Luli had intended to do this with Dad, but when she’d met him she’d suspected the police were investigating her involvement in it, so she’d gotten him drunk and married him in Vegas, hoping it would confuse them into thinking she was innocent of the crimes. The irony that she married a police officer wasn’t lost on any of us when this all came out.
Plot twist time – and this still blew my mind – faced with the evidence, Dad had agreed to work undercover on the case, being introduced to Luli’s acquaintances and getting access to her online accounts via a piece of software installed on his Wi-Fi, not his computer. Putting it on his internet connection meant that regardless of what device she used, they would have her login details stored for them to use to monitor what was being said. I’d been so pissed off by it all, that I’d moved shortly afterwards, so I didn’t know what information they’d uncovered since.
What I did know was that four months after I got here, none other than Rita fucking Wang had driven into town, dropped her panties, and created mayhem since.
So yeah, Rita was my ‘stepsister’ if you could call her that. I wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone if I could, even if it meant potentially losing both balls to an axe. This meant that the woman who’d attacked Jose while she was pregnant, screwed her husband in her house, tried to attack Tabby, and a whole lot of other shit, was technically related to me.
The night she’d been in the cell next to Tabby’s, I’d threatened her with making a phone call – that was to her mom and my dad. Luli hated when Rita got into trouble, probably because it made her paranoid her own tales of deception and crime would be found out, and always found a way to make Rita pay. After Tab had left the building, I’d gone back and told Rita that if she targeted her or Jose again, I’d make her life a living hell and involve her mom. She’d looked scared enough by the double threat to stay quiet, but who knew with that woman.
I knew that she had a court date coming up though because of what she’d done to Jose. And yeah, I’d been heavily involved in making sure that happened and that she didn’t get out of it this time. I was hoping she’d finally get what she was due, time behind bars where she could make plans to disappear out of my life as quickly as she came into it.
This left me with a burning pit in my gut though. How did I tell Tabby? Why the hell had I left it this long?
To compensate, I was doing everything I could to prove to her that I really was a good guy. Everything I’d done was genuine, but I’d opened myself up to her faster than I’d ever done with anyone before, telling her about my mom and my tattoo. All I could do was hope that she remembered all of it when I told her the truth.
Pulling up in front of her house, I shut the engine off and started at the wheel for a second. My plan was to take her out for dinner, bring her home and tell her. I had my cuffs in the compartment between the front seats of the vehicle just in case too.
Mind made up, I got out and walked around the front of the truck and onto the little path that led up to her front door. My house was the total opposite of Tabby’s. Whereas hers was quaint and eye-catching, mine had three floors and was just a house – that was the best way to describe it. It just looked like bricks and cement with some windows pushed into it. My garden at the front was now fake grass because I never had time to cut it. At the back, I’d had all the grass pulled up and pilings from the gold mining in Alaska put down. I had some plant here and there, but that was it. I hadn’t updated the inside, perfectly happy with the light brown walls, varnished wood floors, modern kitchen, and white bathrooms. But seeing Tabby’s and how she’d brought extra life even to the garden, with splashes of bright pink here and there, the addition of some stones along the side of the path that glowed in the dark (scared the shit out of me when I first saw them), I realized that for the last three years I’d been living a boring life. I got up, worked, worked out, socialized here and there, slept…that was it. Even the relationships I’d been in had been as lackluster as that with no emotions involved. It’s not that I didn’t like the women I’d been involved with, but they’d never made me feel what Tabby did. For the first time I was excited to see someone, planning how I was going to do it, and things stood out that I memorized to show her – it was all just different, like I suddenly had color in my life.