He cocks his head and then finally nods. “Point taken.”
My sandwich appears in front of me, and I mumble a thank you to Maya.
I take a bite, chew, swallow.
Brendan and I don’t say much after that.
CHAPTER FIVE
CALLIE
I nearly faint with relief when Rory pulls out the thumb drive.
“Thank God,” she says, her voice more of a sigh than actual words.
I hold out my palm. “Let me touch it. I need to feel that it’s real.”
She drops it into my open hand. Yes, the thumb drive. The only copy of Pat Lamone’s confession. We have our leverage.
The statute of limitations has passed. He can’t be arrested. So what? We can still ruin him. And once the Steels find out…
Oh, God… Nausea crawls up my throat.
The Steels.
We kept this information from them when they wanted it. Granted, we had our reasons, and we didn’t know the Steels very well back then. Sure, we live on a ranch adjacent to theirs, but they’re a powerful family.
Now that I know the Steels better—and now that I’m involved with Donny—I realize we could have gone to them. They would have protected us.
But we were kids. Sure, Rory was technically an adult, but only an eighteen-year-old girl. I wasn’t quite sixteen.
Still, holding the thumb drive in my palm, feeling its shape and weight, gives me relief.
“Whoever got the key,” Rory says, “didn’t get here.”
“They couldn’t have. Not unless they had your ID. And if it was Pat Lamone, I doubt he could have convinced anyone he was a woman named Aurora Pike.”
“We don’t even know for sure it was him.”
“Who else could it be? The only other person who knows where we hid it is Jordan. Unless someone else followed us and she didn’t notice.”
“I know.” Rory wrings her hands together. “I think we have to consider the possibility that someone else saw us back then.”
“Or that Jordan…”
Rory shakes her head. “Don’t go there, Cal. She’s our cousin.”
I nod. I want to believe Jordan wouldn’t be behind any of this. I want to so badly. But what if…
Jordan’s parents live on our land, help us with the ranching and winemaking. At least we have ownership of the property. They don’t even have that.
If someone offered her money…
“I see those cogs in your brain turning,” Rory says. “She didn’t do it.”
“I know.”
But the truth is that I don’t know. My brain works differently than Rory’s. She’s a performer, an artist. She works on emotion.