Page 81 of Keeping Secrets

“Yes, seriously!” She took a big bowl out of the cupboard and set it onto the counter so hard that it made an abrupt, angry sound. “I have work to do!”

She watched Nick from the corner of her eye as he walked in and sat down at the kitchen table. He just sat there, watching her. She studiously ignored him as she measured out flour for a pie crust.

The silence started to grate on her nerves, and she paused her work to grab her phone and start a playlist going. Feeling spiteful, she chose a group that she knew her brother hated.

Still refusing to look at him, she started cutting butter into tiny cubes.

“We need to talk about this,” he rumbled, his voice quiet and reasonable.

She wanted to stab him with the butter knife. Instead, she dumped the butter into the bowl of flour and mixed it with a vengeance, shoving flour over the top and then squeezing the cubes to a pulp with her bare hands.

“I couldn’t just move on with my life and pretend none of that ever happened,” Nick said from his seat at the kitchen table. “I wasn’t there when it all went down, but I was here afterward. I had to make sure that he didn’t hurt anyone else. I don’t think I would have been able to live with myself otherwise.”

“It had nothing to do with you,” she growled. “Any of it.”

“You’re my little sister,” he said helplessly. “I’m supposed to protect you.”

“How was that protecting me?” she demanded.

“I figured that if I got here too late to protect you from Adam, I could at least make sure he didn’t hurt anyone else. It was my penance, I guess.”

“Penance for what, Nick? You didn’t do anything! You didn’t owe me anything. This is all on me. My bad decisions, my horrible choices. Me!”

She drove her fist into the dough, which was well and truly mixed now. She threw a damp towel over the top and put the bowl in the fridge to cool.

“I knew it was weird for you to come to Pelican Point after Adam moved here,” she muttered as she dumped the bag of apples into the sink. She began washing them and setting them onto a fresh towel to dry. “It wasn’t lost on me that he died right after you came to town, either. But you said that you had nothing to do with it, and I let it drop. I believed you, Nick. More fool me.”

“But I didn’t have anything to do with it,” he protested. “I wasn’t even there!”

“You got Travis involved!” she shouted back. “That’s what you had to do with it. You stalked Adam for weeks and roped Travis into your vigilante bullshit, and now he has to pay the price!”

Nick stared back at her, open-mouthed.

She lowered her voice to a hiss and said, “What if the cops catch up with him? What if he goes to prison for this, or worse? That’s on you, big brother.”

He looked down, and she felt a twist of remorse. He had just been trying to do what he thought was right. His heart had been in the right place; it always was.

But God, she was just so angry. She was tired of lies. Tired of being underestimated.

“There has to be a way to make this right,” she said, thinking out loud.

Nick looked up. “What do you mean?”

She took a breath, sat down at the table, and then got up again. She felt too agitated to sit still, so she went back to the kitchen counter and started peeling apples.

“We have to find a way to help Travis,” she said.

“I don’t see how.”

She shot him a glare and then looked back down at her work, thinking.

All of the people who had come and gone in her time with Adam, people that Detective Riegler was looking for. What if they could steer the investigation toward them?

“Do you still have those recordings?”

“What recordings?”

“Travis said that’s why you were there that night. You had been spying on Adam, recording his conversations.”

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