“Why didn’t you ever sleep with her?”
Caleb reacts instantaneously, grabbing me by the shoulders and moving me out of his way. He heads for the stairs. I follow behind him.
“Come on, Caleb. You let her use sex — or lack thereof — as a weapon. Why?”
He glares at me. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Maybe. But that’s because you never talk about her. And, I want to know exactly what happened between the two of you.”
“She left me,” he says. “End of story.”
“What about the second time?” I challenge. “During your amnesia?”
“She left me again.”
His admission cuts me, deeply.
“Why didn’t you ever talk to me about what she did? When she came back and lied to you?”
“Why didn’t you ever ask?” He counters.
“I didn’t want to know…”
He starts to turn away.
“But, I do now,” I say.
“No.”
“No?” I follow him up the first few stairs. “I want to know why you hired her as my attorney … why you weren’t angry with her for lying to you.”
He turns around so quickly I almost topple over.
“I hired her as your attorney because I knew she’d win. I was angry with her … I still am.”
“Why?” I yell after him, but he’s already gone.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Past
One thing to know about me: I dig. If I can’t find it — I dig deeper, harder. I dig until I find it. The only thing I couldn’t dig into was my own mind. I didn’t want to see it.
My father was acting strange, even for him. Twice, I’d caught him swallowing a handful of pills. The only pills I’d ever seen him take were vitamins. These were not vitamins. I found the bottle in the top drawer of his desk.
The bottle said it was a Vasodilator — a high blood pressure medication, but also mixed in the same bottle was a pill I recognized — Klonopin, an anti-anxiety pill. My father had anxiety. I wanted to know how long he’d been taking them and why he was taking them. My father had always been the healthiest man I’d ever met. He was sixty and he had a six-pack. It was an old man six-pack, but still. He made fun of people who suffered from things like depression and anxiety, ironic since he supplied them with medication.
I called my mother.
Her voice warbled across the line when I asked her about the pills.
“He’s fine,” she affirmed. “You know how things get in the office. He’s under stress with this new drug he’s testing.”
I held the receiver closer to my ear. Whatever I said from here could either end the conversation or tell me exactly what I needed to know. I opened my copy of Manipulating Mother 101.
As far as I knew, the testing of our newest drug, Prenavene was successful. Daily, I had to sign off on paperwork that Cash or my father delivered to my office. The drug had been in its testing phase for more than five years. We were on the final leg toward marketing it. Why would my father be having anxiety over a successful project?
“I bet he’s a mess,” I said, trying my hardest to sound sympathetic. I could almost see her nodding on the other end of the line.
“I wish I could just smack that terrible man,” she whispered into the receiver, "claiming Prenavene induced his heart attack. Your father hired a private investigator, you know. The man was a walking heart attack. He has a history of it in his family and he weighs three hundred pounds.”
She said three hundred pounds like it was a swear word. It took me a few seconds to wrap my mind around the words heart attack.
Holy f**k.
Why hadn’t I heard about this? A heart attack during a trial run of a drug was huge! It was enough to shut down the testing until the drug could be re-formulated. It was hard to say anything after that announcement. Why? Why would he risk everything? Not wanting her to know she’d just outed something I obviously wasn’t already privy to, I listened to her babble for a few more minutes. I needed to use her for more information. I swallowed the betrayal in my throat and told her that I had another call coming through.
Why would he keep something like this from me? Why hadn’t they shut down the testing? I thought about calling Cash, but her loyalty was obviously to my father if she hadn’t told me already. I was going to have to dig this out myself. Money. That had to be it. At the last sales meeting, he’d mentioned a drop in our sales. Prenavene was a way to bring the company back. Were we really that desperate for a new drug that he would do something like this? Risk everything?
The next morning, I went into the office early. My father arrived promptly at six o’clock every day. I had an hour before he would show. I had a set of spare keys to his office. I unlocked the door and flicked on the light. Stepping around to his computer, I powered it on, drumming my fingers on his desk. His level of access in the system was higher than mine. I would need his passcodes to access his files. Swearing, I typed in my parents' wedding anniversary. Incorrect Code popped up on the screen. That was a terrible guess on my part — he wasn’t exactly the sentimental type.
I tried birthdates, my sister's and mine. Nothing. Finally, I tried the coordinates to his hunting cabin in North Carolina. The system magically opened, and I had the vast grid of OPI-Gem in front of me. I clicked on the icon marked Prenavene and went to town.
It was true. Oh God, it was true. By the time I locked the door to his office, I had enough information to shut down my father’s company and put him in prison for the rest of his life. The worst part was I wanted to. No, I didn’t. He was my father … well, kind of. He’d raised me. Or maybe Mattia had raised me. I wasn’t even sure anymore.