Love by Association

Her door opened, and she stood, looking beautiful and...normal, in jeans and a sweater that matched the blue in her eyes. “I’m in the middle of a project,” she told him.

He could see the artist’s lamp lit over the table, the stool that she’d obviously been perched on. Paper and pencils were spread across the tilted surface.

A project. Writing and illustrating children’s stories that she wouldn’t send out to agents or publishers. The collection was building. Colin had had a friend of his print some up for her to see—thinking that if she saw them as real books she’d be driven to find a publisher.

“I asked you two weeks ago to accompany me tonight,” he told her. “You know way more about art than I do. And...”

“I told you I would think about it. I never said I’d go.”

In ten years’ time he’d managed to cajole, beg and probably guilt her into attending a handful of functions with him. Ten years of her life she’d never get back.

“Come on, Jules. A few hours out of your Thursday night is all I’m asking.” The law firm of Fairbanks and Fairbanks—named for his father and grandfather, both deceased—represented a good many of the contributors who would be attending this evening. It was expected that a Fairbanks be there.

He’d probably be instrumental in the closing of more than one deal that night. Which was fine with him. He liked the challenge afforded him by his job as sole owner of Santa Raquel’s most powerful law firm.

“I know you want me to think you need me there because of the art.” Julie nodded. “But you and I both know you’re just there for the legal contract part, Colin, not the value designation. We also both know you don’t have to go alone. Just put out the word that you want a date and you’ll have your pick.”

Her smile was almost reminiscent of the loving scoundrel Julie had been until her senior year of high school. But not quite. That shadow of perpetual resignation ruined the effect.

“And if I go alone, I’m going to spend what parts of the evening I’m not overseeing potential negotiations fending off whatever women manage to get to me first.”

Her eyes shone with sympathy, and a hint of the old mischief.

“Amber Winslow’s going to be there,” he told her. The woman—a classmate of his from the private high school they’d both attended—was a leech. And newly divorced.

In the olden days Julie would have been all over protecting him from that particular worm.

“So are the Smyths.”

He hadn’t heard, or he wouldn’t have asked Julie to accompany him. He was surprised actually. Smyth wasn’t a big supporter of the arts.

But that was that. As desperately as Colin wished his little sister could move on, he also understood why she couldn’t. In the ten years since David Smyth had gotten away with brutally raping her at a party, Julie had not seen him. Even from a distance. She’d refused to be anywhere that either David Jr. or his father, David Sr.—owner of one of the last family banks in the state—were in attendance.

In spite of the fact that that meant she was cut off from much of the social circle in which she’d grown up and thrived.

Not to mention losing the close relationship she’d had with Margaret Smyth, David Jr.’s mother.

With David Sr. being their father Michael’s closest friend, they’d all grown up together. When Colin and Julie’s mother had died, Margaret Smyth had been like a mother to them...

“Jaime told me they were on the confirmed guest list.”

Julie’s friend from grade school who’d moved to New York before high school, Jaime Mendonthol, had a couple of paintings in the evening’s fundraising auction. She was in town, and the two women had met for lunch the day before.

Jaime had been the reason Colin had been so hopeful that his sister would agree to the night out. Missing Jaime’s local show would be hard on her.

“I knew, anyway. Leslie Morrison sent me the guest list.”

Leslie Morrison, wife of James Morrison, owner and CEO of Morrison Textiles—a third-generation company that had been using Fairbanks and Fairbanks as lead counsel for more than seventy-five years—was, as far as Colin knew, the only person in their circle who knew what had happened to Julie the night that David Smyth slipped a drug into her drink and then proceeded to sexually violate her in every way possible.

Most people knew of, or had heard rumor of, a liaison gone bad between the two of them. But word among “friends” was that their sexual relations the night of the party had been consensual.

“Friends” including Santa Raquel’s esteemed police commissioner.