“Jesus, lady,” Conner says from one of the chairs in front of my father’s desk. The last time I saw him he was wearing an impeccably tailored tux. Today he’s wearing worn jeans, a T-shirt with his family’s bar logo on it and battered boots, the tattoo ink I’d only seen hints of Friday night, on full display. “For someone who’s beenwaiting for answersand isready for the truth to come out, you sure do talk a lot.”
“Excuse me?” Aunt Renee jerks back like Conner slapped her in the face. “How dare?—”
“How dare I?” Conner flashes her his dimples. “Lady, I’m wondering the same fuckin’ thing about you.”
“This is ridiculous,” Renee huffs. “Preston?—”
“Conner’s right—you’re talking a lot for someone who expects her daughter to be vindicated so you can either shut up or you can get the fuck out,” I say, raising my tone to shut her down completely.
“Are you going to allow her to talk to me like that?” my aunt gasps down at my father like I just spit on her.
“Yes, Renee, I am,” he tells her, even though the look he’s giving me tells me I’m on thin ice.
“This is outrageous,” she seethes, her gaze narrowing down to slits. “My daughter wouldnever?—”
“Shut up, Renee.” I ignore the look my father gives me when I say it to focus on Conner. I don’t need to hear it. I already know the truth. The only reason I’m here is to make sure Paige doesn’t worm her way out of what’s coming to her like she always does. “Go on, let’s get this over with.”
“Goddamn…” Looking around the room at his captive audience, he smiles. “I feel just like Jessica Fletcher.” When no one answers him or even seems to understand what he’s saying, Conner sighs. “Murder She Wrote. Angela Landsbury—it was my grandma’s favorite show. Seriously?” He looks disappointed in all of us. “Wow, okay. Anyway…” Looking at Paige, Conner’s expression hardens. “You upset my wife. You’re lucky all she did was ask me to come here and tell the truth.” Shifting his gaze to my father, Conner sits back in his chair, long legs kicked out in front of him. “The texts are real. Paige and Allister have been having an affair behind everyone’s back for the last two years. She’s the one who initiated it, almost immediately after Millie started dating him—although that rubber-fucking weirdo pretty much jumped at the chance when she threw herself at him. The texts Millie shot out to her wedding guests were just a fraction of afraction. G rated compared to the real nasty stuff. There are videos, pictures?—”
“He’s lying,” Renee shouts. “Look at him—does he look like a computer expert to you? If you think, for one moment that we’re going to stand here and be lied to?—”
“On top of a law degree from Harvard and well over a dozen bachelor’s and master’s degrees, ranging from Celticpoetry to forensic psychology, my husband has a dual doctorate—theoretical physics and cognitive neuroscience,” Henley says, interrupting my aunt’s latest tirade from the seat beside her husband. “Both from MIT—where he teaches computer science and coding when he’s bored.” Looking at my father, Henley’s expression softens. “You know Spencer. You know he’d never suggest you trust Conner if you couldn’t.”
“How do you know?” my father asks, his expression caught somewhere between stubborn disbelief and dawning comprehension that he’d been wrong about Paige. That he’d allowed himself to be fooled by her pretty face and the fact that she is his dead brother’s only child. “How can you be sure that they weren’t?—”
“Fabricated?” Conner finishes for him. “Aside from the fact that I’m a goddamned certified genius? Because I’m the one who hacked their phones and sent what I found on them to Millie.”
“I don’t understand.” My father’s brow furrows. “I thought?—”
“Spencer reached out to offer Conner’s help with tracking the texts after the wedding because I asked him to,” Henley explains. “And I asked him to do that because I’m also the one who asked Conner to find evidence to substantiate the fact that your niece was having an affair with your daughter’s fiancé.” Looking at Paige, Henley’s lip curls like she smells something bad. “I saw the two of you—inmylibrary,” she says like it’s an unforgivable sin. “So I asked my husband to do what he does and in less than an hour he had it all. Every text. Every picture. Every video. And he sent it all to Millie.” Looking at me, Henley gives me a proud-papa grin. “I was hoping she’d do something spectacular with the information and she didn’t disappoint.”
“Well… notallof it,” Conner says. “There are somethings I kept back for the big reveal.” Looking at my father, he gives him a quick grimace. “Some very unflattering things said about you and your wife. Your daughters. Not just between Paige and Allister. Paige and her mother too. She knew about the affair all along.” Leaning in a bit, Conner lowers his tone like he’s telling my aunt a secret. “I put together a slideshow if you’re interested in viewing the highlights.”
“I don’t believe this,” Aunt Renee throws her hands up in the air, trying for indignant but sounding panicked. “You know that Dean Mercer—I know you do. Just look at you, I bet the two of you?—”
“Full disclosure, Idoknow Dean Mercer. We grew up in the same neighborhood,” Conner says, ignoring my aunt’s blow-up to focus on my father. “But that’s nothing more than an interesting coincidence.Alsofull disclosure—I sent Millie an audio clip of the phone conversation you and Dean had while he and Millie were gone. You know—the one where you offered to pay him to leave your daughter alone?”
When he says it, my father’s face goes pale and he looks up at me. “Melisan?—”
“There’s also a video of Paige sexually assaulting Dean at the hotel bar at the Boston Hawthorne, in front of about a dozen live witnesses,” I say loudly, talking over him because I don’t want his excuses and I don’t care about his reasons. “Conner didn’t have to find that one though—it’s all over the internet.”
“Oh my god…” Giving up, my Aunt Renee turns away from the lot of us to stare out the window.
Looking at Paige, I finally see her for what she really is. Sad and pathetic. “I know Dean—he won’t want to press charges. Not because he doesn’t think he should or because he doesn’t think what you did was a big deal but because he won’t want toput me or this family through the ringer—but you should’ve thought about that before you put your hands on him.”
“You don’t know Dean half as well as you think you do.” Caught and exposed, Paige’s mask finally slips. “He loved every minute of?—”
Rearing back, I slap her across the face so hard I knock her off my father’s desk.
“You’re almost as disgusting as you are pathetic, you know that?” Standing over her, I shake my head before looking up, aiming my glare at my father. “You and I have nothing to talk about—nothing—until you apologize to him,” I say before I shift my glare to find my aunt, still standing behind my father’s chair, mouth hanging open. “Andyou—” Lifting my hand, the palm of it throbbing, I jab a finger at her face. “you have ten minutes to get your daughter out of this building before I call security. Your seat on the board is revoked and both of you are barred from the building. Your office will be used for storage before I’ll see you in it again.”
“You can’t do that,” she blusters at me, waving her hands in the air. “You don’t have the authority to?—”
“I’m the future of Blackwell Investments,” I remind her. “I’ll be CEO and running shit from this very office by the time I’m forty—I can do whatever the fuck I want.” Looking at my dad, I make sure he knows I’m serious. “If you fight me on this, if you let them continue to be a part of this family,I’llleave and when it comes time, you can hand this place over to Dalton because I don’t really care anymore.”
Turning away from him without giving him a chance to answer me, I look at Conner and Henley. “Thank you, both of you, for everything.”
Without waiting for a reply, I turn around and walk out the door.
