Smoke & Mirrors by Skye Jordan

26

Logan

Ipace to the window and look through the open blinds for what feels like the hundredth time since I got home from the bar. I’m caught between worry and anger. I was pissed for the first few hours, but it’s midnight now.

Isabel isn’t answering my texts or phone calls, and I’m terrified something has happened to her. She’s not at Tucker’s or the fire station, not with Natalie or Maya. I’ve checked with all the hospitals, but no one’s seen her.

Her last words to me could have been considered a breakup, and I can’t get images of her and fucktard out of my head.

I shouldn’t care. She does exactly what I’ve disallowed in relationships since my mother died—she lies. But I guess logic doesn’t always line up with emotions, because I’m so crazy about her, I can’t think straight.

Lucky can barely keep his eyes open, but he’s watching me pace and occasionally whines, like he knows I’m stressed.

When my cell rings, I grab it off the table so fast, I fumble and almost drop it. “Jesus Christ.” A split second before I hit Answer, I read the screen, and it’s a number I don’t know. “Hello?”

“Hey, Logan, it’s Corbett.”

Panic seizes my chest. Hearing from a cop tonight is my worst nightmare.

“You there?” he asks.

“Yeah.” I force myself to breathe. “Is it Isabel?”

“She’s fine,” are his first words, and the relief is so all-encompassing, I press a hand to the back of a chair to steady myself.

“Okay.”

“She’s in jail.”

“What?”

“She got into a conflict with that guy you wanted me to look into, McBride. Parker and Delgado brought them in. McBride is charged with a DUI and assault. Isabel is charged with assault.”

I drop my head and close my eyes. “Jesus Christ.”

“To be fair,” Corbett says, “she kneed him in the balls when he put his hands on her, but she refused her phone call, and McBride insisted on pressing charges, so they had to bring Isabel in. When I came on duty, she threatened me with bodily harm if I called you or Tucker. I told her threatening a law enforcement official is a crime, but she didn’t think I was funny.”

I would laugh, but I’m not finding this situation funny either. It’s an ugly pattern from my life—a man treating a woman like shit only to have her go right back to him. The fact that Isabel followed that pattern to a T makes something deep inside me go cold.

In my mother’s case, that behavior got her killed. In victims’ cases I’ve seen through my job over the years, that only resulted in more beatings, more severe injuries, and, on a couple of occasions I can think of, like the recent woman with a knife in her chest, a fate similar to my mother’s. Now, it’s Isabel, and as far as I’m concerned, there’s no fixing that fucked-up mindset. I’ve heard of women kicking the sick habit, but I’ve never seen it for myself.

“I talked to McBride,” Corbett says. “He says if she drops her assault charges, he’ll drop his. I’m pretty sure Isabel will tell me to go fuck myself if I ask her to drop the charges. She’s still fuming over the whole thing. Getting arrested for the first time can be…humbling, in an infuriating, humiliating kind of way.”

I slide into a chair, prop my elbows on the table, and rub my face. “I assume this is over the rifle.”

“Sounds that way. It’s in evidence. We’re still trying to work out who the actual owner is. I’ll talk to the chief when he gets in tomorrow morning.”

“Okay, I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

I disconnect, set my phone on the table, and clasp my hands in front of my mouth. I’m relieved that she’s okay, but like the parent of a missing kid, the relief over finding them safe gives way to anger over having been put in the position to worry in the first place.

Trying to calm myself before I reach the jail only makes me wonder about all I still don’t know, and I’m angrier than ever when I pull into the parking lot.

Inside, Corbett leads me toward the metal door of a cell. As he’s unlocking it, I look through the small window and see Isabel lying on one of the benches, ankles crossed, one arm over her eyes, and I experience a whirlwind of emotions.

“Tell McBride she’ll drop the charges,” I tell Corbett. “I want to take her home.”

Corbett nods. “I’ll get the paperwork started.”

He lets me into the room, then closes and locks it behind me. She lifts the arm covering her eyes and glances toward me. Then she swivels into a sitting position and yells, “Corbett, you sonofabitch.”

She rests her elbows on her thighs and shoves her hands through her hair, then sits back.

I lean against the opposite wall and cross my arms. “Want to tell me what happened?”

“I tried to clean up my own fucking mess. That’s what happened.”

“You need to drop the assault charges so I can take you home.”

“That fucking bastard.”

“How long have you known he was in town?”

“I saw him at the hockey game, but then lost him again, and he wouldn’t respond to calls or texts.”

I feel pressure building deep inside me. “He was at the game and you didn’t tell me?”

“There was nothing to tell. I didn’t know where he went.”

“You could have told me he was in town.”

“Why? So you could worry about nothing? You just won your game. You were so happy. I didn’t want to pull you down.” She rubs her face with both hands. “Go home. I don’t have the energy for this.”

Corbett opens the door and leans in. “She’s free to go. She just has to sign some papers on the way out.”

He closes the door, and I stare at the cement floor, a whole different scenario eating at me.

“He stole from you, took advantage of you, and stalked you across the country. Not only didn’t you tell me he was here, but you also deliberately made contact with him.” My voice rises until I’m just short of yelling. “You made plans to meet him without telling me.”

“You’re not my keeper. I don’t require your permission to do anything.”

Maybe not, but this is all too reminiscent of the sick way my parents operated. “What is this really about? Are you seriously over him, or am I just a way to teach him a lesson or make him jealous?”

She looks at me with daggers. “I don’t appreciate the insinuation that I’m as fucked-up as your mother or that I used you.”

I stare at her a long moment, chewing the inside of my cheek, trying to sort things out in my head. But the longer I look at the situation, the more insanity I see.

Corbett returns. “You ready to go?”

“No,” she barks, deliberate but hurt. “He’s leaving. I’m not. At least not with him.”

“Oooookay,” Corbett says. “I’ll just let you two work that out.”

When the door closes, I say, “Tell me the truth about him. There’s more between you than a breakup. You’re both way too angry for that to be the biggest rift.”

She looks at the wall behind me, her jaw flexing. “He put my name in for a promotion at work,” she says deliberately, like the words are being pried from her mouth. “I thought he was a good guy, and we started dating. It didn’t take me long to discover he isn’t a good guy, and I broke it off.”

I wait, but she doesn’t go on. “And?”

Her hot eyes meet mine. “And he got me fired the same way he got me hired, with a comment to the right person. I guess my exit interview caused problems for him.”

“Why did you let it get that far? Why didn’t you just get another job?”

“Because I’m not Maya.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means Maya is successful. I’m not.”

I pace the room, trying to get my head around everything. Get my heart on board. I’m crazy about her, which is exactly why I’m being so rigid about getting down to the truth. “What does that mean?”

“It means I’m a loser, Logan.” She looks at me, anger and hurt in her eyes. “I never made it. After I graduated, I dried up.”

I’m still trying to figure out what that means when she keeps talking.

“I graduated in the top ten percent of my class, but only the top one percent get the hot jobs in New York. I tried and tried and tried, but was always rejected. The job Aiden got me was as an assistant designer where I was previously the window display designer. I thought I’d finally broken through and that with time, I’d climb the ladder. The minute I stopped dating Aiden, he sabotaged every rung in that ladder. You want to know why I know how to do a little bit of everything? It’s because I’ve always had two or three jobs at a time for the last ten years. Dealing cards, serving for a caterer, bartending, you name it. I didn’t make it like Maya did.”

I’m trying to get my mind around this. “I saw your social media. Tucker always talks about what you’re doing in New York. He went to your graduation and stayed in your Manhattan apartment. He didn’t stop talking about it for weeks.”

Her eyes shine with tears, and she looks away. “The guy who owned that apartment was a customer at the poker club where I was moonlighting. He let me borrow it while Tucker was in town.”

Poker club?My gut coils and coils. “It was all lies? Your work, your life? Nothing was real? What about your social media? It’s all bullshit?”

“The window displays were mine,” she says, referencing her Instagram account while avoiding my gaze, “not the clothes displayed.”

“The fashion shows?”

“I worked them.”

“They weren’t your designs?”

She sighs.

I don’t give a flying fuck what fame she did or didn’t find in New York, but I sure as hell care about the way she manipulated Tucker and social media and me to shape how she’s perceived. “Let’s try it this way—what was truth?”

Tears track down her cheeks, and she swipes them away. “I’m exhausted. I can’t do this right now.”

Her tears should sway me, but my mother cried a lot. Cried a lot, yet never changed. Emily cried, but only in an attempt to manipulate me.

I’m struck by how twisted my perceptions have become. I’m broken. So fucking broken. One broken person plus another broken person doesn’t make one whole person, let alone two. Emily was broken too. I wonder if this is a pattern in my life—choosing broken women because I was raised by a broken woman.

“Does Tucker know all this?” I ask.

“No one knows. Except Maya. She did some digging after I fixed her tire.”

All my air whooshes out. So Maya knew but never told me either. I feel stupid. Stupid and pathetic. “I must have sucker written on my forehead. When were you going to tell me?”

She doesn’t answer.

“You weren’t going to tell me,” I answer for her. “You weren’t ever going to tell me.”

“If you’d failed at your dream for five years, would you broadcast it to the world?”

“I’m not the world, and I care about you.”

“I stole Maya’s fucking scholarship,” she yells at me, “then wasted it. How can you forgive that?”

“You’re the only person who’s ever condemned yourself for taking that scholarship.” I pace a circle, my mind tearing apart everything she’s ever told me. “Where you lived, where you worked, what you did, how you ended up here, it was all nothing but lies. How can I trust what you’re telling me about Aiden? How can I trust anything you tell me? I have no idea who you are, do I?”

“This is exactly why I didn’t tell you,” she says, dropping back to the bench. “Get out. I don’t need this.”

I open my mouth—to say I don’t need this either, but Corbett pokes his head in again, and I decide to leave with those nasty words unspoken.

I exit the jail and sit in my truck. For how long, I don’t know. My mind works to separate my mother and all the things she said and did from Isabel. I know the situations are different, but one thing is the same—the lies. Especially on the heels of Emily’s whopper of a lie, one that first terrified me, then hollowed me out.

I sit there, a knife in my gut, desperate to find a way to extract it without bleeding out, but experience has taught me that once the knife is in, you leave it in until you’re with professionals who are capable of handling the trauma when it comes out.

Which means it’s here to stay.