Crossing Lines: A gripping psychological thriller (Behind Closed Doors Book 3) (24 page)

“I had to try. Because he’s going to kill her.”

“Only Julia can make the decision to leave Wayne, and she’s never going to do it while you’re telling her to.” I resign myself to my fate quietly. “I’m sorry. It’s not the answer you wanted, but… you have to let Julia make this choice on her own. Maybe she never will. But in the meantime, you have to support her.”

“What do you think I’m doing here, Darryl? How can you even say that?”

“Because…” My head moves from left to right and back as I say, “You don’t.” Rage lights up in her eyes. “Repeatedly threatening to kill her husband is not supporting her. You come in, you take over, and you do things your way. You don’t even realize that you’re overpowering her. She’s just like everyone else who doesn’t know how to say no to you, and you take advantage of that." She gasps again; I think if she didn’t have one hand wrapped around the other she’d hit me. “Anyone in Julia's situation needs someone who’ll listen to her, someone who isn’t going to judge or tell her how things should be, and someone who isn’t going to get up in his face either—because he’ll only take it out on her later. I’m sorry, Ashleigh, I know you think you're helping, and I know that’s all you want to do, but you’re not.”

“I can’t stand by and do nothing.” She’s pleading now. "I can’t believe you’d even ask that of me, now you’ve had your tongue down her throat."

Guilt flashes through me because she’s right. “I’m sorry I screwed this up, Ashleigh.”

“No, you didn’t, and that’s not what I meant.” She attempts to smile, but I know she’s in too much pain for it to show across her whole face. “You have too much to lose, Darryl. Kissing Julia was significant for you, so don’t ask me to do nothing, when you care about her just as much.”

“You’re right, I do have feelings for Julia that I shouldn’t. But I’m not asking you to do nothing.” I make it sound simple, but this is anything but. “I’m asking you to do this her way from now on.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?” I repeat and she nods. Then she moves to push past me, but I block her exit. I cross the comfortable boundaries of personal space to stop her from walking away. “It can't be that easy. What are you up to?”

“I said ‘okay’… All right? I’m done.” Annoyance dances in her eyes as she steps back, creating plenty of distance between us. “What more do you fucking want from me?”

“Why are you so angry, irrationally so? What’s going on?”

“Because I’m an angry person, Darryl.” She feigns a disinterested shrug and pulls further away from me. “I thought we’d covered this already.”

“We did.” I step forward. I don’t expect her to back away when I enter her personal space again. But she does. She takes one very large step back. Her reaction strikes me as very odd for someone who never backs down from anything, so I do it again. It takes two steps to put me back into her personal space again. “Do you trash your house regularly? Or only when you’re pissed off with Sean?”

This time she doesn’t move. Not a single muscle. If she’s breathing at all, I can’t tell. “What do you want from me?” she asks without breaking our locked gazes.

“The truth.”

“The truth?” she repeats, and I nod. “You don't get to make those demands about my life, when you’ve told me to stay out of yours.”

“The difference is, I’m your psychiatrist, someone you asked to help you deal with this shit. Do you remember asking that of me? Ten days ago, I wasn’t convinced you needed me at all. Now I’m certain that if anyone needs help, it’s you. Have you been this fucking crazy your entire life?” I’d never have said something like that to any other patient, and I’d certainly never say it to Krystal Valentina. “Seriously, you're batshit crazy, and very possibly certifiable!”

She starts to laugh. “Is that your professional opinion, doctor?”

“My professional opinion, Ash, is that first, you
need
to stop carrying the weight of everyone else’s problems on your shoulders. They are not your choices, you didn't make them, and no matter how hard you try, you can’t fix what your friends and family don’t want you to fix. Secondly, you need to quit doing something that makes you so fucking miserable—leave L.A., drop off the paparazzi radar for good, and to hell with whatever responsibilities you think you have to other people! Thirdly, you need to stop being so secretive about everything, because treating you is a freaking nightmare. And finally, if you love him, don’t do and say stuff to contradict that. He’s a guy. He will understand
love me
,
marry me
,
father my babies
, or
protect me
. If what you do or say doesn’t equal one of those, then don’t be mad at him when he doesn’t get it!”

She meets my gaze again and I look down at her hand. “Now what are we going to do about this?”

“My hand, my problem.” As I glare at her, she rolls her eyes at me. “Oh for God’s sake, Rylan’s kids are having a play date with Callie. He’ll fix it for me, if I go over there.”

I let out my relief on a long breath. “Sounds like a good plan to me. Would you like me to drive?”

She takes a moment to glance nervously over her shoulder. “But what about Julia?”

“Ash,” I sigh. “Do you honestly think I’d willingly leave, if I thought she was waiting for us to go? She’s not. You have as long as it takes for Wayne to get the ADA to drop the charges.”

“You and I both know he can’t do that.”

“Precisely.” I sigh again, since honestly, I don’t know what else to do. “I think the best thing we can do for Julia’s case right now, is to ring your dad.” Her father is Julia’s defense attorney, after all. "We’ll tell him the truth about why you brought me here and that, with Julia’s consent, I will help her case any way I can.”

“You’ll never get her consent.”

“I know. But it might be enough to make your dad believe you.”

Chapter Seventeen

16
th
October 2012

THE WITHHELD NUMBER
I’ve been ignoring for two days lights up the screen of my smart phone, for the tenth time—or is it eleven? I care not to remember or know who’s on the other end of that line. All of the important people are on my contacts list, and anyone else will have to wait. I have something more important to deal with.

The phone lights up again, this time with a text message. I press the icon on the screen and scan the words. It’s from the ADA in charge of prosecuting Julia’s case, requesting an appointment at my earliest convenience. I can only assume that the brief and volatile telephone conversation Ashleigh and I had with her father on the drive to Dexter Leighton’s house two days ago has somehow been brought to her attention. Why else would she want to talk to me?

I make a mental note to call her back later, as I pass the sign welcoming me to the town of Hawthorne Creek, Georgia. I hadn’t known this was where I was heading when I’d dropped Ashleigh off at Dex's home in Bel Air. She’d told me not to wait and she’d sweet talk Rylan into bringing her home, so I decided to go for a drive. When I'd reached a stretch of empty straight road leading into the middle of nowhere I’d decided to see what her Lexus RCF could
really
do.

Somewhere on the open road, instinct had taken over and I lost my mind to the day’s events; despite the kiss with Julia still burning my lips, it was Ashleigh who had my attention. More accurately, it was the damned attack in the airport hangar, where she’d told me to quit indulging in self-pity. So now I’m here, passing the crisp and clean signage and crossing the outer boundaries of Hawthorne Creek. No one knows I’m here. I haven't called or checked in with anyone since I left Ashleigh’s two days ago, two days of replaying Sunday’s events over and over in my mind. How could I have been so reckless, losing all perspective of what we were trying to do: help Julia?

“If only I’d have listened to Ashleigh in the first place,” I chastise myself aloud. Again. I'd made everything so much worse by not getting on the plane to go after Lisa in the first place. She hated Hawthorne Creek. She had told me she hated it at the end of every school semester, each time I told her she had to spend time with her family.

I can see all this from her point of view now. It came across as though I didn’t want her, didn’t love her. When she wasn’t at school, I sent her away. But that had never been my intention. I’d even told her that her dad’s family were just as important to her as both Faith’s family and my birth parents' family had been to me. But maybe she’d misunderstood. I’d never actually said John’s family were also important to me, and I had rarely visited Hawthorne Creek with her. I guess we both had reasons to hate being here.

I pull the car up to the sidewalk outside the oldest, spookiest house in Hawthorne Creek. The sheer drapes have yellowed again. The off-white coat of paint has chipped and begun to turn cream with weathered age. The gardens have grown higher than the half-brick, half-cast-iron rails, standing six foot tall and designed to keep unwanted visitors at bay. They have failed.

But then again, John had built them after Calvin’s first visit, and neither he nor Faith had thought they were necessary after Calvin had gone to prison. They’d grown accustomed to the safety and open doors so many other town residents enjoyed.

On the very few occasions I have visited Hawthorne Creek since Faith’s and John’s death I’ve never come here. I haven’t been inside their home since Izzy and I settled Faith’s affairs, covered the furniture with dust sheets, and closed it up. We took Lisa back to New York with us. It hurts too much to be here, to stand in front of the home that made my sister so happy for the last few years of her life, and know neither Faith nor John will ever return.

But today, I push through the gate, I walk the concrete path that cut through the over grown garden and come to a stop at the foot of the steps leading up to the wraparound porch. My gaze settles on Drew, rocking back and forth in the chair John had made as a wedding present for Faith.

“What are you doing here?” I ask.

Startled, he looks up from his cell phone. I’m struck suddenly by the family resemblance between him and his deceased older brother. Drew is the same age now as John was when he died, and has the same salt-and-pepper greyed hair, the same laugh lines, even the same worry lines, the ones that only develop through wisdom, experience, and age. It’s almost like looking at a ghost.

“About to ask you the same thing, Kiddo,” he replies. “People are looking for you.”

“So by people, you mean either Georgia or Caleb, maybe both?”
And possibly Ashleigh.

“Spot on.” He smiles and I hover at the bottom of the steps through the awkward silence, wondering when things became so strained between us. "So, you just walk away when things get tough, huh?”

I take the porch steps two at a time, drop the car keys on the weathered wooden table, and test the rickety old stool with my hand before I sit down. “Yeah.” I lean forward and rest my forearms on my thighs. “I guess I do.”

“An’ how’d that work out for you?”

“It didn’t.” I don't look up as I continue, “I kissed a patient, pissed off a journalist, and borrowed a car from a celebrity without asking.”

“Everyone’s gotta hit rock bottom sometime, son!”

“I’m surprised you haven’t read all about it.”

“No one talkin’ about nothin’ interesting, and all three sound like somethin’ they’d be talkin’ about if it was Faith’s and John’s boy they were readin’ about.” Drew exaggerates his southern accent as he winks at me. Then he looks through the cast-iron railings at the bottom of the garden. Slowly, he lets out a long, low whistle. “Nice ride, borrowed from a celebrity you say? So just to be clear, if I run the plates you won’t be spending your first night ever in lock up?”

“Faith already beat you to that.” I smile, remembering the night I was caught drag racing down the highway at seventeen. “And I'm in no rush to experience it again.”
Besides, I doubt Ashleigh would want to attract that kind of attention.
“Krystal's going to be pissed I took her brand new car, but she’s not going to bring the police in over it.”

Drew’s brows shoot up.

“No. She’s not the patient I’m talking about. She’s not a patient at all.”
That’s probably the honest truth at this point.

“So, you just hopped in her car and drove down here?”

“Yeah. I came for Lisa.”
Whether or not Drew likes it, I’m not leaving Hawthorne Creek without her.
I wait for his response, but he doesn’t give one. Unsure whether Drew has understood me, I add, “I’m taking her home with me.”

“Really?” His right brow shoots toward his hair line. “Well, maybe she doesn’t want to go with you.”

“She wants to come home.” I’m so certain of that, I’ll put my entire fortune on Lisa coming home with me. “She hates it here!”

“But she’s safe here.”

I glance through the open door of the house. “Faith thought she was safe here too.”

His gaze locks with mine. “They’re two completely separate things, Darryl, and there isn’t a day that goes by I don’t regret not knowing that bastard had been in and out of my town before I even knew he was here. It’s that kind of complacency that gets a man killed, and it’ll never happen again in this town, not while I’m the sheriff!”