“No. I understand why you didn’t tell me, Mom, but I need time to process everything. It’s been a long day, hell, a long year, and this on top of everything else is just too much.”
“I understand.” Her mom still looked defeated, but she didn’t push Kelsi any further. “I’ll be here when you want to talk about him.”
“Yeah.” Kelsi didn’t look back as she walked out to her car. She pulled out of the driveway, feeling like she was adrift with no land in sight.
Needing to vent, she reached for her phone and called Abby.
“How was day one?” Abby’s excited voice filtered through the car’s speakers.
At the sound of her best friend’s voice, Kelsi lost the tentative control she had kept on her emotions since Dylan had stepped into Banksy’s office. Her throat constricted and she cleared it a few times, not wanting to give her emotional state away to Abby.
Her best friend was too smart for her own good, though, and could tell that something was wrong. “What happened?” she asked, voice sharp with her concern. “Who do I need to tase?”
Kelsi choked on a startled laugh, knowing her friend wasn’t joking. As a private investigator, she really did carry around a stun gun, and she wasn’t afraid to use it. Once she had even tased a man at a bar when he was giving the two of them a hard time and refused to take their repeated no’s for an answer. Luckily, the officer who responded was one Kelsi was familiar with. When he heard what the pervert had been trying, and after a few of the other women at the bar had spoken up too, he ignored the man’s cries of assault and let Abby off without even a warning.
Kelsi struggled to find the words to explain what had happened that day but finally went with the simplest explanation. “Dylan is back.”
Abby’s startled screech was so loud through the speakers that Kelsi winced.
“What!”
“Yeah.” Kelsi sighed. “He’s back in town. And not just that, he’s been back. Formonths. And my mom never told me.”
Abby let out an affronted gasp. “Oh no, she didnothide that from you.”
“She did.” Kelsi shook her head, even though Abby couldn’t see her do it, and told her what her mom had explained about the accident. As she spoke, her voice rose in pitch and speed until she sounded nearly hysterical. “And now, to top it all off, he’s working at the same office, and we’ve been assigned a big case together.”
Abby was quiet for a few long moments. Softly she asked, “Do you think your mom didn’t tell you what happened because she didn’t think you cared about him anymore?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Kelsi snapped. “What does matter is the fact that she hid this from me and knew I was going to see him today. I could have been emotionally prepared to see him, but instead he caught me off guard. On top of everything with Tom, I thought she might have been a little more considerate, but guess I was wrong.”
“K, you know as well as I do that if your mom had given you any warning, you wouldn’t have shown up this morning.” Abby’s voice was endlessly patient.
“That’s not true.” Kelsi could picture the look Abby was making, neither of them believing her for a second.
“So, what are you going to do?”
Kelsi thought for a long moment. “I’m going to do what I can to win this case, with his help or not. It’ll be strictly professional. I can’t let him into my heart again.”
“That’s my girl,” Abby said. “But, Kelsi, you know as well as I do that it’s not quite that simple.”
Kelsi did know that, but she sure as hell was going to do whatever it took to keep Dylan from worming his way back in again. She shattered over him once, and she vowed to never let him break her like that again.
CHAPTER 10
Kelsi
26 Days to Trial
As the redsun crested over the horizon the following morning, Kelsi pushed her kayak off from the shore. She let the repetitive motions of her paddle—gliding through the water on the right, then the left, forward and backward—lull her into a zen state.
This was her happy place. Here, on the water, a light burn in her shoulders and biceps as she worked against the waves to propel her kayak through the slightly choppy water of the small creek off the Chesapeake Bay.
She moved the paddle faster and faster, shooting through the water, exorcizing her demons and frustrations until her arms shook with exhaustion and her chest heaved. Only then did she lay the paddle across her lap and float. She trailed her fingers through the lukewarm water, careful to keep away from the jellyfish floating lazily past her. Kelsi closed her eyes, and the tranquility of the creek at sunrise filled her with contentment. It was in these moments, with the soft cacophony of the birds in the woods framing the water, the soft splash of a distant fish jumping, and the rustle of the squirrels and snakes and deer in the reeds on the shore, that she truly felt at peace.
The crash of the waves against the shore, mixing with the beautiful array of undisturbed nature, when it was still too early for the tubers and skiers to be out on the water, was her version of heaven on earth. Normally these were the moments she could let her mind go quiet and not worry about everything that she had going on. When she was pushing her body hard, she had no room in her mind for anything besides focusing on her breaths and the movements propelling her forward.
Not today, though. Today she struggled to clear her mind. Thoughts of Dylan and the case—and the fact that she was going to have to go back to Virginia Beach, to Tom, sooner than she’d expected—floated around in her brain like pesky gnats.
