Page 160 of Love Notes & Lifelines
“All of it.”
He glances at the phone in my hand, then back up at me. “I needed an outlet for my grief, and she was there. I thought I loved her. And I thought I could make a merger happen without crossing the line into the illegal—I didn’t,” he snaps. “I may have fucked with records, but I didn’t ever cross that line.”
“You gave a competitor information, Caleb.”
He grins, and I take a step back. “Did I?”
“Didn’t you?” I’m seriously the worst detective in America.
He shakes his head slowly. “Danica is right that I have a pretty face, but I’m also much smarter than she gave me credit for. The only thing I’m guilty of is trying to bring her into all those deals with Becker under her different entities’ names, but it was all aboveboard.”
“No, we found?—”
“You found mistakes, just as I’ve said, and I’ll take those repercussions. But the rest of it? That’s all her.”
He glances away, but not before a hint of pain shows itself in his gaze.
“You really did love her.”
His eyes narrow, but he nods, once. “I wanted to, but it wasn’t anything like my marriage. I foolishly hoped that a merger would be enough for Dani—that’s all she wanted in the beginning, or so she said. As time went on, I hoped it would, at the very least, put her in a position where Beck could facilitate her getting some help. She played me emotionally, but no one ever fucks with my career. So,” he says with an arch of his brow. “It’s kill or be killed.”
“You gave this to me to save your own ass.”
“Think what you want.” He adjusts his tie, but his hand trembles. It’s the only outward sign that he’s not holding it together as well as he’d like me to believe, and I feel a flash of empathy he probably doesn’t deserve.
“You’re a smart man, Caleb,” I say quietly. “You know that’s not love. The way she speaks to you is not love.”
He lifts a shoulder and walks toward the door. “Hurt people hurt people, Stella. I hope you’re the one to break the cycle.”
His words knock me back a step. “If that’s true, why did you tell her about Silas?”
A flicker of real emotion casts his face in shame before he drops his gaze to the floor. “I told her about you when I first hired you. In a ‘guess what happened at work’ kind of way. I never could have anticipated things playing out the way they did.”
“Would you have told her if you knew how she’d use Silas to hurt me?”
He stares at me blankly. “I can stand here and lie to you, but the truth is, I don’t know—I can’t say what I would have done. And it’s a waste of fucking time to think about it.”
With that, he walks out the door, and a second later, Beck barrels through it.
“Are you okay?” he asks, breathing hard and gripping my biceps to inspect every inch of me. “I couldn’t find you, then I found Danica glaring at the door, and then Caleb walked through it. I just had a bad feeling about it all. Are you okay?”
I blink.
“Stella?” Beck asks again. “I swear on my life, if they did anything to you…”
“No, I’m—okay. But—well, listen to this.” I press stop on the recording, then play. It’s not the best quality, but there’s no mistaking their voices.
“No way,” Beck says, then leans against a vacant table.
An older woman enters and does a double take when she finds us here, but she shakes her head, muttering under her breath, and grabs a stack of chairs piled up next to the door.
I drag him out of the room by his sleeve.
“He knew you were in there?”
I nod.
“He came clean.” His brows pinch as he scans the hallway.
