Total pages in book: 73
Estimated words: 67675 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 338(@200wpm)___ 271(@250wpm)___ 226(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 67675 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 338(@200wpm)___ 271(@250wpm)___ 226(@300wpm)
The world had been fooled, but I hadn’t been. Even before the scandal, I’d seen that there was something off lurking behind that beautiful exterior. Elyna loved her husband and her daughter and money, and she didn’t see anything else. She fawned over her “consultants” when they were in front of her and forgot they existed when they left the room. I’d had to work with her house manager to ensure the men I had working the Livin’ Lavigne Loco events got basic necessities like water in hundred-degree heat and bathroom breaks at day-long events.
After six months of dealing with shit like that, I’d come to the conclusion that it wasn’t cruelty that kept Elyna from providing for them. It was an inability to see them as fully human.
Public opinion might have been divided, but I had no doubt Elyna had done everything she’d been accused of. Defrauded, lied, stole. Whatever she had to do to add to her bottom line, no matter who it took from. And I had no doubt that she genuinely didn’t understand why she was being punished for it now—why all that hard earned money was being taken away. She’d won it with her cleverness, her boldness, her ruthlessness, and they’d lost it with their softness, their weakness, their gullibility.
It might not have been legal, but I was sure that in Elyna’s mind, it was fair.
Her daughter couldn’t have been more different. Cami saw everyone, felt everything. She’d been too young for me—only twenty-three to my thirty-eight—but that hadn’t stopped us. It had taken an ecovillage in Turin to do that.
“Earth to Landon,” Julian said, dragging me back to the present. “Ground control to Major Landon.”
“What?” I snapped. “I’m paying attention.”
And I was, more or less. Even as I was reading the closed captioning on the screen behind Dominic’s head, part of my brain was tracking the conversation. Con was talking about his daughter, although I couldn’t have said whether it was the older one or the newborn. I replayed it in my head. The kid in question was waking up three times a night, so probably not his 22-year-old.
“Get a night nanny,” I advised to prove I’d been listening.
“It’s amazing,” Garrett marveled. “I know he didn’t hear a word we said.”
“It’s like he has a recording device in his head,” Dominic muttered, frowning at my forehead like he might see wires poking out if he looked hard enough.
“It’s called a fucking brain,” I told them. It was true though. I had a preternaturally good recall and a near photographic memory. It was partly how I had made my name in the security industry. It wasn’t just the cutting-edge equipment, it was me. I saw what everyone saw, but I never forgot it. If something was moved a few inches the next time I looked at it, I noticed. If someone had a tell, I caught onto it almost immediately. I was good. I’d seen right through Elyna.
Her daughter on the other hand–she’d fooled me. If you’d asked me four and a half years ago, I’d have said Cami was falling in love with me. I didn’t feel good about it because she was too young to fall in love with a guy like me. She deserved someone who cared about her enough to give her everything she wanted—a future and a family. Things that just weren’t in me to offer. But then she’d blindsided me by moving to another country without so much as an ultimatum or a goodbye, so maybe she had fooled me after all.
I wondered if Cami knew what was happening now. I knew fuck all about ecovillages–maybe she had no idea that her family business had collapsed, and her parents were potentially facing jailtime. It was the only thing that made sense to me, knowing her like I thought I had. She had been close to Robert and Elyna. The three of them had been an unshakeable trio. If I suspected Elyna didn’t have a heart, I only had to look at how she was with Robert and Cami to know she did. If I doubted Robert had any emotions at all, the way he smiled around Cami and Elyna proved me wrong. And so, Cami should have been in the courtroom with them. My friends didn’t know this, but I’d watched the coverage every day, expecting to catch a glimpse of her. A younger version of her mother with the same heavy-lidded dark eyes, masses of thick black hair that framed a pale face with a high forehead and pointed chin. Her full, sensuous lips that always seemed on the verge of a smile would be unusually sober at her parents’ trial.
But even today, she wasn’t there.
Not for the first time, I wondered where she was.
And if she’d ever come back.