Page 51 of No One Can Know

Logan grunted. “It’s been a long time,” he hedged. “She probably bought what all the rich not-that-kind-of-junkie junkies bought. Valium, Vicodin, oxy, whatever their preferred flavor. A few at first and then more and then too much, and either they got clean, got in trouble, or got above my pay grade.”

“Above your pay grade meaning…” she prompted.

“Heroin,” he said simply. Emma gave him a skeptical look. “Never heard of the opioid epidemic? Eventually the semilegal stuff stops doing the job. But like I said, above my pay grade. If it wasn’t something you could at least theoretically get with a doctor’s note, I didn’t stock it.”

“Right. So how long?” she asked.

“How long did I sell to her, you mean? I think about five years,” Logan said, scratching his chin as he did the math in his head.

“Right under your dad’s nose.”

He smirked a little. “No risk, no reward, right? Besides, he’s not the white knight he likes to let people think he is.”

She thought of Ellis across the table, playing the concerned fatherfigure while urging her to incriminate herself. How frustration had crept in quickly, his face turning red as his voice got louder.

“And what about now?” she asked. “Still selling?”

“Clean as a whistle,” he said. Leaned an elbow on the bar. Leaned intooclose. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

His eyes fixed on hers. He did have pretty eyes, she thought. Maybe that was what Juliette saw in him. Or maybe it was only that he was so unlike what she was supposed to want. That, Emma could understand.

“Did my mother always pay on time, Logan?” Emma asked lightly.

He chuckled. “Nice try. I wasn’t even selling to her at that point.”

“So she got clean, got in trouble, or went above your pay grade?” she asked. She would have known if her mother was usingheroin, wouldn’t she?

“Or she was getting it from somewhere else,” Logan said.

“Where?”

He worked his jaw, like he was considering not telling her. “I can’t say for sure.”

“But you have a theory,” Emma said, raising an eyebrow. He wanted to talk. He wanted her leaning in close, listening to what he had to say; he wanted to be important, and there were precious few opportunities to be important when you worked at a place like Wilson’s, lived in a place like Arden.

“It’s nothing.” Logan shook his head.

“Does it have to do with my father?” Emma guessed, and Logan froze. Something illegal, involving her father. Drugs wouldn’t have been her guess. Her law-and-order father thought they should bring the firing squad back, thought “druggies” should be rounded up and put in camps—preferably along with liberals, IRS agents, and anyone who called their pets “fur babies.”

But she was realizing more and more how little she’d known him—or any of them. Her parents, her sisters. She’d been so wrapped up in her own anger and misery, she’d never looked twice at the people closest to her.

Logan wetted his lips. “Emma. I was a cuddly teddy bear compared to some of the people out there. I was a dumbass with a lucrative hobby, and I don’t mind talking about it. Other people, they’re not going to be so nice, if you ask questions.”

“My father is dead. He’s not going to hurt anyone,” Emma said.

“Yeah, he’s dead. And someone killed him.”

“General wisdom says that was me,” Emma reminded him.

“Nah,” he said. “I never bought that.”

“You might be the only one.”

“I’m good at reading people,” he said. “You might act tough, Emma Palmer, but you’re a gooey chocolate chip cookie on the inside.”

“You have a way with words,” she said dryly.

He waggled his eyebrows. “It’s not the only thing I have a way with.”

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