“Are you asking me to let this go?”
“No,” she says. “But I’m asking you to prioritize your life just as you do mine.”
She might as well have asked me to hand her the moon on a silver spoon. Honestly, that feels like it’s a greater possibility than what she’s really asking for. But I need her to let me keep looking into this, and if that’s what it takes, then— “I’ll try.”
She nods. “Then I accept that. But I don’t want to be in the dark anymore. You didn’t tell me you were going to New Jersey, and that made me angry. I deserve to know.”
“Deal. Will you talk to Harlow tomorrow?”
She nods. “I can try. But I can’t promise anything will come of it.”
Chapter 22
Emma
Harlow Slater is not who I pictured.
In my head, I’d compared her to Heath. Painting her as a Morticia type from the Addams Family. Instead, she’s petite, with streaks of silver in her blonde hair. Her eyes are not nearly as full of malice as her son’s, and her features are far softer than his too.
She looks like any normal woman.
Yet, she had a hand in raising a monster. Just like Felicity did.
She’s seated on the front porch of the cabin, a mug of coffee in her hand. Dylan remains near his truck while I’m sitting next to her, waiting for the woman to speak. Which she hasn’t done since we were introduced.
Though. every now and then, I catch her staring at me. Is she seeing Felicity when she does? Or the woman her son intends to marry?
“You look like her,” Harlow finally says. “Like Felicity. The spitting image of her when she was younger. Before Gio put her through the Botox injections and plastic surgery.”
“She had plastic surgery?”
She nods. “He thought her nose was a bit too sharp. That was just the start of it too. He molded her like clay. Top to bottom, even though she was beautiful before—like you are.”
“Did your husband do that to you?”
“They all do it,” she says. “There’s an expectation of women married to dangerous men. We must look as beautiful as they consider themselves lethal.” The way she says it makes the ache in my chest grow.
The fear I’ve been trying to bury threatens to surface again. Is that what will happen to me if Heath gets his hands on me? Will he change me? Stripping away everything God blessed me with until he’s not only destroyed my heart and soul but my body as well?
I glance over at Dylan.
Heath won’t get to me.
“How long did you know my mother?” I ask, hoping to gently steer the conversation away from Heath—for now.
“Since college,” she replies. “But that’s not what you really want to know.” Harlow turns to me. “How about you ask me what you really want so I can go back to the solitude I’ve been placed in?” She looks so sad—so broken. What was she like before? Back when she and Felicity were college girls with their entire lives ahead of them?
“Why does Heath want to marry me?”
“It’s not about the marriage,” she says. “Truthfully, the only thing Heath wants to do is destroy. The Karvers are in to him for a lot of money, and he told them they have until the new year to pay up, or he’s going to wipe their entire line from the face of the earth.”
If it’s a New Year deadline, then why did Felicity insist on November 1st?
“How did I end up getting offered as payment?”
She sighs. “I wasn’t supposed to be privy to that conversation, but I overheard Heath on the phone with your fath—Gio,” she corrects. “He said that he had a daughter who grew up in a tiny town with no outside corruption. Asked Heath if that would buy him some additional time to get the money together.”
My stomach twists. I was a pawn to be sacrificed for the betterment of the king. A story as old as time, but never easy to digest. “No outside corruption, what does that mean?”
