Page 27

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“Trivedi! My office, now !”

Rav stands and slowly buttons his jacket. Then he walks the longest twenty steps of his life.

The newspaper lands on Howard’s desk with a slap , headline splashed out in bold black ink.

“HE’S BEING FRAMED”: SISTER OF SUSPECT IN SLAYING OF MUSIC EXECUTIVE SAYS THE EVIDENCE AGAINST HER brOTHER IS FAbrICATED

“ Sit .”

Rav sits.

Howard perches on the edge of her desk, looming over him with eyes blazing. “I just got off the phone with the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” she says, slicing each word off with a razor. “Agent Rice is apoplectic. She thinks the unnamed source in this article is you. I assured her that was impossible. It is impossible , isn’t it, Detective? Because I distinctly recall you giving me your word you would keep your nose out of the Vanderford file from now on, and I know you wouldn’t risk being brought up on charges for interfering with a federal investigation.”

“To be fair,” Rav says slowly, “I gave you my word that I would confine my investigations to off-duty—”

“Do you really think being pedantic is going to help you here?”

“No, ma’am.”

“I am at the end of my rope with you. I assigned you this case to give you a chance to shine. So that everyone could see what I saw: a talented detective with maturity beyond his years. Instead you’ve demonstrated poor judgment at every turn, and—”

“Have I, though?”

“Excuse me?”

He looks up, meeting her eye. “I realize I’ve made decisions that aren’t in the best interests of my career, but with all due respect, that’s not all there is. You’re the one who reminded me of that. I understand the consequences of my actions, and I haven’t taken them lightly. I’m doing what I believe is necessary—to protect someone I care about, and to get justice for Richard Vanderford. If it costs me my career…” He falters for a second. “If that’s what happens, I’ll live with it. Covering my own arse instead of doing the right thing—that I could not live with.”

Howard stares at him, her mouth pressed into a thin line. “Is that what you’re doing here? The right thing? Because for the life of me, I can’t see how this”—she taps the paper—“helps anyone.”

“I guess we’ll find out,” he says quietly.

“I guess we will. Dismissed.”

Things go downhill from there.

Rav is assigned grunt work on Danny Jobs’s latest case. If Howard wasn’t benching him before, she definitely is now, and though he probably deserves it, it’s humiliating having to eat shit like this. He spends his days sifting through grainy traffic cam footage and handling paperwork, pausing to check his phone every five seconds in case he somehow missed a call from Carrie Campbell informing him that his oh-so-clever plan actually worked. Then he goes home to his flat—once his perfect little oasis, now scarred by the presence of the evidence board. What was he thinking, putting that thing there? Nothing like having a constant reminder of your failure mounted on the fucking wall .

Then there’s Jack, who is basically ghosting him.

Missed calls and voicemails, texts that go unanswered for days. They’ve spoken exactly once since the band left for Europe, and Jack was distant. Not cold, exactly, just… reserved. “The schedule’s really crammed right now,” he said when Rav hinted that it had been a while since they’d spoken. They were on a video call, and Jack was distracted, flashing past the screen while he changed his shirt, put his guitar away, and generally buzzed around his hotel room. Rav spent much of the call addressing a moving torso. “I might be hard to get a hold of for a bit. But we’ll always have the pool, right? Listen, I gotta run…”

He’s busy, Rav knows he is. But there’s something else going on. Maybe Rav freaked him out with that “love” slipup. Maybe now that he’s back on the road, Jack remembers that the world is full of interesting, attractive people, and he doesn’t want to get too hung up on someone whose life makes no sense with his.

Or maybe it goes deeper. Maybe with the benefit of a little distance, Jack has realized it might be better to put the past couple of months in the rearview. New York has been the site of a lot of trauma for him. Maybe he just needs to get some space between himself and all that, even if it means putting space between him and Rav, too. If that’s the case, Rav would understand, but he wishes Jack would just say so.

It’s in the midst of this emotional nadir that his mother calls, naturally. Great white sharks have nothing on Eva. She can smell blood in the water from thousands of miles away, and she smells it now. Rav declines the call on his mobile, but Mummy Dearest isn’t having it; thirty seconds later, his desk phone rings.

“Are you screening my calls now?”

“I’ve been screening your calls since I was fourteen.”

“Then why did you pick up?”

“Because this is my work phone. I’m at work, Mum. Working.” He pretends not to notice Will smirking beside him.

He knows why she’s calling. The Nicks are in London this weekend, which means the skate park memes will be back in people’s timelines. His Lordship won’t like seeing his son’s face all over social media. It’s undignified . He’ll be in a foul mood about it, which puts Eva in a foul mood, so she’s calling to share the fun.

“Your boyfriend is making quite the splash over here,” she says.

“I don’t have one of those.”

“What should I call him, then? Your latest fling?”

Hold on. He’s never mentioned hooking up with Jack. Is this some weird maternal intuition? “I can’t talk about this right now. I’ll call you later.”

“You’ve been ducking my calls for weeks. Enough is enough.”

He sighs. “Fine. Give me five minutes.” The office gossip about his scandalous relationship has finally lost steam, and he has no desire to revive it. He calls her back from the street.

“Your father is in quite a state,” Eva informs him. She sounds wryly amused, as she often does when discussing His Lordship. For the life of him, Rav can’t understand the dynamic between those two. They met at Columbia, and if he tries really hard he can sort of imagine how a starchy English boy and a hot American model get it on for a while. How they end up married after accidentally getting pregnant. He can definitely understand how they break up almost immediately, upon discovering that the world cannot, physically, revolve around each of them at the same time. The getting back together after more than twenty years… He just cannot. Especially because they still fight like cats and dogs. About the only thing Eva and His Lordship agree on is that their son is a huge disappointment.

“If he’s worked up over a silly meme, that’s on him,” Rav says.

“I believe it’s his son being in the tabloids that has his blood pressure up.”

“You mean the TMZ thing? That was ages ago.”

“I mean the torrid affair the two of you are allegedly carrying on. Your picture is in every checkout line in the country.”

Rav’s stomach drops. He’d dared to hope they were in the clear after Mo deleted those photos at the food market. “Is it a big story?”

“For a few days, but of course they’ve already moved on to the next thing. So has he, if the headlines are to be believed.”

“What do you mean?” Rav asks, his stomach sinking even further.

“Apparently, he has a new love interest. Marcella something-or-other. A singer, I think?”

Marcella Marcus, presumably. Even Rav knows who she is. Extremely talented, and extremely beautiful. Rav experiences a sharp twist of jealousy before pushing it aside. The British tabloids are notorious muckrakers. They’ll say anything to sell papers.

Also, you have no claim on him.

“So you’re calling, why? To pass along a friendly I-told-you-so ? That’s what you get for not being discreet? ” The words sound every bit as bitter as they taste.

“Oh, stop it. I’ve never said any such thing. Your father might have—”

“ Might have?”

“—wanted you to be discreet, but I never asked that of you. Don’t tar me with that brush, because it’s not who I am and you know it.”

Rav stares straight ahead, jaw twitching. The street is its usual mayhem: yellow cabs, trucks with shrieking brakes, irate honking. Sometimes, he wonders what the hell he’s doing in this city. It’s not as if coming here fixed anything. “Why did you go back to him?”

He’s not sure why he’s asking the question now, all these years later. It’s not as if she can say anything that will change how he feels about it. Which is betrayed.

“I spent my entire childhood trying to please him, and when he couldn’t cram me into his perfect little mold, he turned his back on me. I came to you to start a new life—”

“And I was there for you.”

“For a hot second and then you went back to him! It makes me wonder if it was me you were trying to get away from all along!”

“Christ, Rav.” A sigh on the line, and a silence. “Where is this coming from all of a sudden?”

“I don’t know.” He takes a moment, pacing back and forth in front of the station. “I’m just in a bit of a state. With work, and—”

“That’s why I’m calling. I’ve been where you are right now, and I remember what it’s like. How it eats away at your self-worth. And I don’t just mean the tabloids. I’ve been celebrity arm candy too, more than once. It’s not so bad if you enjoy it for what it is, but you don’t want to lose your heart to someone like that. He’ll break it.”

“You don’t know anything about him.”

“Maybe not, but I’ve known men like him. Or at least, I knew one.”

Rav takes a moment to digest that. “You’re not talking about Dad.”

“No. This was during one of our many breakups, before we were married. He was… Well. Never mind. What matters is that he was rich and famous and exciting, and trying to love him was like trying to catch a shooting star in a butterfly net. I was never the same after, and I don’t want you to make the same mistake.”

“Ah.” Rav’s voice feels like sandpaper. How is it your parents always know just where to hit you? With laser precision, they zero in on your worst fears, your deepest pools of self-doubt, and blast them open like fucking bunker busters. “In that case…” He clears his throat. “I’m sorry to say you’re a bit late. Because I am very much in love with him.”

It’s the first time he’s admitted it to himself, let alone someone else, and the fact that it’s to his mother of all people makes him want to laugh. Or cry. Both, maybe.

She sighs. “Oh, Rav. My baby.”

She hasn’t called him that since he was ten years old, and he is not up for it. “Spare me the sympathy, Mum. It’s not your style. Besides, it’s not as if you’re telling me anything I don’t know. There’s every reason to think this ends badly, but I decided a long time ago that it was worth it. Cue clichés about gathering ye rosebuds, it’s better to have loved and lost, et cetera.”

His mother gives a humorless laugh. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. You’re just like—”

“Yes, yes, I’m just like my father. Never could tell either of us a damned thing.” He’s heard it a thousand times.

“I was going to say you’re just like me. A hopeless romantic.”

“Please. You’re the most cynical person I know.”

“Who says you can’t be both? A cynic is just a brokenhearted romantic. You’ve had your heart broken more than once, including by your parents. I have to live with that. I’d hoped to be there for you this time, at least. Apparently, it’s too little too late, so I’ll simply say this: if he truly is worth the risk, then take it. Really take it. No half measures. Because if things don’t work out, what you’ll regret most isn’t the chances you took but the ones you didn’t.”

Another silence. Rav finds himself wondering where she is. In the garden, maybe, in the gazebo he nearly burned down. “What happened to him? Mr. Famous and Exciting?”

“He got married a couple of years later. Another model.”

“Bastard.”

She laughs. “It was partly my fault. I was famous myself, and very young, leading a fast and glamorous life. You get used to everything around you being profoundly superficial. I treated our relationship as casual because I fully expected him to do the same, and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. I can’t be sorry for how it turned out, because I have you, and your father. But I can’t help wondering what would have happened if I’d let myself be vulnerable instead. If I’d shown him that I could be the true thing, the real thing, in his life. And he could be that for me, too.”

“Bloody hell.” Rav rubs his eyes harshly. “I was so not ready for this.”

“What?”

“You. Parenting. It’s completely foreign.”

“Oh, fuck off.”

“That’s more like it.” Against all odds, Rav finds himself smiling. “Go on, then, who was he? You have to tell me now.”

“I really don’t.”

“I suppose I’ll just have to find out on my own. I am a detective, you know.”

“So I hear.” A pause, and a sigh. “Should I buy tickets to this concert?”

Rav has a brief but vivid image of Eva elbowing her way backstage to go full Naomi Campbell on Jack. The tabloids would love it. “I’m sure they’re sold out. But I appreciate the thought.”

There’s a beep in his ear. He glances at his phone—and his heart skips a beat.

“I have to go, Mum. I have another call.”

There must be something in his voice, because she says, “Is it him?”

“It is, actually.”

“No half measures,” Eva says. “And Rav. Remember what I taught you about putting your chin up in photos. Let them see that perfect jawline.” With that parting advice, she hangs up.

Rav draws a deep breath and hits the green icon. “Good afternoon.” He hopes it sounds breezier than it feels. “I thought you’d be in sound check by now.”

“Soon. Thought I’d get out and see the city for once, now that I don’t have to worry so much about security. I’m taking a walk in Hyde Park, and I can’t even tell you how good it feels.”

“I bet.”

There’s a long pause. Then Jack says, “I can’t stop thinking about you. Everything in this city reminds me of you, and I just had to hear your voice.”

Rav melts onto a concrete bollard outside the station. “I’ve been missing you, too. How have you been?”

“Fine, thanks.”

Bullshit. Rav can hear it in his voice. “You don’t sound fine.”

“It’s been a tough couple of weeks. We had to postpone the Zurich show. But the last few days have been better, and—one sec.” Jack covers the phone; he’s talking to someone in the background. “Yeah, okay.” Uncovering the phone, he sighs. “Listen…”

“You have to go.”

“I’m sorry. It’s just so intense right now.”

Rav stands and turns a little circle on the sidewalk. “Jack, look, if this isn’t… If you don’t want to—”

“I do.”

“I would understand, is all I’m saying. You can be honest with me.”

“I am being honest with you.” He sighs again. “I know I haven’t been good at keeping in touch. It’s not because I don’t want to. Maybe we could try again later tonight? After the show?”

“Of course.”

“Great. I’d better go. And listen, about this crap in the tabloids—”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Are there photographers following you again?”

Rav glances around instinctively, and… yes, there’s a figure lurking nearby. He slips around a tree trunk when Rav looks his way, and a moment later he’s gone. “Maybe,” Rav hedges. “But don’t you dare say sorry again. You don’t owe me an apology and you don’t owe me an explanation. It’s not like we made any promises.”

“Maybe not, but just so you know, that stuff about Marcella is bullshit. We’re friends, that’s it.”

“Duly noted.” A clamp releases on his chest, but his tone is airy as he adds, “Though for what it’s worth, if you were so inclined, I wouldn’t blame you. She’s hot.”

“Shut up,” Jack says, laughing. “I gotta go.”

Rav hangs up feeling better, but something tells him whatever is going on with Jack isn’t going to be fixed by a couple of phone calls.

He’s about to head back inside when his phone rings again. Bloody hell, he’s popular today. He checks the name. Unknown caller.

“Trivedi.”

No response. Rav can hear traffic in the background.

“Hello? Who is this?”

Nervous breathing. And then: “This is Joe Miller.”