Sighing, he said, “Tatum, you’ve always been a woman who does what she wants. You’re independent and don’t like being told what others think of your choices. I’ve told you what I think. That’s all I can do.”
Duvall was one of my closest friends. Well, he used to be. But he didn’t know me very well, and that was my fault. He’d tried to get to know me, but I’d always held pieces of myself back. The pieces I was ashamed of. I wasn’t sure I wanted one of my closest friends to not know me anymore. “I never told you the full truth about why my marriage ended.”
Surprise flared on his face and he leant back in his seat. “So it wasn’t just because your dickhead ex cheated on you?”
“No.” Sucking in a long breath, I laid my heart out for him. “Randall had a lot of debt and just kept clocking up more. And he fought with me all the time over that and everything else in our life. In my wisdom, I decided the way to fix our marriage would be to help him solve his debt problem.”
“So you took bribes off Billy,” he said slowly, piecing it together.
“Yes, that’s why I took those bribes.”
“Fuck, Tatum,” he swore. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You say that as if the reason why I did it makes it more understandable when it doesn’t.”
“It does.”
I shook my head. “No,” I said with force. “It doesn’t. The fact is I gave up on everything I believed in to do what I did. I told myself at first that it would just be that once, but it quickly grew too easy to make good cash. As my marriage disintegrated, I became more desperate to fix it. Billy just had to look at me back then, and I was panting to help him.”
He fell silent for a beat. “I understand it because he gave me what I needed, too. So don’t think you’re the only one who threw something away.”
My heart cracked for what Duvall did for his family. The deal he signed with the devil was done from a much better place than the one I signed. “You did what you did for your sister, Duvall. You had no other choice.” She had ALS and desperately needed money for care. I knew he’d gone to hell making the decision to allow Billy to pay for her medical bills, but I would have made the exact same choice.
He never talked about what he’d done, especially not since his sister died six months ago. He ignored what I said and asked, “So why did you take a damn job with him?”
I flattened my lips as I considered that question. “It would be easy to say the reason was because he was the only person offering me a job at the time. But it runs deeper than that, and I’m not sure even I fully understand my reasons.”
“Try me.”
“By the time I was disbarred, I’d changed. Everything that happened made me into a different person. It made me harder, but it also made me want to help people who stared at life from a place of no hope—”
“Fuck, you’d always wanted to help those people, Tatum.”
I nodded. “Yeah,” I murmured. “Billy originally asked me to help one of his strippers out of a legal mess caused by an abusive ex who played the system so well that he had the upper hand. Helping her led to him finding more work for me with the people who worked for him and here we are.”
“Do you ever think of leaving and finding a job away from the filth?”
He didn’t understand me, and I wasn’t sure he ever would because we looked at life through different eyes. “Duvall, I don’t judge the filth, as you call it. To me, it’s just people trying to live their lives the best way they can at that moment. We all have parts of ourselves we wish were different, better maybe. The parts of us that have been fucked up by life and the people in it. Sure, some don’t want to change their lives, and that’s their choice, but I’m there for those who do. Sometimes along the way I have to do things I don’t agree with or that I wouldn’t choose to do, but I do them because in the end they help me achieve my goal. And these days, my motivation isn’t greed.” It was that greed, along with my blind trust in a man who had no respect for me that made me feel so ashamed. Back then, he’d made me feel like I wasn’t enough and that was why he’d cheated on me. Not feeling like I was enough had proven to be a hard feeling to recover from.
He drummed his fingers lightly on the table, listening to me but
seemingly miles away in his thoughts. “So the end justifies the means, then?”
I leant forward and met his gaze. “Yes,” I said softly, “sometimes it does.”
He listened and he processed, but in the end he said, “We’re going to have to agree to disagree on that one.”
I smiled. “That’s the beauty of friendship, right?”
“I guess it is.”
It always had been that way for our friendship. We’d often argued over cases and the rights and wrongs of the world. And we’d always been able to forget all that shit when it came to our friendship. “Thank you for being a good friend.”
He lifted a brow. “You call me not giving you hell for dating a biker, a good friend?”
How would I ever convince him of the truth? “He doesn’t beat me. I can’t get into it all, but what you saw on that footage wasn’t even close to what you think.”
“I believe you.” When I gave him a confused look, he elaborated. “I looked into it more and found out about the murder at the casino that night. I put shit together, Tatum, and figured he must have been involved in it. And for you to have anything to do with him after that, I figure that dead biker deserved everything he got. Still doesn’t make me happy that you’ve chosen to get involved with Storm.”