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He makes bail thanks to Victoria’s brother, Babe.
He fucking hates Babe.
Always has, always will.
There’s just something unnerving about him.
He has a stupid pet name for a grownup man, Tim decided long ago.
Though, ironically, it suits him.
Babe was gangly and awkward well beyond puberty; seemingly uncomfortable in his body and letting everyone else take the blame for it. He never married, never had a family of his own; a bachelor in Durham that women in-the-know avoided and men in proximity were forced to turn a blind eye to due to his pedigree.
Tim found a way to overlook the pit he got in his stomach about his brother-in-law fine enough on the golf course or over cigars and a scotch at the club. But whenever Babe had been in his home and around his wife, he often caught him poised in her peripheral like a lame coyote, waiting with his jaw unhinged for a meal to skitter on in.
There are certain qualities about Babe that Tim worries might have been passed to his youngest son. He tries not to think too hard about that, the way he tries—under normal, everyday circumstances—not to think too hard about Babe.
Except these aren't normal, everyday circumstances.
He owes Babe money that he might not ever recover, an explanation for the mess he’s made of their lives and an apology for all the rot and ruin he’s irrevocably caused. And what will Babe do if he goes to prison? What could he expect as payment then? His wife, his children? All his lambs for Babe to feed on.
These are the thoughts that plague him while tidying their bedroom—the carnage left over from the FBI raid—when Victoria flutters into the room like a moth; an omen of death that first alights near the window then appears on the edge of their bed, staring up at him expectantly.
“I thought you were a great man, Tim,” Victoria begins and her shoulders shimmy in a way that tells him that sentence alone took a lot for her to summon.
He braces for impact; like the man Lochlan showed them on his iPad, waiting for a tsunami to hit.
It’s the first that she’s uttered since he came home this morning and it feels like the worst place to start. He can’t bring himself to look at her, instead tilting a dustpan full of the remnants of a shattered picture frame into a garbage bag.
“That’s what everyone always told me, what a great man you were. So loyal, so generous, so attentive. That’s what my mother said, too, when we were young and first fell in love. When I was too young to know myself or what I could’ve become without you. She said, ‘Victoria, he’s a great man and he’ll make you very happy.’”
“Haven’t I?” He asks, and it’s pathetic in his own ears.
“Do I look happy to you?”
“I’m sorry.”
He rids himself of the garbage bag and the dustpan he’s been using as a shield.
They clatter to the floor in a heap and some shards of glass poke through the black, stretched polyethylene.
“You’re a liar and a cheat,” she clucks and chases it with a bitter chuckle.
“I love you,” he declares, exasperatedly, because he doesn’t know what else to say.
He gains the courage finally to search her eyes for what he fears might be lost between them; those twin, dark orbs he’s spent a lifetime loving and longing to be cherished in.
If there’s anything left of her adoration of him, he can’t quite find it.
“I’m going to live with my brother,” she tells him and stands abruptly.
She’s wearing a wild expression, one he recognizes as a bird hellbent on flight.
“Please, honey, no. Don’t do that!” He’s quick on his feet for a man of his age.
He blocks the way with the heft of his entire body, an arm flung out across the wide door frame, his knuckles colliding harshly with the wooden trim, having anticipated her attempt to flee.
“Stay with me, please, fight it out.”
Punish me, he doesn’t add but longs to. I almost killed us.
“I can barely stand to look at you,” she wails and stomps her foot.
His beautiful wife—the most beautiful—reduced to tantrums and tears.
“I know, I know.” It’s a gut punch. “What about the kids?”
Maybe he is exactly what she thinks of him because he knows where to stick his finger in an open wound, knows exactly where her bleeding heart lies. All her strengths and weaknesses, hopes and fears laid bare with the birth of her babies—no, their babies. She would go to great lengths for them the same as he would; wouldn’t fathom a life of discomfort for them when there was still an alternative.
She would die for them, kill for them.
He would die with them, kill them.
She will suffer this existence with him, for them.
At least he hopes.
He’s been wrong about some things lately.
“What about them? They’ll come with me,” she shrugs. “Babe won’t mind.”
“Not Piper,” he shakes his head defiantly. “Maybe not Saxon, not if I ask.”
Victoria points a red, manicured claw at his heart to stab him once—like a knife—into his sternum. Her nose crinkles, her brows arch. All the meanness she can muster, a bored debutante turning down a dance, “Just because you’re going down doesn’t mean we have to go with you.”
He lets loose a startled laugh at that.
It’s a terrible sound that ricochets around the room and takes too long to make its way back down his throat.
How pretty of her to think that she could ever be without him or that he could ever truly be without her; as if she could just untie herself from him, like her survival hasn’t always depended on his. What a joke, considering the iceberg has already been struck and he’s got to be the one lowering her—women and children first!—into a lifeboat.
We’ll get through it as a family, he’d told them and meant it.
He needs his family.
They need each other.
They do.
“Where I go, we go and we go together,” he abandons the doorway, takes hold of her by her elbows, digs his thumbs into the crooks and yearns to pull her into him but she’s strong and determined; rooted to the spot.
They are tethered for eternity, the five of them.
He knows she can feel them; bound.
“You’re demented, Tim,” she nearly spits, upper lip curling in disgust.
This indignation in her causes an anger to rise up from within him that boils to the top and threatens to overflow. His fists squeeze—hard, harder, hardest—where he grips her arms, not caring if the indentations of his fingers leave bruises on her delicate skin.
Victoria squirms, gnashes her teeth.
Oh, he’s demented? That’s tame compared to what he could’ve been. He’s seen her die in his daydreams a thousand times, seen himself splattering her brain matter up the walls or pouring poison down her throat. Even on the flight home, he imagined tossing them all from thirty thousand feet out of an airlock; holding hands as they tumbled down to Earth while being torn apart by the atmosphere before they even reached the ground.
He’s seen Lochlan actually die next to the pool outside their villa.
He’s seen God.
“You don’t know what I’d do or what I’ve done to keep us together.”
“What does that mean, Tim?”
“It means you’re staying put.”
I need you, he doesn’t add but longs to. Because it isn’t time for our droplets to join the collective. We haven’t the time to be reborn. Not when the world is conspiring against us and there are all manner of rabid beasts at our door.
His beautiful wife—the most beautiful—goes limp in his grip and it’s in that instant he sees her the way she was when they were sixteen and she’d put up a fight as he’d hauled her into the backseat of his dad’s cadillac. She beat her fists against his chest and he waited until she tuckered herself out. Then, cheeks reddened and lips swollen, she stared deep into his eyes and asked to be kissed. He obliged and they had made love, steaming up the windows while parked next to the creek.
Maddening, then and now, this woman child he loves so dearly his chest aches.
Maybe he should’ve killed them both back in Thailand.
“Victoria,” he lowers his voice, as good of a warning as he’s ever given.
If he lets go, they’ll have lost everything and there’s no getting everything back.
“Don’t do this.”