Mason waves, and I want to remember him like this forever. Just back from a jog. Standing in the sun. Happy. “Go make out with your fiancée. I’ll see you at brunch.”
EPILOGUE
JAMESON
Well,what do you know? A single asshole megalomaniac bites it, and the whole world opens up.
Relax—that was a joke. Bettencourt’s swan dive into hell wasn’t momentous enough to hand us the world on a silver platter. Just three and a quarter boxes of case files, and we had to wait six months to get them.
Pretty fucking pathetic, if you ask me. If I murdered two people and destroyed even more lives just for the sake of insurance fraud, I’d at least want it tolookimpressive. Instead, Bettencourt kept it concise. The court case that fucked us over reduced my parents and the plans they made to care for us in the event of their deaths and their most important friendships to four cardboard file boxes, size medium.
Did I go to the lawyers Mason hired to keep me out of jail and let my eyes slowly fill with tears? Yes. Did I then ask them to intercept these boxes for me? Yes. Did that work on those softhearted motherfuckers? Absolutely it did.
I can’t give them too much shit for it. Mason’s lawyers, along with Gabriel’s, did a bang-up job of legally bitch-slapping the remaining members of the consortium. Since turnabout is fair play, Gabriel fired every employee of his company, which he’d signed over to the consortium, and Mason hired them all as part of a new division at Phoenix. The consortium is left with the company’s empty husk and its debts. Mason finally got Gabriel to come work at Phoenix. Nobody’s out of a job.
It’s all over. Happily ever after. Ride off into the sunset.
No, it’s fucking not.
For the moment, I’ve stacked the boxes in my closet at Mason’s penthouse. I’ll move them to my cabin next time I’m out for the night. Mason, who has a pregnant wife and permanent teary eyes because Gabriel stopped pretending to be fine, doesn’t have to know about the information in these boxes at all.
A light knock at my bedroom door. I nudge the boxes into the closet with my foot and hide them away, out of sight. “Obsessed much?”
“Jameson.” My baby sister Remy giggles in the hall. “You said we were going to do cake and TV.”
I open the door and put on a confused expression. “Don’t you have to dig in the sand with a tiny rake?”
Her blue eyes get big and serious. “That’s zen gardening. I use a shovel, then a paintbrush.”
“You know what they say. Antique artifacts wait for no one.”
“Yeah, actually, that’s all they do. Cake or not?”
“It’s never anotsituation with cake.”
Does it hurt like a stab wound or a punch with brass knuckles to make a boxed cake with Remy? Yes. Does the pain cease when we sit in Mason’s living room and eat it out of the pan? No. Will I ever stop doing this? When I’m dead.
We watch an episode of Downton Abbey and eat cake. At the end of the episode, Remy gets up, kisses my cheek, and heads out to her archeology study group. She attends that thing like it’s a cult meeting.
It’s not. I’ve checked.
I move the leftover cake to a covered dish, put our forks in the dishwasher, and go back to the boxes. Mason and Charlotte went to a birthing class, and now they’re at a card game at a friend’s house outside the city. Gabriel’s at his brownstone with his fiancée and two stray teenagers.
The four boxes can be consolidated into two. One of them is only a quarter-full, which feels insulting.
Most of the papers inside are boring, generic legal filings. References to contracts and laws and precedents.
I find what I’m looking for in the second-to-last folder.
The thing about asshole megalomaniacs is that they don’t work alone. Power can’t happen in a vacuum. You need other people to get it, and enforce it, and shore it up.
My brothers have largely taken care of the consortium that so badly fucked us over. For Mason and Gabriel, that’s good enough. They’re happy. They can ride off into whatever sunset they want. My brothers won’t be adventurous about it. Their sunset is right here, with their new families.
It’s for the best, honestly, if they never know that I’m a crime scene.
I’m usually on the scene of one crime or another, being arrested by cops in a wide variety of moods, but that’s not the one I’m talking about.
I smooth the papers out on my desk and try to force the images away. Charred, smoking rubble. Gabriel laid out on the sidewalk. Flashing lights in red and blue and white.