Page 117 of A Lethal Game of Trust

Sam turned back to the table and said quietly, “I’m here for when he fucks it up. When, not if, Leo. You’ve needed to get him out of your system for years. Do it, but call me when it’s done.”

“What?” I hissed, checking no one around the table could hear. “You can’t be serious, Sam. You’re the one who took photos of me and showed the fucking boys at school. His first glance of me naked was because of you!”

His brows pinched and then he looked down at his hands in his lap. “Fuck. I… Jesus, Leo. That was ten years ago. I was a prick. A complete prick. But I wouldn’t dream of—”

And for the last ten years, I’d been wise to always keep my face out of the nudes I sent him. I’d known.

“Fuck you, Sam. Watch your fucking back and don’t text me again.”

He went to speak, his eyes pleading but I just shook my head. He stood, downed his drink, left his chips and walked to the bar.

44

You Got Out

Leonie

Back in Osburn, the next two weeks didn’t feel real. We spent our mornings wrapped up in a mess of limbs. Dom normally made breakfast, then we’d go for a walk, hand in hand. I would make lunch, he’d work and I would mark and then we’d make dinner together. One thing I had requested from the Castillo home was my father’s cookbook and we made our way through it, rating them on sticky notes and placing them in the precious pages.

Then we’d fuck all night long. Sometimes we’d fuck after lunch, or breakfast, or our walk, or between each paper I marked. Sometimes during meals.

He started to scour through the security footage of my home leading up to my dad’s death, using facial recognition to check who had been on the grounds.

We found the clip of my dad catching us by the pool in the early hours, that night we had gone swimming at 4 am, the night we smoked out on my patio.

One clip of him slipping off the trellis that led to my bedroom made us wheeze so much that I saved it to my phone.

All the while, there was a niggling feeling that it was all about to crash down once Issy was told.

But there was someone I wanted to tell first.

Coalhaven was a once-in-a-country kind of facility. Ivan and Derek’s wives found it while Mum was hospitalised and were now large annual donors. The gala presented money towards the business each summer and I was always the one to be photographed with the large cheque. They meant it in the most supportive of ways, but it only made me cringe.

I couldn’t get away from Mum’s illness.

The building itself was large, bigger than our family home, but nowhere near as grand. I hadn’t been there since the winter, and in the season that had passed, the grounds had once again flourished with bushes of bright flowers and trees of dark green leaves. The crunchy conkers littered the floor and always reminded me of playing at break time in school.

But when I saw Mum sitting on the bench overlooking the lake with a colouring book, I knew in comparison to my peers, I had aged thirty years instead of twenty since then. She had aged forty.

Her dark hair had sprinkles of silver in it, thick in places like chunky highlights. The mother I had known ten years ago would have despised it.

But this mother didn’t care.

She was far more alert than the last time I had seen her back when I was still with Jared. She looked up at our footsteps as they crunched on the gravel path up to where she sat.

And her eyes narrowed on our intertwined hands.

“Mum,” I said softly, but she didn’t look up. She justcontinued to stare. “Mum, it’s me.”

I bent down to her eye level as Dom’s hand tightened around mine.

“Dominic,” she said with a smile up at him. “How nice to see you again.”

Again? She wouldn’t have seen him in years. My guard heightened. There were times she was alert and cruel, times she was spaced out and loving and all the times in between.

“You too, Aunty Elena,” he replied without missing a beat.

“El,” she asserted. “Aunty El.” She shuffled further up the bench and tapped where she had sat, her eyes only on Dom. “Youcan sit. You’re a good omen.”