Page 29 of The Best Wild Idea (Off-Limits #3)

Silas

By the time my phone pings with a message from Ryan, Jules has thrown everything into her suitcase and is back to sitting on the couch across from me, waiting. The air between us is thick as we wait to find out whether or not my building had anything to do with Grant’s death.

My phone pings with a text.

The report is in your inbox.

I text Ryan back:

We may need separate planes out of here. Make the arrangements then stand by.

“What’d he say?” she asks, sounding breathless. She looks like she’s practically crawling out of her skin right now, having to sit across from me while we wait for the truth of that report.

“He sent it,” I confirm, trying to stop my hands from shaking when I hit the email icon on my phone screen.

I see it immediately at the top:

Subject: Smithfield building report

I tap it and nervously clear my throat. Terrified of what I’m about to read. Afraid of what it will mean for Jules if I confirm her worst fears: that everything about Grant’s illness could have been prevented, and that I was the man who didn’t do a thing to stop it.

I tap the PDF attachment and scan the summary page of the report. A rush of air escapes my lungs all at once when I get to the end. I hold the phone out to Jules for her to read it herself.

She’s white as a ghost when she takes the phone from me, her hands trembling just as much as mine. I can’t imagine how hard this last year has been for her, agonizing over what she believed was a preventable death. I wish she would have told me sooner.

I move to the spot on the couch right beside her, careful not to touch any part of her right now. She’s too engrossed in what she’s reading to notice. No one should have to read something that they’ve agonized over for a year sitting all alone on a couch. Even if she hates the person beside her.

She scans the document for what feels like an eternity, her breath rapid and unsteady, before scrolling through it a second time. Finally, she places the phone back down on the coffee table between us and the screen goes black.

I sit quietly, letting her digest everything she’s just read, giving it a chance to sink in for a minute or two. Maybe more.

“I don’t understand,” she finally says.

“I’m sorry you’ve been torturing yourself. I wish you’d have told me what you suspected sooner so I could have—”

“Proven your innocence?” she finishes, closing her eyes tightly. “Oh my God, Silas, I’m so sorry.”

I turn to her just in time to see a flood of tears stream down her face. As much as I want to wrap her up in a hug, like the one I held her in last year, to do anything I can to stop the relief that probably feels more like pain, I don’t.

I don’t move.

“I knew Ryan would have told me if something had come back as abnormal in the report,” I continue, more slowly, and as gently as I can.

“I know how consequential it could have been if he hadn’t been diligent, if I had just assumed .

. .” I pause, unsure of how to word what I’m trying to say without wounding her more.

“But he was diligent. There’s nothing in that report to suggest the Smithfield building had anything to do with Grant’s illness. ”

She turns to me, her eyes already swollen, but she looks less angry than she did a moment ago.

All this time, she’s been able to direct her anger about Grant’s passing at me, and I know from my own experience as an angry kid after my mother died, and again as a lost twenty-six-year-old after my father passed, that sometimes grief needs a physical outlet for the pain.

Something, or in this case, someone to blame for the tragedies that turn your insides out and threaten to eat you alive.

If Jules had needed an outlet for her grief, someone to blame for Grant’s death, I get it. I don’t blame her for wanting that. But all this time, I wish I’d known that it was me she was blaming so I could have put her mind at ease a lot sooner.

I study her face, unsure of what to say. Not at all certain that I should be the one to say anything to her right now as the truth of his passing finally comes to light.

No one was responsible.

“Sometimes unexplainably awful things just happen to the best kind of people.”

“How can that be possible?” she whispers, releasing a fresh waterfall of tears down each cheek. She wipes them away slowly. “How could he just be fine one day, and then gone a few months later if it wasn’t that?”

“I remember the doctor saying Grant was more susceptible to it, right? Asthma as a kid, then into adulthood, plus they suspected a genetic deficiency on top of that, which they were about to do a genetic test for right before he . . .”

“Right before he got worse,” she finishes for me, reluctantly. “Before they decided he wasn’t going to make it through the treatment.” She finally brings her eyes back up to search mine, as if looking for a place to anchor her thoughts, likely spinning out of control right now.

I nod, wishing with everything in me that this conversation never had to take place. That it really was Grant sitting here, making her smile right now instead of all this making her cry. Both of them deserve to be here instead of me.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. I don’t know what else to say.

“It’s not you that should be apologizing,” she says, weakly, pale. “I should have never . . . I’m so sorry I blamed you, I—”

I hold up a hand to stop her, not wanting her to have to go through what feels like an unnecessary apology.

If I had truly been negligent enough to give a toxic building to Grant, I would have deserved every bit of the wrath she was ready to rain down upon me tonight.

Hell, I probably would have been a hundred times harder on myself than she ever could have been if that report hadn’t been negative just now.

I wish I could shut out the truth about that time in my life.

If my assistant had missed something in that report, I probably would have handed the building off to Grant anyway because I wouldn’t have been responsible enough to check it myself.

It could have been that easy for me to neglect something deadly during that time of my life.

She has every right to question the decisions I made.

I shake my head at her.

“It’s alright, Jules. You don’t have to explain it to me. I don’t blame you for thinking I could have done something so careless, considering how reckless I was back then.”

“I think I needed someone to blame. Like, if I could blame something for why it happened the way it did,” she starts, then stops, like she’s trying to shake off a mountain of frustration.

“You don’t have to justify it to me,” I tell her, but she goes on.

“Even when I was unleashing on you a minute ago, insisting that it was your fault, it only made me feel worse. And now, seeing that I was wrong? All that time and energy I spent hating you? Oh my God, how I’ve hated you, Si.” Her voice cracks.

I give her half a smile. “I know. You aren’t exactly shy about it.”

She laughs as another tear escapes.

“How are you still sitting here?” Her face twists, like a leaf withering on its branch. “What the hell is wrong with me?”

I’m about to tell her nothing is wrong with her, but she starts laughing, quietly at first, then louder like she doesn’t know where to take all this pent-up emotion that’s suddenly spilling out of her.

“I wanted to push you out of that plane today without a chute,” she says, barely able to get the words out. She holds her stomach, laughing like all the aggression has drained out and it’s the only thing left to do.

I smile, remembering my recurring dream. “I wouldn’t have blamed you if you had,” I tell her, breaking into my own tortured grin, “at least if you’d been right about this.”

“But I wasn’t,” she adds, sobering up. “I was wrong about all of it, thank God. I have hated you so, so intensely. Wrongfully. When truthfully — and don’t give me shit for saying this Silas, or I swear I’ll never say anything nice to you ever again — but .

. .” She pauses, looking slightly alarmed that she’s about to say something nice.

I sit a bit taller. “But what?”

“Silas, I am so, so sorry.”

“Forget it,” I tell her, meaning it. “I never want to revisit this conversation again.”

“Just like that?” she asks, looking bewildered.

“Just like that,” I confirm, nodding. “I don’t blame you for questioning it. I just wish you’d told me sooner.”

She studies my face and for the smallest moment it feels like I’m looking into the eyes of the old Jules. The one who doesn’t hate me after all.

“You know what?” she says, suddenly shifting gears. “Let’s get out of here.”

My shoulders fall. “ Here as in Switzerland?”

She stands up. “No, out of this room. We need some time out of this suite. Cleanse the energy. God, especially after that.”

Her laughter has tapered off, and even though she’s still swiping a few stray tears from the corners of her eyes, which are now as translucent and light as the turquoise lakes outside, she appears ready to roll out of this room. And I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t too.

“Now?”

“Yes, now. I need to get out of this stuffy cave, like an hour ago. We’re in Interlaken, for God’s sake, Si.” She smiles ruefully. “We need to go get a stiff drink and something other than a wedge salad.”

She kicks off her slippers and locates her shoes.

“No lettuce in bed?” I confirm, standing to grab my jacket.

“Absolutely not.” She rolls her suitcase back through the doorway of her bedroom. “I’m going to find a hat. What time is that reservation?”

I glance at my watch.

“You have forty-seven minutes. Enough time to change.”

She turns around and gives me a wide grin, patting the top of her messy bun. Her nose is still red and her eyes are swollen from crying, but somehow she still looks beautiful.

“I hear wind-blown chic is in,” she retorts, “and thank God for that because you’re right there with me, I’m afraid.” She points to my hair, still sticking straight up from the freefall earlier, I’m sure. “You might want to find a hat as well.”

“Unfortunately, this place has a dress code. You up for that?”

“Nope,” she says. “Would you mind if we just found a pub or something? Somewhere that’ll accept me in jeans?”

She shuts the door to her room and, without her eyes on me, I breathe a real sigh of relief.

There you are, Jules.

“Yeah,” I call through the door. “I’ll have Ryan cancel and find us a place nearby.”

She peeks her head back out.

“Can we not?” she asks.

“Not cancel or—?”

“No, can we not bother Ryan again?”

I blink like the thought is foreign to me. “It’s literally his job for me to bother him.”

“Exactly. I’d rather just walk around and see what we run into.”

I pull my phone out to see what’s around the hotel on my Google Maps app.

“Okay, how much time do you need?”

“Do you not remember how fast I can whip myself into shape?” she asks. The door closes again but her voice calls out, muffled now through the wood. “Pretty sure I’m lower maintenance than you! Give me ten minutes!”

When I hear her bathroom tap turn on, I sit back down on the couch and run my face through my hands, feeling ill.

Thank God for Ryan’s diligence.

I didn’t believe Jules could have been right about us completely missing something that important in the report, but I could have never lived with myself if she was. That would have been the end of me.

I breathe in deeply, waiting for the raging panic-driven nausea to subside, wondering if Jules is doing the same thing on the other side of that door right now, knowing without a doubt that there’s nothing either one of us could have done to save him.