HADES Read online

  “Oui,” he agrees, hating himself for the hope bubbling in his gut.

  He didn’t mean to trap her. But if he had…If she never got her memories back and this dream life he created for them can become permanent…

  He’s not sure why he went into work that morning. Sure, he needed to go over his business numbers and project list with the team at RR Homes so he can sound up-to-date and knowledgeable when he talks with Desmond Keane at dinner that night. Plus, he has a Zoom call with the Louisiana branch about the progress on Bayou Falls.

  But his head wasn’t really firing on all cylinders.

  And though he told himself he’d wait patiently until he got home, he ends up texting Persy ten minutes after the trackerware he had installed in her car as soon as they got back from Louisiana lets him know she’s arrived home.

  Ma belle, waiting on your call. Did you pick it up?

  He waits. Five minutes, then ten. No answer.

  Okay, that can mean anything. Maybe she simply hasn’t taken it yet.

  When she doesn’t finish her task list before it’s time to pick up Daphne, she sometimes does a little more work when she gets home.

  He checks the mirrorware he keeps for both her home and work computer, and sure enough, her day was packed.

  But his stomach drops when he sees a name that wasn’t on there when he checked her schedule for the week.

  Breakfast meeting with Melinka Hale from Weiss Fox.

  Weiss Fox Beer—the company her real ex-boyfriend, Lukas Brandt, recently became CEO of after forcing a no-faith vote against his father.

  A quick search reveals that Melinka Hale runs the charitable wing of Weiss Fox and is in town for a conference. But she attended Tulane Business School at the same time as Lukas Brandt. Did that beer bitch use his charity wing liaison to worm his way back into Persy’s life?

  The car trackerware suddenly dings and his breath catches. Persy’s left home again. But then he relaxes a little when he sees that both location dots for her car and phone stop at the plaza with the Walgreens where she always picks up her feminine items, like tampons and the seemingly thousand hair mousses and leave-in creams now lining her side of the double vanity.

  Alright…She must have forgotten to pick up the test. Helluva thing to not remember, but that’s fine. She’s picking it up now…

  And he expels another breath of relief when the trackerware informs him she’s returned home. He puts down the phone and forces himself to wait patiently for another hour.

  But still no return messages. Maybe the test was negative. Maybe she’s at home, crying because of it. He knows Persy well enough by now to sense that she’d put a lot of hope into a pregnancy fixing their sex stalemate.

  With a guilty heart, Hades picks up the phone again and rechecks the trackerware.

  Only to frown when he sees that both her phone and car are still in the exact same places they were an hour ago. The parked car is understandable, but the phone should be moving around their 8,000-square-foot home.

  No more playing it cool, he calls her cell. It doesn’t go straight to voicemail, the way it did in Louisiana, but after a few rings, he gets the same message he hasn’t heard since then. “You’ve reached Stephanie Fairgood. Leave a message, and I’ll return it as soon as I can. “

  He leaves a message, but she does not return it. And he discovers why when he gets home to find her car sitting in the driveway and her phone lying in the weaved basket bowl where she sometimes tosses the mail.

  Along with an ATM receipt for $500—the maximum you can withdraw in one day.

  CHAPTER 16

  TESS

  “Right on time! I just got done making us breakfast,” Tess calls out when Daphne emerges from her room with two full-sized suitcases—a whole suitcase more than any teenager should need for a class trip, even to France.

  But Tess bites her tongue and sets a plate down on the kitchen table she bought a couple of days after Daphne and Stephanie showed up on her doorstep three years ago. “Two pancakes, two eggs, and two pieces of sausage. Just like the Grand Slam you always order at Denny’s.”

  “Okay…” Daphne gives Tess a confused look.

  Probably because Tess never makes breakfast for just the two of them. She usually only breaks out the pancakes and eggs when the shelter cook has an emergency and so it’s breakfast for dinner because Tess has to come up with something quick and easy for all the young moms.

  Otherwise, Daphne’s lucky if her mother can manage to toss her an untoasted Pop-Tart as she heads out the door most mornings.

  But in the end, her daughter takes a seat and pulls the long braids she got installed for her big France excursion into a ponytail. “Wow, thanks, Mom. If I’d known all I had to do was leave the country to get a homemade breakfast, I would have signed up for the class trip last year too.”

  “Ha, ha,” Tess says, laying on the sarcasm as thick as the syrup she sets down between their two plates. But she switches to a casual tone to ask, “So…how did your aunt’s double date-slash-business meeting with your Boston uncle go?”

  Daphne’s expression switches from bemused to suspicious. Tess never makes breakfast for just the two of them. And she never asks after anything involving her father’s side of the family. Ever.

  Tess immediately regrets asking. But she can’t stand the suspense anymore. She just has to see if there was any fallout from what she had privately entitled Operation Birthday Card.

  Luckily, teens only have so much attention span. After Tess holds her daughter’s suspicious gaze for longer than a fifteen-second TikTok, Daphne gives in and starts scarfing down her breakfast.

  “IDK,” she answers around a mouthful of eggs. “She texted this morning that ‘something’s come up’ and she has to leave town for a while. So she won’t be able to take me to the airport for some last-minute French practice like we planned.”

  “Oh yeah? That's weird.” Tess tries to keep her voice light, even as all sorts of alarm bells sound in the back of her head. “I can take you to the airport. Let me just see if the afternoon assistant can come in early today….”

  “My dude, no worries. I took care of it,” Daphne says, already moving on to the sausage.

  Tess frowns, and not just because she’s talked to her daughter several times about referring to her like she’s some TikTok friend.

  “You can call me any version of mom,” she reminds her. “And what do you mean you took care of it? Took care of it how?”

  A knock sounds on the door before Daphne can answer.

  Daphne’s face falls. Then she jumps up like she doesn't have pancakes left on her plate. “I'll get it!”

  Now it’s Tess’s turn to frown suspiciously. “No, I'll get it. We've talked about this.”

  Tess does what she can to keep the shelter safe. And most of her girls are more the victims of parental neglect and harsh judgment than domestic violence. The person at the door is probably just one of the teen moms with a problem in need of solving before the bus picks them all up for school.

  But on a few occasions, guys have come to their upstairs apartment, demanding to know where Tess is keeping a girlfriend who refuses to see him because the building had a strict “no male guests” rule.

  Just in case this is one of those times, Tess grabs the softball bat she keeps by the door during Daphne’s off-seasons.

  “Mom, hold on,” Daphne says, following her into the main room of the apartment.

  “Have you lost your mind this morning? Stay there!” Tess reminds her, pointing at the kitchen seat she abandoned.

  Then, in her toughest voice, she raises the bat and demands to know, “Who is it?”

  “It's…uh, Benjamin,” a voice answers on the other side of the door. “Daphne asked me to pick her up, but she wasn't answering any of my texts.”

  That's another house rule. No phones at the table.

  “You asked your father to come pick you up?” Tess frowns over her shoulder at Daphne, who never di
d sit back down like she was told to.

  Daphne gives her mother a sheepish shrug. “You’re always lecturing me about taking personal responsibility for myself.”

  Yeah, when it comes to things like homework and making sure to ask Tess about birth control if she ever decides she wants to start having sex. Not inviting her father over to their apartment in explicit violation of their custody agreement.

  But Tess supposes she doesn’t have a leg to stand on. It’s not like she didn’t go over to his place a few weeks ago with the request for him to get her the intel she needed for Operation Birthday Card.

  With a sigh, she opens the door to find Benjamin standing there…looking like an ad for men who cannot only pull off turtlenecks but get even more handsome as they age.

  Ugh! Why does her biggest mistake ever still have to be so fine?

  Tess hates the way her stomach still swoops whenever she sees him.

  If this had been any other month since she’d reluctantly let him back into her life via Daphne and Stephanie as proxies, Tess would've still used the bat to make her point about never wanting to see him again.

  But she lowers the aluminum weapon since he was an integral part of getting her the information she needed for Operation Birthday Card.

  That doesn’t mean she has to be enthusiastic about his unexpected visit, though. “Oh, it's you. Hi."

  “Hey, how you doing there, Tess?” he answers, flashing her the smile that melted the panties right off her when she was a teenager — an incredibly naïve and non-forward-thinking teenager.

  “You’re early,” she starts to point out testily. But then it occurs to her that if she’s not nice to him, then there's a chance she just used him for information. Just like he used her for van access sixteen years ago.

  For that reason, and that reason only, she opens the door a little wider and adds, “That means you have enough time to eat some breakfast. I just made sausage, eggs, and pancakes, if you want some.”

  She eyes him up and down as she makes the offer. He’s not as bulky as he was when he was a teenage hockey player, but he still fills out his clothes with lean muscles like nobody’s business. Maybe he’s one of those people who don't touch carbs. She hopes.

  “Oh, well, Daphne and I were going to stop by Starbucks on the way. That's why I'm a little early,” he answers with an apologetic tone.

  Tess’s heart fills with relief. Oh, good, she won't have to endure a whole meal with—

  “But a homemade breakfast sounds way better,” he says with a huge grin. “Thanks, Tess!”

  He pushes past her before she can think of a polite way to take back her invitation. Though, she supposes there is no polite way to say, “On second thought, I low-key still hate you. So I definitely don't want to feed you.”

  Which is why she ends up setting a plate of breakfast food in front of her long-despised baby daddy instead of threatening him with her bat. Again.

  Tess tries not to think about how cozy and convenient this all feels as she sits down at the little table with her own plate.

  But, of course, Benjamin has to go and ruin her resolve to ignore it.

  “Hey, you have three chairs,” he points out. “This is perfect for us.”

  “Yeah!” Daphne agrees.

  Traitor.

  “Stephanie used to come over here a lot more before she lost her memory and moved to Carnation Estates with her secret husband,” Tess points out between gritted teeth.

  “That's a real nice neighborhood,” Benjamin says, cutting into his pancakes. “Keane and me talked about acquiring that new build when the original owners ran into financial problems. Would have been nice to have a house out there. Something with a big backyard.”

  “Why didn’t you?” Daphne asks in the rich-girl whine she sometimes slips into, no matter how much Tess tries to shame the entitlement out of her. “I could have my own pool, like back in Louisiana. And a lot of my friends live out there. I wouldn’t have to ask Stephanie for a ride home all the way back to downtown every time I hung out with one of them after school.”

  “Sure, but you’d also be farther from your mom,” Benjamin points out. “And our custody agreement’s already complicated enough.”

  Daphne just sighs and pours herself a glass of orange juice from the carton Tess set out in the middle of the table. “It would’ve been so lit to live in one of those nice, big houses.”

  “Too big, probably,” Benjamin answers. “Stephanie and Galen are gearing up for a family. But even the smallest of the Carnation Estates new builds is too big for just you and me, kid.”

  A wave of irritation passes through Tess for some reason. “You’re acting like it just being you and Daphne is a permanent thing,” she says. “You’re only in your early thirties—not to mention rich and fine. You could still meet somebody new and start a family to fill up one of those big houses. Or are you just biding your time until Daphne goes to college and you can go back to Boston so you can be done with this ‘complicated custody agreement’?”

  Tess’s face heats as soon as that question is out of her mouth. Like most people who speak before they think, she doesn’t hear how harsh she sounds until she’s done talking.

  “Gee, Mom, not to sound like Lady, but tone,” Daphne says.

  At the same time, Benjamin throws her a lopsided grin. “You think I’m a catch? A rich snack any woman would want?”

  Tess’s stomach curdles in complete mortification.

  And Daphne covers her ears like Benjamin is blasting music she can’t stand. “Ugh, Dad, please don’t ever refer to yourself as a snack again.”

  Benjamin shrugs, “Hey, I’m just paraphrasing what your mom said.”

  “Okay, we’re changing the subject,” Daphne insists, dropping her hands from her ears. “Do you think Stephanie will still be able to fly with us to Boston for your thing?”

  “What thing?” Tess asks, also eager to change the subject.

  “Dad's getting the Man of the Year award from Boston Charities next month,” Daphne answers before Benjamin can. “Uncle K is so proud of him, he bought two tables. And Stephanie said she was going to try to come too — maybe even bring Uncle G. Do you think her out-of-town emergency will be done by then?”

  Benjamin and Tess exchange looks. Could this sudden emergency be directly related to Operation Birthday Card?

  “We'll have to see about that, pumpkin,” Benjamin answers for the both of them. “She canceled her dinner with Keane yesterday. So whatever it is that…um…took her out-of-town might be way more important than my little award.”

  “It's not little,” Daphne insists. “It's so cool that even though you’re living here most of the time these days, you’re still doing so much for Boston, they're giving you a big award. I'm really proud of you, Dad.”

  Tess’s heart pangs, watching them together. It’s still a little hard for her to believe that Benjamin Brady Keane actually moved to Ohio to be close to the daughter he didn’t know he had until three and a half years ago. Or that he is such a good father to her. He never misses a pickup. Always makes sure she is ready to go on time. Every recital, softball game, and parent-teacher meeting—Tess never has to be in communication or ask if he is coming. Guaranteed, if it involves Daphne, he shows up—usually five minutes early.

  And sitting across from Benjamin and Daphne now, she can't deny the thing she suspects but chose to ignore over the last three-plus years. The boy who broke her heart sixteen years ago is an excellent father. What would it have been like if…?

  Another knock sounds on the apartment’s front door before she can finish that unwise thought. And this knock is just as unexpected but not nearly as polite as Benjamin's earlier one.

  “Are you expecting anybody else?” Tess asks Daphne this time.

  Daphne shakes her head, and Tess immediately stands up and grabs the bat again.

  “Stay here,” she tells them.

  To her relief, this time Tess listens. However, Benjamin doesn't. br />
  “Is it one of those teenage dads Daph was telling me about?” he asks, rising to his feet.

  Before Tess can answer, he strides over to her front door and all but pushes Tess behind him before ripping it open.

  “What do you think you're doing knocking on the door like that?” he demands.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” she says to Benjamin. “You can’t just come up in here and—”

  But they both stop talking when they see the man standing on the other side of the door.

  It's Galen Fairgood, and he doesn't look smooth and in control like the last time Tess saw him at Christmas.

  In fact, those silver eyes of his are wild and a little unhinged as he informs her, “I just watched all the footage from Stephanie’s dash cam, and I saw that you gave her some kind of birthday card in an envelope that said, ‘Burn After Reading.’”

  Tess gasps. “Wait, that dash cam was recording what happens inside her car, not outside of it, without her knowledge? I knew I was right about you having her under complete surveillance!”

  Galen just glowers at her and demands, “What did you say to her in that card? What did you say to my wife to make her leave me again?”

  CHAPTER 17

  STEPHANIE

  He's probably going crazy again, wondering where I am.

  A wave of guilt washes over me as I reach my destination and climb off the bus with my rollerboard. Just a few weeks after I vowed never to scare Galen like that again when we came back from Louisiana.

  Sure, I’m even more frustrated about our sex life than ever. Being hungry is way harder when you know what good food tastes like, and I’m starving for a repeat of what happened at the bayou stilt house.

  But Galen loves me, and he's been so patient with me. There’s no reason to upset him with another disappearing act.

  Unless there is.

  That’s why I’m here in a whole ‘nother Midwestern state after a long Greyhound Bus ride to get to the only place I can think to come.