Chapter Twenty-Five
Finn
I had to admit,I was curious.
Curious as fuck.
I didn’t even mind that even though Aoife got herself all worked up, and me too, she’d done too much today and ended up conking out on me when we migrated our make out session from the living room to the bedroom.
Sure, my dick was aching, but she needed the rest and I needed answers, otherwise I’d get no sleep tonight.
Thatwas how curious I was.
I didn’t even mind the hard-on from hell.
When I grabbed my phone and scrolled through the messages and emails for the tenth time this hour, I saw one from an ‘Unknown Sender.’ Satisfied once more with Paul’s efficiency, I opened it and I scanned the contents of the file.
A standard hit and run. A witness had seen the green Jaguar drive off, but she hadn’t caught the registration. Shehadnoticed that the driver was a woman.
When I saw the picture of Aoife’s mom, my breath caught in my chest because it was like looking at Aoife twenty years down the line.
Christ.
They were like twins. The same rich hair and the skin that was almost opalescent with its glorious sheen.
As I looked at a ‘future’ Aoife, I marveled at how fucking lucky I was, even as I felt sad that I’d never get to meet Michelle Keegan or Ellie Donahue as I’d known her. Seeing her was believing though.
I remembered her vaguely. My mom and her had hung out a lot, but I’d spent most of my time with Aidan Jr., avoiding not only my father, but her too.
My mother’s best friend, and my wife’s mom, had been crossing the street one day and out of the blue, a car hit her. She’d never have foreseen that, would never have been able to plan her life around it. Wouldn’t have said goodbye to her loved ones, to Aoife. Just boom. In an instant, everything had changed.
The witness claimed Michelle had been on her phone before she’d stepped out onto the road, and according to the report, Michelle didn’t wake up after the accident so the officers in charge of the investigation couldn’t question her to confirm that. She’d hit her head on the way down, and no matter what the doctors did, she never got back up again.
Still, there was something about the report that hit me as odd. Jaguars weren’t a common car in the States. Sure, they were here and there, but they were a luxury import, and most people who wanted that kind of status vehicle opted for Mercs or BMWs.
Then there was the color. Something the witness had stated was close to, if not darker than, evergreen.
And I distinctly remember Magdalena’s forest green Jag being in the shop back in January.
It was a leap, but, fuck, so was the suggestion that the Senator was behind his ex-girlfriend’s death in an attempt to keep his dirty secrets a secret.
I rubbed my temple, disliking how when I carried on reading through the report, my mind kept leapfrogging to Lena. It wasn’t like Jags were that uncommon, but that paint job had been custom. It was so dark, it was close to black with green highlights, and from the woman’s description, ‘an odd black color. In the light, it turned green,’ it just hit me on the raw. Then, there was a sketch of the woman behind the wheel.
Those things were usually shit. The illustrations all over the place and hardly accurate, but when I saw the bright red hair that curled into a topknot, as well as traced the similarity in the drawing’s features to the woman I knew, I’d admit to feeling faintly antsy.
Aidan had bought her that Jag as a wedding anniversary gift. He’d had it brought over from England as a surprise, and I remember him rolling his eyes and cursing women drivers when she’d had to take it into the shop a couple of months later.
I stared at the ceiling for only God knew how long, wondering what the fuck I was going to do.
I’d gone from being happy that my wife was back home, to learning that she somehow knew my mother, revealing my past, and then her asking me to investigate her mom’s death. But that was the thing with these kinds of accidents; they wereaccidental. There was no motive to be found. No reasoning.
Just a split second’s inattention and bang. Someone was dead, you were shitting yourself, and rather than hang around and face the music, you tore off out of there.
It was flight or fight at its most basic level.
Though I hoped I was barking up the wrong tree, even though the weird color of the car and that fucking sketch said otherwise, I was left stuck in the middle of a horrendous crossroads.
I stayed close to Aoife as I went through my options. One arm curved around her, one arm behind my head as I wondered what kind of Pandora’s box we’d just opened.