Page 63 of Bullet
I drove straight there, praying that what I’d done hadn’t been discovered yet. Whether he forgave me or not didn’t matter, if I could tell him what happened before anyone saw it, maybe he could fix it.
His bike was parked in front of his house, and I was relieved that he hadn’t been to the bar yet for the day. I was trying to work out how I was going to explain everything was running through my mind, but I was thinking more than anything, that I just needed to tell him the truth from the beginning.
If I told him it was all meant to be a ploy, but I fell in love along the way, would he believe me?
“Harry?” I said as I knocked on his door. “It’s me.”
Very near the door, I could hear a weight settling, followed by footsteps getting closer to the door. It opened, and I was immediately hit with a feeling of dread. The look on his face could peel the paint off the walls. Neither of the cats were anywhere in the vicinity.
“Come in,” he said without even looking at me. “We need to talk.”
Shit. He knew.
“Okay.” I stepped into the living room and walked over to the couch and sat down.
Harry walked over and sat down in the armchair perpendicular to the couch and folded over, setting his arms against his legs and balancing his head in his hands. “I’m confused, Celia.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s fair.”
There was a heaviness in the air that was suffocating. I wanted to wrap my arms around Harry and just beg him for his forgiveness, but the situation required me to hold back.
When he looked up at me, even with the sadness in his eyes, I was reminded of how good he looked. “Are you going to explain yourself?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Um…” I took a deep breath. “Remember that car accident that you were in?”
He recoiled at that. “Yeah? What does that have to do with this?”
“I’m Darrien Pescoe’s goddaughter.”
Harry’s eyes widened. “You’re what?” He stood up. “You’re what? Celia, that man tried to kill me!”
“That’s not what he told me!” I cried. “He told meyoukilled them. He told me you killed my dad!”
“Your dad?” He dropped back down into the chair. “The other man in the car was your dad?”
“I was doing it for revenge. All of it,” I said. “This was all just a ploy to destroy you for ruining my family.”
Harry folded his hand over his mouth. “It was all fake?” he asked.
“At first,” I said, and a toxic sludge knotted itself in my throat as I continued to speak, “but I fell in love with you, Harry. For real.”
Harry shook his head. “No.”
“I swear,” I said.
“No, I don’t believe you. You stole money from the club.”
“I didn’t!” I said. “I only fudged the numbers so that it would look like you were stealing.”
“Well, it worked, so congrats. You pulled off what you wanted to,” he said. “The numbers got reported as you wrote them, so now we’re fifty grand in the hole for this month. I’ve got to use what’s left of my settlement money to pay them back.”
“What about looking for your brother or sister?” I asked.
“Well, I guess I’ll have to stop that for now, won’t I? Hopefully my mom doesn’t kill them between now and when I can afford to pick the P.I. up again. It’ll be hard, since I’m no longer VP at the club, but hey, I’m sure Hoppa is just full of lucrative jobs.”
“I’ll go to the club,” I begged. “I’ll tell them it was me and not you.”
“They know that, and we were able to figure it out, but I stepped down because it was my fault you were there. The trust between Nick and me is all fucked up now, and it was sketchy to begin with, but none of that is as bad as the fact that I really did fucking fall in love with you. I was sitting at that dinner table thinking, ‘Damn this is what I want my life to be like’. And you weren’t even serious.”
