“He doesn’t accept visitations. He has no one on the list, not even Megan.”
“What can I do to get through to him?”
Locke was firm. “Nothing. He wants this. He wants you to move on. You have to respect that he wants his solitude.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “No, he doesn’t. He’s self-sabotaging, and he isn’t thinking straight.”
“I disagree. I think he’s finally thinking for the first time in his life. All the years I’ve known him, he’s taken what he’s wanted, used people, bullied to get his way. He never thought of the consequences. He thought with his fists and searched for trouble to keep himself distracted from his sickness. Going to prison and cutting you out was simple self-preservation. He’s distanced himself to give you a chance. He dragged himself down, why take you down with him?”
Didn’t Locke understand? It wasn’t that simple.
“He killed Billy for me, Locke,” I stressed. “I’m partly responsible.”
Now he looked at me like I was stupid. “The people responsible aren’t around. One’s in prison, the other is dead. Again, Charlotte, you don’t get it. He. Could. Have. Stopped.”
“I know that, goddammit. I just miss him!”
I took a few breaths to steady my racing heart. Locke couldn’t understand. He didn’t look like he had the capacity to feel. To make sense to him everything had to be logical. But feelings weren’t always logical, and you couldn’t look the truth in the eye and accept it if it meant you were going to walk away with a gaping hole in your heart. Hence why Billy had to haunt me and try to reason with me the truth of his madness on that day.
After I stopped breathing hard, I finally levelled Locke with a weary look. “Okay, sure, I agree he didn’t think things through. He was impulsive and he was cruel when he wanted to be, but by the end he had stopped himself. You weren’t around to see it, but Conor was changing. Now he’s surrounded by people worse than him. Do you honestly think he deserves that?”
Locke pressed his lips into a firm line, looking away from me. “No, I don’t.”
I felt my chest tighten. “What if he’s getting hurt?”
“He isn’t getting hurt.”
“How do you know that?”
His eyes grew distant. “I just do.”
“You promise?”
He ground his teeth, not meeting my eye. “You have my word.”
For some reason, I believed him.
He gave me no reason to doubt him.
We fell into a tense silence. I watched him, watched what he was doing with all that money. I hadn’t seen this man in so long, and now he was standing here, in my home, scolding me like he had every right to.
“What are you doing here with all that cash?” I found myself asking, cutting straight to the point.
“No,” he suddenly said, harshly, shaking his head at me with disapproval. “You don’t get to question me right now. You’ve got a pile of letters on that counter threatening your eviction and you didn’t utter a damn word to anyone about it.”
I tensed my jaw, not liking the tone of his voice. “The world doesn’t revolve around me, Locke. I’m not going to run for help every time I’m in trouble.”
“Just going to bury your head in the sand and hope it all goes away? There’s at least sixteen letters in there.”
“I know.”
“I’m a lawyer, Charlotte.”
“I. Know.”
“You’re going to have to do a better job at explaining.”
“I’ve been looking for a place and I’ll figure this mess out –”
“No,” he cut in, looking pissed now. “You really are so naïve, aren’t you?”
My lips parted in shock. I glared now in response. “Excuse me?”
“I hate repeating myself, Charlotte, but you seem to be hard of hearing. I’m a lawyer. You should have come to me about this.”
“What is there to say?”
“You have rights.”
I felt lost. “He was serving me eviction letters written from a lawyer, I thought –”
“He’s harassing you. It’s a scare tactic. He wants the house and he thinks he can bully you out of it. The house is in Conor’s name. It rightfully belongs to him, his father made sure of that before he died.”
Now I was just confused. “Why is he doing this then?”
“This house is sitting on a shit ton of currency.”
“The gold, you mean.”
“I think Dave’s run out of money, and he’s targeting you because you’re young and isolated and…so naïve.” His nostrils flared, like he was so damn disappointed in me. “When was the last time you turned to anyone