Page 36 of Hard Heart

“Do you know how fun it is to have a toddler throw a milkshake over you? At the beginning of a shift? Besides, I can’t let Tina go it alone. I’d worry about her.”

Levi stiffened. “I thought you said it was safe?”

“Oh, Tina just got into some weirdness. Old men with fetishes—I’m trying to get her out of it. I only want to save enough to get me through school and make a down payment on that cabin we keep talking about.”

“I’d rather sell this place than let you take risks.”

“No way! I love this house. Your mom won’t live forever, and then we can come back here.”

The irony. If there was any woman Levi had wanted dead, it was Mary Theresa Sykes, not that he’d ever admit that out loud. She and her sky-high cholesterol had lived for another three years after Ruby passed. In a bizarre twist of fate, he’d been watching The Wizard of Oz in the chow hall when he got the news—Redding’s Grove had an extremely narrow selection of TV channels; think cartoons, religious programming, and PG-rated movies—and he’d celebrated with a Snickers bar from the commissary. Ding-dong, the witch was finally fucking dead. Wherever she’d ended up, he hoped Ruby was giving her hell.

Punishment for his mom, therapy for his girl.

But that afternoon, Ruby had snuggled against him, both of them basking in blissful ignorance. Until his phone rang. Of course, it was his mother.

“Just turn off the ringer,” Ruby groaned as he reached across her to the nightstand.

“Do you want her to drive over here? Because she will. You know she will.”

He’d left the room to take the call, and that was the last time he’d seen Ruby conscious. She’d looked back over her shoulder as she walked into her en-suite bathroom, muttering about leakage. Her final words to him?

“How am I supposed to become a therapist when it’s me who needs the therapy?”

Levi had spoken with his mother and taken his medication as she watched him via FaceTime, cursing inwardly as he complied. Another irony that wasn’t lost on him—he’d encouraged Ruby to seek alternate employment as he popped pills to keep the tuition money flowing. A half hour later, he’d gone to check on her, decided that he’d had enough of being a hypocrite. If she’d take a step back from the sex work, he’d wean himself off the pills, spit them out into a cup or something, and they could be each other’s sponsors. Like AA, except without the alcohol problem. Levi didn’t drink at all.

But Ruby had been asleep, starfished across the bed. Her blonde hair fell from the pillow in a waterfall, and he’d kissed her on the forehead before he draped a sheet over her and headed back to his lair. His hideaway was on the second floor, an airy studio beside a smaller bedroom with a bathroom tucked into one corner. Natural light flooded in through a pair of French doors that led to a private balcony, and he had the space to leave several easels set up.

Christmas was just around the corner, and he was working on a surprise gift—a triptych of cat portraits showing Shadow in three different poses. He’d put on a pair of noise-cancelling headphones, turned up the music, and begun to paint.

“By ‘nooner,’ you mean sex?” Serafina asked Levi, and now she wouldn’t look at him.

“Yes, but there was nothing untoward about it. The last time I saw Ruby, she was taking a nap.”

“Was that normal? For her to nap in the afternoon?”

“She was a night owl. I remember being relieved she was asleep because it gave me a chance to spend a couple more hours on her Christmas gift, but she never got to see it.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I thought about leaving the paintings on her grave, but…” Levi sighed. Rain would have ruined the canvases, and perhaps there would have been a macabre symbolism in that, in the unfinished work rotting away, but he didn’t want the memory in his head.

“Did you attend her funeral?”

Levi nodded. “They arrested me two hours afterward.”

Serafina’s face fell, and not for the first time, Levi wondered about her capabilities as a lawyer. If she’d passed two bar exams, she was clearly smart, but he’d been able to fly through any academic test with ease too. It was his social skills that let him down; he understood that. Making small talk was more of a challenge than understanding the formation of photochemical smog. He struggled with empathy; she showed too much of it.

In contrast, the legal team his parents hired a decade ago had been ice-cool under pressure, intrusive in their questioning, and ruthless when it came to interrogating witnesses in court. And they’d still lost.

Who the fuck knew what was going on anymore?

“I’m so sorry it happened that way,” Serafina said. “I can only imagine how distressing it must have been.”

“You’ve never lost anyone close?”

Levi was curious how far he could push her when it came to revealing personal information. He wanted to know more about her. What made her tick, why she’d moved halfway across the world, everything.

And most importantly, why was she here today? Were her colleagues at the Justice Project aware of the trip? Levi had asked around, and he knew this wasn’t a regular visit. In fact, Serafina had met with Elias Jones over in Unit Eight on two occasions, and according to Marnie, who tended Unit Four’s branch of the Redding’s Hill gossip tree, she’d been nothing more than a glorified note-taker for the lawyer she’d accompanied. She was taking notes again today, but not many of them. Had she gone rogue? And if so, why? Levi circled back to the podcast thing, but he also had to consider whether one of the others had sent her. Justin, checking up on him?