The Art of Endings Read online

  Tess and Shayla were good friends and had been before Trey even got involved with her, so he was pretty sure she knew how Shayla was. But as usual, Tess liked to take his temperature about things, test him, and gauge his emotions by making him talk. Something he didn’t do too much of voluntarily.

  “She’s good. You should come by the house.”

  “Yeah. Maybe next weekend. So things are good?”

  “Yup.”

  Tess laughed and leaned over, nudging him in the arm.

  “You don’t have to play it cool with me; I know she’s got you so wrapped up you could . . .”

  “How about we talk about you?” Trey interrupted. “What happened with that job you were telling me about?”

  “Well, about that,” Tess began. “I’m thinking that maybe it’s not for me.”

  Trey looked at her, exasperated. “You’ve been there how long, Tess?”

  “Are you about to preach to me?’ Tess asked dryly. “Because if you are, you can leave me right here at the curb. I’m not that damn hungry.”

  “You have to make a living. The money in your trust . . .”

  “Of which I have not touched a penny for six months.”

  “Well good, and you should try to keep it that way.”

  “I am! In fact, that’s related to something I need to talk to you about.”

  “Okay, well let’s wait until I’ve had some coffee because I feel another one of your harebrained ideas coming on.”

  They went to the Front Page, a nearby restaurant that was well-known to locals for its Sunday brunch. Trey watched as his sister dug into her plate which she’d piled high with waffles and fruit, and then called over the waiter to order a mimosa. He was always watchful whenever she ordered alcohol. It reminded him of when she was sixteen, and there’d been a hellish five-month period when he was sure he’d lost her for good.

  Tess and he had a ritual, all through her high school years where he took her to a movie and then dinner once a week. Every Friday night without fail. The year Tess turned sixteen, it was tough to keep up because Trey was in his second year of law school and the hours and workload were challenging. But he made it a priority to spend this time with her because she’d become quieter, moody, and a bit of a smart-mouth. But hell, she was a teenage girl, so he didn’t think much of it.

  One crisp fall night, he’d taken her to see a Quentin Tarantino movie. Tess had been especially uncommunicative the whole evening. But it was only when Trey had glanced over at her next to him in the darkened theater and seen her glassy eyes, staring dazed and unfocused at the screen that it hit him.

  Tessa was high as a fucking kite.

  And suddenly, he saw all the things he hadn’t wanted to see those past months. All the signs laid out before him like a damned after-school special that he’d missed or ignored. Irritability, anger, withdrawal, new friends, new clothes, apathy. Resentment of authority. Disappearing money, forgotten chores and declining grades. It was all there. Trey sat through the rest of the movie with her in part to buy himself some time, and then through dinner at a chain restaurant afterward.

  At the house though, he’d confronted her, followed by the inevitable screaming match after which Tessa ran out of the house in dramatic fashion, pretty much consistent with an after-school special script. Trey hadn’t gone after her right then. Shit, he was glad she was gone.

  What the hell did he know about raising a teenage girl? He was only twenty-four for fuck’s sake! He wanted to date pretty women and stay out late with his friends drinking. And on a Friday he wanted to do the Bar Crawl with his law school classmates, not sit in a fucking movie theater eating stale popcorn and then forcing conversation over dinner onto a hormonal little bitch who never listened to him anyway.

  He spent the entire night angry, resenting his life, his dead parents and most of all, his pain-in-the-ass, drugged-out sister who always seemed to need something that he had no idea how to give.

  But by four a.m. he was worried, and by five, he was frantic. Tessa still hadn’t come home and he realized he hadn’t a frigging clue where to look. Trey wracked his brain, trying to think of the names of her friends, and the places she hung out and realized he had no idea.

  Until then, he actually thought he was doing pretty well by her. Hell, they had Movie Night, right? And he’d been scrupulous about never missing one. But until that moment, he never realized that he’d been treating Tessa like another task—another thing he had to take care of. He had no idea who the hell she was.

  It was almost daybreak when he finally called Darren, who was in his first year at the Metropolitan PD. Darren had come to pick him up in a squad car and they drove aimlessly through the streets of Trey’s Maryland neighborhood until about nine a.m. He knew—as did Darren, though he was a good enough friend not to say it—that it was pointless and that they were never going to find her that way. And when they returned to the house, it was just because Trey finally thought to go searching through Tessa’s room looking for friends’ numbers or some clue about where she might be.

  In his sister’s room, Trey and Darren hadn’t found any friends’ phone numbers but they found a hot pink bong, a stash of weed that would make any low-level dealer proud, a Ziploc baggie filled with colorful pills and a half-empty bottle of vodka under the bed.

  The fact that Tessa wanted to get high was one thing, the myriad ways she found to do it was quite another. This was not someone who wanted to get high for fun, this was someone for whom a single moment of lucidity was intolerable.

  Trey had looked at it all, looked at Darren and then sat there on the edge of his sister’s bed and cried.

  __________

  “Am I the only one eating here?”

  Tessa’s mouth was full as she spoke and Trey resisted the urge to ask her not to do that, digging into his own plate of waffles.

  “So you said you had something to talk to me about,” he reminded her.

  “Yes.” Tessa took a swallow of water, and Trey could tell she was nervous.

  Oh shit. What now?

  “A bunch of my friends and I are moving,” she began. “To San Francisco.”

  Trey froze, his eyes slowly lifting to meet hers, but Tessa was pretending to be engrossed in the cutting of her food.

  “No,” he said.

  At that she did meet his gaze.

  “What?”

  “I said, no,” Trey enunciated.

  Tessa made a scoffing noise. “You’re a lawyer. So you should understand the concept of legal adulthood. I don’t need your permission.”

  “If you plan to do it with the money in your trust, I’ll tie it up. Get you declared legally incompetent to manage it.”

  “You couldn’t . . . you wouldn’t . . . no court would . . .” Tessa dropped her fork and looked at him, her eyes frightened. “Trey, you . . .”

  “Actually, yes, I would,” he said, his voice and gaze steady. “To keep you from fucking up. In a heartbeat, I would. And maybe a court would eventually rule in your favor. Eventually.”

  Tessa seemed to have lost the power of speech for a moment and her face had gone deathly pale.

  “You need to choose a course for your life, Tess. All this stupid playing around stuff has got to stop.”

  “It’s not playing around!” she snapped. “And I have chosen a course. I’m moving to San Francisco with Reagan and Paul and we’re opening a bakery in . . .”

  “Holy fucking shit, are you serious?” Trey asked. He leaned across the table so that their faces were inches apart and lowered his voice to a hiss. “Is that your big plan? Squander your trust to open a goddamned bakery?!”

  No one else made him curse this much. No one but Tessa aroused this intensity of emotion. Okay, so maybe that wasn’t true anymore. Shayla could pretty much make him lose his mind as well.

  Tessa pulled away, leaning back in her seat and Trey could see tears beginning to surface in her large, brown eyes.

  “For your information, I never
planned to use my trust money. If you ever let me get a word out, I . . .”

  “I don’t care what you plan to use. It’s a shitty idea in your epic of shitty ideas, Tess.”

  At that Tessa’s lower lip began to tremble. Trey took an angry sip of his coffee, glaring across the table at her.

  “One of these days you’re going to tell me you’re joining the French Foreign Legion,” Trey continued, “which come to think of it would make more sense than this bullshit.”

  “Well, I’m going,” Tessa said. “Whether I go with your blessing or not, I’m going.”

  “Well, not only are you going without my blessing. I’ll see to it you go without one penny of that money you’re counting on to subsidize your irresponsible life.”

  Tessa’s lips were trembling in earnest now, but Trey knew better than to think it meant she was about to back down. He could make her cry, he knew that. But when she’d made her mind up, he could rarely make her budge.

  “So I’ll go without one penny,” she said finally.

  Then she continued eating her meal. Trey tried not to look at her, but it was impossible. She wiped the corner of her eyes angrily, probably impatient with herself for crying.

  Tessa was tough. He had to give her that. A tough, stubborn little pain-in-the-ass. And he loved her so damn much he sometimes didn’t even know what to do with that love. It was both a blessing and a burden that he carried like a load on his back.

  Was he being unreasonable about this? He didn’t think so, but he needed to talk to Shay to be sure.

  “I never planned to use my trust,” Tessa continued. “I was hoping we would do something else.”

  Trey sighed. “Like what, Tess?”

  “Like sell the house.”

  Her words were like a steel-boot to the throat.

  Sell the house?

  “It’s fifty percent mine. And I want out of it,” she said.

  “That’s some bloodthirsty shit, Tessa.”

  “Why?” she raised her eyes to his. “It’s not like I didn’t love them too, Trey. But they’re gone. And I don’t want to live with that shrine to our dead parents like you do. I want to move on to my life now. And by the way, now that you’re with Shayla, maybe you have a shot at moving on to your own. So sell it. Or buy me out. It’s your choice.”

  __________

  Shayla’s hair was in a high swing ponytail. She’d started straightening it again about two months ago, telling Trey that it was much more manageable that way. It was long, dark, and fell past her shoulders when she let it out, which she very seldom did. As Trey watched from the car, it bounced as she turned her head to talk to the man next to her.

  The professor, he presumed; but this guy was a lot younger than Trey expected, and did not look at all professorial.

  Wearing jeans and casual boots with a three-quarter length suede coat and a Burberry scarf, he had ash-blonde hair and looked like a graduate student rather than someone who taught them. Smiling down at Shayla, he nodded animatedly at something she said.

  Trey watched for a while more then opened the door, getting out and greeting them at the sidewalk. After his difficult conversation with Tessa, he wasn’t in the mood to make nice with anyone, but he also didn’t like the way this fucker was looking at his woman.

  “Hey!” Shayla spotted him and came to wrap an arm about his waist. “Just in time. Trey, this is Zale Whitman. Professor Whitman.”

  What the hell kind of name was Zale?

  Trey shook the man’s hand, tightening his grip. Zale Whitman’s gaze met his briefly, picking up on the subtle power-play. Ah, so they understood each other.

  Shayla, Trey’s grip said, is well taken care of.

  “Good to meet you,” Trey said. “Shay’s pretty excited about her research. Nice of you to help her out.”

  “Not at all,” Zale Whitman said. “There’s not a lot of stuff out there on Nella Larsen. Shay’s work will be a great contribution to the field when she’s done.”

  Trey bit hit tongue. One of his pet peeves was when anyone—with the exception of him and her sister Portia—exercised the privilege of calling Shayla ‘Shay’.

  “It turns out some of the stuff has to be kind of hunted down,” Shayla said. “A couple of private collectors have letters Larsen wrote to friends. It’s going to be so exciting. Zale’s taking me to meet them and I’ll actually get to handle letters that Nella Larsen herself wrote. Can you imagine?”

  “Oh yeah?” Trey couldn’t help but smile at anything that made her look like that.

  “Yup. Some of the stuff is in New York, some in Pennsylvania. I have a lead on a collector in Kansas,” Zale Whitman said. “But I haven’t had time to track some of this down and authenticate it, but Shay seems game.”

  Again with the ‘Shay’. You just met her, asshole.

  “Not that I’m qualified to authenticate anything,” Shayla said, shaking her head.

  “Well, you’ve done as much research on Larsen as anyone at this point. You’d definitely be a good person to have on a team to look at the stuff.”

  “You really think I could do that?” Shayla asked.

  She trained her gaze back toward the professor and Trey could see what Shayla clearly did not, what most women would not unless they were looking for it—the unmistakable signs of sexual interest in Zale Whitman’s face. The way his eyes danced across Shayla’s face but paused at her lips, and the oh-so-slight flare of his nostrils. If this joker thought Shayla was about to go traipsing across the country to Kansas with him as part of a so-called “team” of Larsen experts, he had another think coming.

  “I heard we might be seeing some snow today,” Trey said. “So maybe we’d better . . .” He inclined his head in the direction of the car.

  “Yup. Okay. Thank you so much, Zale. I really appreciate . . .”

  Trey walked away with a curt nod in the professor’s direction, signaling to Shay that he could do without the last little bit of small talk.

  As he headed toward the car, his cell buzzed and he looked at the console. Tessa. Hopefully calling to say he’d talked some sense into her and she’d decided to rethink her dumb-ass plan to move across the country to start a destined-to-fail business with her stoner friends.

  “What?” he asked without greeting.

  “Don’t be a jerk, Trey,” Tessa said. “I’m actually calling to help you out with something.”

  “Okay, Tess, what?” he asked, his tone softer. He glanced in the direction of Shay and the professor who looked to be finally winding down.

  “When I asked you how Shayla was, it wasn’t just to be a smart-ass. I was wondering whether she’d told you . . .”

  “Told me what?”

  Trey stood still, his hand poised with the car alarm fob, about to unlock the doors.

  Shayla, he knew from experience, was not always forthcoming about what was going on in her life. When they’d just gotten together she’d hid a pretty darn big part of her past; something that had been like an invisible barrier between them—something Trey sensed though he didn’t consciously know it.

  Eventually he’d found out—though not from her—that she was once beaten to within an inch of her life by a boyfriend. But not just any boyfriend. Justin Ford, Shayla’s ex, was a national college football star who everyone expected to win the Heismann trophy. But after his assault on Shayla, he’d spent three years in prison instead of quarterbacking in the NFL.

  The trial that sent Justin Ford to a Virginia state prison also made Shayla notorious as the woman who took down someone with the potential to be one of the best QBs in the game. She was tarred by some as a gold-digger, a scorned and vindictive young woman; others saw her as a pitiful and pathetic victim. Neither persona had been tenable for Shayla, so she’d moved away from her home and family and kept her past a secret.

  But it hadn’t remained a secret. Trey found out when Paige recalled the case and Shayla’s face from the nationally-televised drama that had played out at Justin
Ford’s trial.

  Doing some research of his own, Trey learned even more than Paige remembered. And what was worse, got to see for himself the product of the beating Shayla had suffered at Justin Ford’s hand. Even now, just thinking about the picture that had been plastered all over the media, of her face with injuries painfully apparent, made Trey want to ball his fists up at his sides. Three years in prison for that piece-of-shit wasn’t nearly enough as far as he was concerned.

  The picture, and the stories that had been told about her made Trey almost understand why she’d kept the whole thing a secret. But they were past all that. They didn’t keep secrets from each other anymore; that was their deal.

  “Well turns out Shayla got a phone call,” Tessa began slowly.

  “Yeah? A phone call from . . .”

  “From your maybe-baby-mama.”

  “What?”

  Trey said the word loudly enough that both Shayla and Zale Whitman turned to look in his direction. Shayla, even as she finished up her conversation, kept her eyes fixed on Trey’s face as though sensing that whatever had disturbed him concerned her.

  “Yeah. She told me a couple days ago that Alicia Banfield called and asked her to lunch. Shit. At brunch this morning I was hoping . . . but I guess she didn’t . . .”

  “I’ll call you back,” Trey said, abruptly ending the call. He took a deep breath.

  Alicia Banfield was a former fling, the daughter of the senior partner at his law firm. Trey had spent three months meeting Alicia in a Dupont Circle hotel for wild-ass sex and very little conversation. Long after he’d stopped sleeping with her—and a little bit after he and Shayla got together—Alicia called to tell him that he was one of a few candidates that might have gotten her pregnant.

  Trey was skeptical, and remained so. But there was still a slender possibility that Alicia, now about a month away from her due date, was about to have his kid. Over the course of her pregnancy he’d walked a fine line with her, trying to be supportive, but not so available that it would threaten what he had with Shayla. Trey knew from bitter experience all too well how precarious things were where this Alicia situation was concerned.