Page 13 of Unleash Hades
I wiped my face, willing myself to come back to the present.
I had been too open with Gavin years ago. I had told him too much. My suspicions about Richard’s mistress, my remorse about my sister, and how much I loved my boys. How I made choices that hurt every day.
“We’ll get him, Calissandra,” Gavin said, leaning forward. “I just… needed to be sure your head was in the right place.”
Gavin knew a thing or two about compromised morals.
I nodded solemnly, feeling the dread seep in. A dread I had learned to feel over the past two decades. It was the voice inside my head that told me I would never win, that fighting was useless.
Still, here I was… that disgusting sense of hope still alive inside me even when it had no right to be there.
The day passed. Gavin and I worked side by side, chasing leads, making phone calls about stories that had nothing to do withthe drama of my own existence. I could distract myself with the suffering and injustice elsewhere. Sometimes, even being to shed light on something, and spur a little bit of action felt like I could pay a penance for my own sins, and my own disastrous choices.
“Don’t you worry,” Gavin said. “Everything will be alright.”
“Don’t be stupid, Calissandra. Hope is the opiate of idiots,”my inner voice chastised, bringing me back down to my reality. Back to the despair that was my normal living.
But what good was despair? Where would that leave my boys? Chloe?
No, I had to try. Not because there was hope, but because the other option was to do nothing. And something was better than nothing.
It had to be.
“Anything in particular I need to look for? Everyone’s hard drive has a ton of useless information. Is there something that should alert me?” Gavin tapped a wrinkled finger on the table, before clicking on the pad of his laptop to wake it up.
His desktop was a picture of his late wife, her white hair pulled in a ponytail, as they hiked the Pacific Coast Trail the year before she died. Her dying wish.
“Marseilles,” I said, finally. Letting the name leave my lips like a French speaker, instead of the fake English voice that I had forced on myself. “Look for anything that points to Marseilles.”
I bit my lower lip, remembering the day Richard came home.
Then the police, when they showed up at the door, telling us that a body had been fished from the water. No signs of foul play… No autopsy.
I hoped that the Marseilles waters had been warm, compared to the Hudson. I hope in her last moments… she found peace in our motherland.
“We’ll connect the dots,” Gavin said quietly, his eyes growing distant as he nodded, his lips pursed. “And then it’ll be the end of it.”
“Don’t tell me anything over the phone,” I said, keeping my voice as low as I could make it. “I think he’s bugged mine.”
Gavin lifted a bushy white brow, and smirked. “It’s not my first time, sweetheart.”
“I know,” I blushed. “But I have to say it anyway.”
“When do the lads turn eighteen?” Gavin asked, as astute as ever.
I never told him that I was waiting for my sons to be legal adults before leaving Richard. He just pieced it together. He knew my marriage was in shambles long before I did. Back when I was still young, naive, and believed that love and work could hold a marriage together.
“Two weeks,” I said, with a gentle smile. “Then they’ll be off to Cambridge.”
“Ah, the two scamps have decided to stay together after all.” Gavin smiled. “I suspected they would.”
Gavin liked my sons. He was their metaphoric uncle.
“Of course!” It never crossed my mind that my boys could possibly be separated. Not for any time.
“Not the same major though,” Gavin guessed.
“No,” I smiled fondly at the thought. “Romulus will study Medicine, and Remus wants to study business.”
