I couldn’t help it. My body jerked away in response to the very idea.
“I promise you that hearts do mend even if it feels like they never will. After he is out of your life, you’ll be fine again.”
“I don’t want to talk about any of this anymore,” I said, and walked out of the store. In a strangely calm state of mind, I walked down to the cafe around the block. I ordered a pot of tea, something I never do, and sat down at a table by the window. Then I took out my phone and began making notes, breaking down all the renovations and repairs that we would need to quickly put the shop back in order.
Half-an-hour passed by before I was done. I had not drunk the tea and it was cold. I looked at the cakes behind the glass counter. They made good blueberry pies and usually, I would have ordered one. Now the thought made me feel slightly queasy. I looked down at my notes. Now I needed to hand this list to Caleb just as we had agreed, so that he could begin to mobilize the resources that we needed.
I looked out of the window. A man was walking past with his child. She was licking a lollipop. My hand trembled. For some inexplicable reason, I felt angry with the man. I didn’t even know him. It was simply because he let the innocent child eat the lollipop. I turned away. There was something very wrong with me.
The words Sandra said came into my head. Caleb was a murderer. He had been in prison. And I was supposed to leave him because of that.
She had to be joking.
45
Caleb
I had lost my cool in Willow’s shop and there would be consequences. The shock on Willow’s face told me that, but at the moment I had a more pressing problem to handle. First, I made a call and arranged for security for Willow and her parents. Then I got my secretary to hire a team of workmen to start that morning.
Then I called Finnegan. “You smashed her shop?’
His laugh was curt. “Shouldn’t you be thanking me that I didn’t touch her?” My blood ran cold at the thought, but this was no time for losing my shit again.
“I told you I was working on it,” I said as calmly as I could.
“Well, we heard you were busy losing a lot of money yesterday and we wondered if you were trying to be clever.”
“You think I lost money to be clever? To start with I don’t control the stock market and most of my own fortune was wiped out.”
“If you get careless, that’s your fucking problem. We just wanted to let you know that we don’t care if you lose other people’s money or even your own. We still want our product.”
“So you went out of your way and made things personal?” I growled.
He laughed again, it was a cynical laugh. “Frank told me how murderous you could be. How brutal you could be to protect yourself. But Wolfe, that was prison. This is the real world, and out here, you can’t so easily defeat your enemies because not all of them line up next to you at the canteen. I left the woman alone because I just wanted to send a little message that we know just how important she is to you. You have a week to bring me results.”
He ended the call, and it took every ounce of strength inside to calm myself down to the state where I didn’t want to find him and smash his head in.
Then I was back at my office sitting at my desk. As I hoped, Finnegan hadn’t guessed what I was up to. He thought I’d deliberately incurred those losses to make them nervous about my ability. True, I had deliberately allowed those losses to happen, but I had a deeper plan. And now, I had another week to watch my plans unfold, but I knew if I really needed the time I could stretch even that week out.
I had tried my best to think of and to cover every eventuality. My life still felt like it was hanging from a thread in a storm.
I wished I hadn’t lost my cool with that sniveling bastard. It was almost certainly going to come back to bite me in the ass. I knew the coward would tell her what he knew, and I would have to handle that issue when I was just not yet ready for it.
When a call came in right then, and I saw Willow’s name flash on the screen, I stared at the phone on my desk as if it was a snake. What was our conversation going to entail?
I picked up the phone. “Willow,” I called softly.