“Bobby, of course,” she says with a smile. “When you’re gone and Daddy has to keep his promise to retire and give Bobby the company, he’s going to go to sleep one night and never wake up.”
“No!”
“Yes!” She laughs. Candy is clearly enjoying my pain. “And then, after a respectable amount of time, Bobby and I will find solace in each other and get married. We will be the new face of DHR.”
“Classy,” I mutter. “I thought we were friends, Bobby.”
“You never gave up the goods.” She laughs. “I did. Poor Bobby was in love with Adrienne, and she never noticed him. Boohoo.”
“Were you always this mean?” I ask, no longer caring if she shoots me or not.
“Pretty much.”
“Yikes.”
And then the room explodes.
Manny comes in through a side door and shoots Bobby, who falls to the ground. Candy turns and raises her gun toward Manny, and I scream.
“No!”
Eric is behind her with his gun raised. But I can’t let him kill her, can I?
“She’s pregnant.”
Candy moves to turn back to see what’s behind her, but Eric is faster than she is, raises his hand holding the gun high overhead, and brings it down on her temple. She crumples to the ground.
“I told you we’d make it in time,” Eric says with a smile.
Someone starts cutting the tape away that’s binding me to the chair, and I know without seeing him or hearing his voice that it’s King.
“I love you too,” he whispers in my ear, but it’s too much, and everything goes black.
Chapter 19
Just the beginning
Six months later
The sun is high over the ocean as my dad walks me down the aisle. King is handsome as ever in his gray suit with Manny and Eric standing at his side. He drew the line at a tux, claiming it was “complete bullshit with nowhere to put a gun.”
I tried to insist that guns were not needed on our wedding day, but he disagreed.
When I woke up in the hospital that night, I had a nasty concussion from the bump on the head Bobby gave me. But I was all right, and I would be. King had declared his love for me in front of everyone in the hospital room, and I do mean everyone—my parents, Manny, and Eric.
It also turned out that our argument about birth control was moot, because I was already pregnant. It’s a girl, and I’ve already told Sky that I want to name her Mae.
Dad divorced Candy in the following weeks after her arrest. He had already been planning to but he needed to get all of his ducks in a row. He did feel bad, because he never suspected that she was homicidal. Like me, dad thought she was too dumb to be murderous. We were all wrong.
Bobby died that day. Manny fired a fatal shot, and he told me he sleeps just fine at night. Those aren’t the ghosts that will keep him awake. He went back to Texas to be with his family. Marisol is overjoyed that there will be a new baby, particularly one that she doesn’t have to nurse or get up with at night.
Candy is serving two consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. She gave birth in a women’s correctional facility in northern California two weeks ago, the baby was adopted privately with a closed record. I hope he lives his life free, unencumbered by the monsters who sired him.
After the ER doctor announced that King and I had an announcement of our own, Dad declared openly that he was done serving his sentence for cheating on Mom twenty years ago and it was time to stop fucking around and she needed to let him come home. Then King, not to be outdone, announced that I had six months to plan a wedding, no more. And no tuxedos.
He’s really a party pooper.
She declined.
