reason, to let me go. What I didn’t get was that there was nothing reasonable about any of this to Ruby.
That Ruby would never let me go.
I breathe in through my nose, knowing I have to finish this.
“It was raining that night. Ben was off at college and Libby was in town.” I laugh, but there’s no actual mirth in it. “So, yeah, she was lying at dinner, but she was also telling the truth in a fucked-up way. Howell was doing some guys’ fishing weekend down in Georgia. Nelle was upstairs watching TV—she got really obsessed with Downton Abbey. A rich family in England, that big house, World War One? Classic Nelle.”