“I’m glad you told me all of this.” It was an evasion, and she squinted at me like she could damn well see it, but she didn’t challenge me for the moment. She was going to take her time to figure out how to get through to this new Tamara who had managed to draw some of her biggest secrets out of her… but what I wasn’t going to let her find out was that by the time she’d decided, it would be too late.
My mind returned to Steven, this time because I was done with going over the past for the moment. The present was full of many more concerning things. What was his plan to help Jess? Would it work, or was Jess a lost cause and the next time I saw Steven going to involve him behind bars?
There was a little plaque mounted on the wall next to the closets, one of a half a dozen Mum had with the famous ‘serenity prayer’. Mum had put one up on my bedroom wall too, making a big thing of how it was such a tradition between mothers and daughters. Changing what you could, and accepting what you could not… well, Mum had added that one up for herself, hadn’t she.
I wondered if anyone had ever given Jess such a thing. She probably wouldn’t find it as relatable as a lot of girls did.
I still had to work out for myself what I could (and should) change and what I couldn’t, but if there was one thing I knew already it was that I was just going to have to let Steven do what he had planned here. There was nothing I could do to help him.
I wanted things to be different… but life was determined to keep teaching me how futile that was.
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Steven
I left a message for Para while she was still offline: Sorry I can’t keep my promise.
It really did eat me, having to invade her life when she’d asked me not to. Even though I knew I was saving her, it was still a violation to me.
But I knew all about crossing the line—and when it came to a girl I was mad for, it was already proven I could go wherever I needed to. In some ways, Tamara might end up being even worse for me than Julia.
I was actually shaking a little, parking outside the address Tamara had given me. I waited until I had that under control before I got out of my car. Confidence was the way to go with this, acting like I wasn’t doing anything wrong so I didn’t have anyone else in the neighbourhood trying to intervene.
Well, as far as I was concerned, what I was doing was exactly right, so that was easy. And the nearest neighbours were a few paddocks away. But still, I was more tense than I’d ever been just walking up to someone’s door before.
A woman with very big dark eyes opened shortly after my knock. She looked all over like a sad puppy expecting a smack.
I turned on all the charm I would have used on Julia’s parents, if she’d ever let me meet them. “I’m sorry for bothering you. Is Brad at home? I’d like to have a chat with him.”
She shook her head in a way that was strange: almost pleading. “He doesn’t talk to salespeople or journalists, sorry—”
I blocked the way as she tried to close the door. I felt like a real thug… and that was both a bad and a good feeling. “He’s going to want to talk. Trust me.”
A flash of another face behind her caught my eye: a girl with dark hair I recognised somehow though I had never seen her before. She looked like her mother and didn’t remind me of Tamara at all, which was a huge fucking relief.
“Please,” Para’s mother said. “Could you just go?”
She sounded almost as terrified as Julia had when I was dragging her off, before she realised I was still the same pathetic fuck I’d always been, and maybe that would have made me weak if not for what I knew about her. She’d known exactly what was happening to Para in the house they both lived in and she did nothing. Fuck her. Fuck any mother who wouldn’t stand up for her own kid.
“I’ll stay right here until I see Brad Chalmers, please,” I told her.
Finally a hulking brute shoved his way between the two women, going from zero to straight-in-my-face in seconds. He was fucking huge, bigger than all the pictures I’d seen had made me understand, and I would have been terrified if I didn’t know I had something that could knock him flat.
I got in with it fast, before I could think too much about how he might try to knock me flat anyway. “Hi, Brad. I’m going to need you to come for a drive with me, just the two of us and nobody else involved… unless you think you’d like what you’ve been doing to your daughter to become a trivia question on Family Feud.”
Brad backed off right away, his nostrils flaring. I could see a bit of Tamara in him, the way her mind was always working when she had a secret she was trying to work out how to manage, but I shook that thought off and led the way when he came forward.
Para’s mother clutched at his arm as he passed. “Brad…”
“Keep Jess inside, check her work or something, just fucking keep an eye on her,” he told her. “I’ll be back soon.”
I didn’t want to let her out of my sight. I just had to keep telling myself this was all for her, even the way I was going about it.
He sauntered along ahead of me happily enough at first, but at the end of his long driveway, out of sight of his wife and Para, he balked. “I’m not getting in a fucking car with you, mate, so whatever you’ve got to—”
I pulled out my little knife then, something I’d nicked from the kitchen drawer that my dad used to cut fruit, and he laughed at me. “You stupid little boy.”
“You want to say that again from the wrong side of a jail cell?” I said, and he got straight in the front seat of the car.
With him inside my own car looked like the last place I wanted to be, but I forced myself to keep moving, maintaining that big dick energy neither of us really believed