“Look, you’re just gonna keep beating yourself up,” Paul said with forceful affection, the kind that barges in with good intentions. “I think getting away would do you some good. You’ve just gotta?—”
“I’ve gotta what? Cope? Wait for another pile of ashes to show up at my door?”
Everyone had opinions about Cal’s grief. Cal had opinions too. These days, they zipped from his lips far faster than he could stop them. Paul shook his head and tried again.
“That’s not what I meant. I love you like a brother, and I hate seeing you this way, but no one has seen Amelia since the party. I don’t know that you’re going to find her in the…” Paul cleared a catch in his throat. “Well, in the way you think you are.”
Paul couldn’t say it. No one could. Dead. Amelia Havick was dead. That’s what everyone wanted to say, and Cal was suffering, not stupid, so he heard the whispers and read the room.
“My daughter isn’t dead,” he’d told anyone who’d listen. With rubbery smiles, they indulged it like a lunatic delusion and threw him a bone to say that they tried. It was only human to be so knee-deep in denial.
“You think she’s dead,” Cal said with a sinkhole in his chest. Shoulders hunched, he collapsed into it. One day, it’d swallow him whole.
Paul fixed his eyes to the far end of the yard where sunlight and shadows met on the overgrown lawn.
“If she were alive, she would’ve come home by now.”
The point stood, but Cal stubbornly refused to believe it.
“I’d know if she was gone. It’d be like a light turning out in me.”
“I know what it’s like to lose someone without making amends. What happened between you and Amelia wasn’t your fault.”
Wasn’t it, though? The trees beyond the fence swayed in the gentle breeze, not unlike the last time he saw his daughter. His carelessness had driven a wedge between them by then, and Amelia stood in his office no longer a little girl, but her trust in him fading like a dying star.
Most nights, Cal dreamed of her. The years of her life played like an old movie until the film ran out at dawn and he laid alone in the morning light.
“I shut her out,” Cal said, the words thick with shame. “She needed me, and I left her out in the cold. And for what? My own pride. I was so hard on her. Maybe if I hadn’t been.”
Cal grounded the thought before it got away. He couldn’t rewrite the past, so he turned to Paul and voiced what mattered.
“This isn’t about the things I didn’t get to say or what I would’ve done differently. Amelia isn’t dead. I can’t prove it, but I need you to believe me. She ran from something that night.”
“From what, though?”
“Burt warned me that Rich was in over his head with Philippe Velasco. I’ve got this sick feeling that Rich knew more about Philippe’s death than he let on.”
Paul folded his arms and sucked on his teeth. “Fuckin’ Rich.”
He didn’t know the half of it and took up the cause because Cal had made it clear that Richard Dauer wasn’t the man they used to know. And he was missing—not identified amongst the dead and his beloved Ferrari unaccounted for. The implication was clear. Richard survived but made no attempt to reach out, not to Cal or anyone else.
“Something bigger is going on,” Cal said, “and I think Amelia is caught up in whatever it is.”
An uncanny calm blanketed the yard as the world went quiet.The birds stopped chirping, and the leaves no longer rustled. Tension tangled in Cal’s stomach.
“Listen to me, Cal. If you’re not gonna come to Chicago, at least consider leaving town for a while. It’s not good, you staying here alone.”
“I’ll think about it.” Cal mindlessly patted the phone at his hip, his only lifeline to Amelia. “I appreciate all that you and Susan have done for me. You have no idea what it’s meant.”
Paul squeezed Cal in a tight embrace and huffed in a way that Cal knew he stifled tears.
“You can’t imagine how sorry we are.”
Cal’s chest ached, and he clung to his friend who’d stayed longer than anyone else. At the kitchen table, Susan plucked petals from the lily arrangement and placed them in a plastic bag. The clean casserole dish sat beside the barren arrangement.
“What am I supposed to do?” Cal asked tearfully.
“You carry on because you’re Callum Havick, the most decent man I’ve had the pleasure of knowing, let alone calling one of my oldest friends. And damn it, we’re getting old, aren’t we? What the hell happened?”
