Neanderthal by Avery Flynn

Chapter Forty-Four

Kinsey

Her room had gone dark, but Kinsey didn’t bother to turn on the lights. The switch was way across the room, and she didn’t have the energy or spirit to take the ten steps to get there. Damn. She was droopier than an overwatered house plant dripping water and turning yellow. Every part of her body was exhausted or ached or was both at the same time. She’d already tried to escape into the mother of all naps, but as soon as she closed her eyes, all she could see was Griff’s face as he admitted what he’d done.

Nothing had hurt as much as the realization that he believed all the way down to the core of his being that what he’d done was right, that making decisions for her was the right thing to do, that he was protecting her by taking away her agency over her own life. She spun the scenarios of what could happen next in her head over and over and over like some kind of internet doomsday generator and couldn’t come up with a single instance in which this had a happy ending.

Her phone, which was squished between her cheek and the mattress because that’s how she’d landed when she’d all but melted onto the bed earlier, vibrated with an incoming call. It took more oomph than she thought she had in her to sit up enough to look at the screen. All the breath whooshed out of her as her stomach dropped to the building’s sub-basement and landed with a splat by the huge furnace. Even presuming why the call was coming didn’t make it any easier to answer, but Meemaw hadn’t raised a wimp.

She swiped the screen to answer the call. “Hi, Gavin.”

“You sound like you already know what I’m going to say.”

She closed her eyes and let out a tired sigh. “I have a pretty good idea.”

“I’m sure you do.” He paused dramatically like some superhero-movie villain expecting her to break down and beg for mercy. When she didn’t, he went on. “I just spoke with Jeannie from HR.”

“On a Sunday?” The smarmy asshole had no consideration for other people. No wonder he’d made a connection with Holden Beckett.

“When something is this important, yes.” Another dramatic and completely unnecessary pause. “Jeannie found your emails.”

She started, surprise at his sheer audacity yanking her upright. “My what?”

“Your emails to Holden Beckett, offering up insider information on the Le Chardonneret serum.”

This motherfucker. Bless his heart, she was gonna run him over with her brother’s four-wheeler. “I never sent those.”

“I know it’s what you’d like everyone to believe, but Jeannie obtained the proof here in black and white.”

“If it was me, why would I send the emails from my work account? That doesn’t make sense.” Because if she was doing that, it would be about the most boneheaded move she could make.

But getting into her emails would be child’s play for her supervisor, who had all of her login information. A few choice key words in the emails that had supposedly come from her would make it simple for IT to do a search and report the findings to HR.

“I would have thought you’d be smarter than that, too—after all, I was really rooting for you to succeed here, which is why I picked you to be a part of the Le Chardonneret team,” he said, almost making the lies sound like the truth. “Obviously, I made a mistake in trusting you. You’re fired. I’ve spoken with Jeannie and while the final decision isn’t mine, I’ve recommended that they not press criminal charges for industrial espionage against you. All of that ugliness will only hurt Archambeau’s reputation when the gossip has finally started to die down because of Leigh’s messy divorce—Jeannie agrees and so does Leigh.”

And there it was. The key part of this whole play. He’d set her up as the patsy and had managed to get everything swept under the rug so no one looked too closely at what had gone down. It was brilliant in its evil simplicity.

“Really, it’s a gift to you. Even a hint of this type of thing in the public sphere will sink any hope you have of finding employment in another lab,” he went on, sinking the shiv a little deeper. “And to show how sorry I am about the error of my ways concerning your involvement in the product that was going to help Archambeau regain its position in the market, I’m turning in my resignation.”

“Already have a place lined up in a country without an extradition treaty?” He may be acting the martyr by resigning, but it really was his only move.

“Please don’t project your troubles on me, young lady,” he said, his usual patronizing snippiness thick in his voice. “You’re in it deep enough as it is.”

While it was unlikely he’d get twenty years for industrial espionage, that was part of the sentencing guidelines, along with a ten-million-dollar fine. Considering that Le Chardonneret was likely to revolutionize the pharmaceutical cosmetics industry, he’d probably gotten at least that much for the information and would still be getting all the licensing fees from the other Archambeau patents he’d managed to get during Leigh’s wreck of a divorce. The man was setting himself up to live out the rest of his days on a beach somewhere.

He was still talking when she hung up. Really, what was the point?

She was lying flat on her back on her bed staring at the ceiling, her brain so smooth and blank, it might as well have been pore-blurring primer, when Morgan came home an hour later.

Her best friend paused just inside Kinsey’s bedroom door. “Who do I need to kill?”

Kinsey started to chuckle, but it came out as more of a groan. “Did you bring a pen and paper so you could make a list?”

“No,” Morgan said, walking over to the bed and then flopping down onto it so she was laying on her back beside Kinsey. “I’ve binged The Wire; I know better than to take notes about a criminal conspiracy.”

Despite everything, this time she really did laugh. It was a little too long and definitely too loud, but it emptied some of the weight pressing down on her. She rolled onto her side and flung her arms around Morgan, squeezing her tight. “I’m gonna miss you.”

“Why?” Morgan asked, her words muffled by the death grip Kinsey had on her. “Where am I going?”

“You’re not.” Kinsey unwound herself from her best friend until she was staring back up at the ceiling. “I’m moving back home.”

“Tell me everything,” Morgan said in a tone that allowed for absolutely no dissention.

So Kinsey did. She shared all the work details, from the antagonism that had started on day one to the bullshit phone conversation. Then she explained all the stuff with Griff that Morgan already had a good idea about and then the big-Neanderthal-energy move he’d pulled.

“My brother is clueless, and that Gavin dude needs to be pushed out of a window,” Morgan said once Kinsey was done.

“I can’t disagree with any of that.”

Are you sure? He fucked up, yes, but still—

Shut up, brain.

“So what will you do?” Morgan asked.

“Go home. Find another job somewhere and pay off my student loans so Meemaw doesn’t lose her house when the bill comes due. Eat enough chocolate to forget your brother.”

“There has to be something we can do,” Morgan said. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

Yeah, but life wasn’t fair. If it was, her mom would have stayed. People wouldn’t immediately decide after she opened her mouth that she was just a dumb Southern redneck because of her accent. And Griff would have never had the balls to make her decisions for her in the name of protecting her.

“I’ve barely worked at Archambeau for a month,” Kinsey said. “I have no history. He made up the emails. What’s the point? If I go quietly, then there’s no publicity and I have a chance to stay in the industry. If I fight this, I won’t stand a chance of getting another job in cosmetics.”

“I don’t want you to go.”

Kinsey sighed, the world coming back and sitting on the middle of her chest again. “Me either, but there’s not a way around it.”

“I can talk to Griff, fix this.”

Kinsey shook her head. Like brother, like sister—except that in her own way, Morgan was asking if it was okay instead of just assuming she knew best.

“There’s nothing to fix,” Kinsey said. “Sometimes you can love someone and it doesn’t matter because it’ll never work out. The whole thing was just a bet for him anyway. He didn’t love me, because if he had, he never would have done this.”

She’d run the scenarios. There was no happily ever after, and it hurt like getting run over by the zero-turn lawn mower. Clamping her jaw tight, she inhaled a sharp breath as she tried to keep the emotion clogging her throat from breaking free.

“I don’t believe that,” Morgan said.

“That’s because the world wouldn’t dare disappoint you.”

“If that was true, you wouldn’t be leaving,” Morgan said with a frustrated growl that reminded Kinsey more than a little of Griff. “I’m gonna throw them both out the window.”

Kinsey took her friend’s hand and squeezed it as a tear slid free. “I love you, too.”