Page 62 of This Might Hurt

I hold his eyes without flinching for the first time in my life.

The last rational part of my brain is listening to myself talk with no idea what’s coming out next.

“Once I get into Hugh’s office, you will never get me out again.

I’m going to make your life hell. Everything you try to do, I’ll find a way to undo.

Every promise you make, I’ll break it. Every time you need funding, I’ll tie it up in something else.

But no one will stop me because I’m so fucking likeable, right?

No one will believe you when you tell them to vote me out because I’ll keep our reputation spotless.

I’ll fuck you over for as many years as it takes to bring this entire thing to the ground, just so that you can’t have it. I don’t care anymore.”

Archie sits frozen, leaning halfway forward in his seat. When I finish, he cocks his head like he must have misheard me and furrows his eyebrows. “Excuse me?”

He’s the man who taught me to be silent, so I hope he’s satisfied when I keep my mouth shut and refuse to repeat myself.

His nostrils flare, his big shoulders tensing.

I didn’t account for the fact that he could beat the shit out of me.

He might, if the funeral wasn’t the day after tomorrow.

“You’d better know how to fucking back up those promises, boy, because you really don’t want to try and bluff me.

” He grabs Jude’s background check, dangles it between two fingers. “I will take him apart.”

“Whatever you do to him won’t change my mind.”

Fury leaks past his barely controlled expression. “You don’t have the balls to turn on your own family. You’re nothing. No one gives a shit about your worthless ass.”

When I stand up, my legs go suddenly weak and I have to steady myself on the back of the chair. “I guess we’ll see, won’t we?”

As I push the door open, he clears his throat. “Andrew.” A chill runs over my skin. I’ve never in my life heard him sound so unsure. “What do you want? Do you want to talk more? We can talk.”

I want to take you apart while you stare at me just like that.

If I was Jude, I’d throw those words back in his face, the ones he said to me in the billiards room before Grandfather died.

But I’m just Andrew—quiet, a little awkward, no good at drawing blood—and right now that’s enough. I walk away without saying anything.

My numb feet carry me out the side door and across the sun-dappled grass to the Scottish garden. Low stone walls, draped with heather and moss, surround beds of bluebells, anemones, foxglove and dozens more I don’t remember the names of.

Carla told me the family placed a memorial stone for my grandfather here, the morning after he passed.

It takes me a moment to find it, under a trellis of wild roses.

The rough-hewn stone is carved neatly with his name and the dates of his life.

I didn’t expect the words etched underneath—Avise la fin.

He talked to me about the motto of Clan Kennedy when I was young, on my first trip to Scotland.

It means “consider the end.” I thought it sounded sad, but he explained that it didn’t necessarily have to do with dying.

It means that whatever you do, whatever choices you make, you have to consider the consequences and decide if you’re willing to bear them.

“Hello.” Standing over the stone with my hands in my back pockets, I tap it lightly with my shoe. “I’ve done something terrible, because Archie tried to hurt the man I love. I’m not sorry. You should have told him to leave me alone a long time ago.”

He doesn’t give me an answer, so I wander around the garden picking flowers.

When I have something similar to what I took him in the hospital, I sit down cross-legged in front of the stone, laying the bouquet out between us.

“I don’t think you cared for it the first time, but I put a lot of thought into it.

” Exhaustion and a kind of existential dread are overtaking me one breath at a time until I’m too overwhelmed to even cry.

I prop my head in my hands and stare at the little gray rock that represents what remains of the man who made us all.

Archie wasn’t wrong; my words in his office didn’t have a plan behind them. I barely even knew what I was saying. But out here in the early evening hush, as I consider the end of the path I’ve chosen, I know what I have to do to show my family that their pet dog has found its teeth.

I jump when fingers brush the top of my head.

Jude’s hair is still messy from his nap, bright gold in the sun, and his eyes look puffy.

Without me even asking him to, he obligingly put on a forest green sweater, tan trousers, and the brown dress shoes I picked out.

Everything he does reminds me of what he said when we exchanged rings, that he would always be good to me.

“I saw you from the balcony,” he explains in a sleepy voice.

“Took me ten years to find my way out of the house but I got here.”

“Good job.” I reach up and lace my fingers through his. “You look nice.”

“What did you do while I was sleeping?”

“Not much.”

He frowns at me, troubled. “Why are you being weird?”

The ache in my chest gets worse. How am I supposed to explain that Archie was going to hurt Lena, or that I fixed it by committing half my life to ruining my family?

I considered my end, but once again I failed to think about his.

“I’m not being weird. I was wondering…” I hesitate, watching a bee crawl in and out of the roses.

Jude flops down cross-legged in the grass. He picks up a spray of bluebells from my bouquet and starts pulling off the blooms one at a time, flicking them at me. “You were wondering what?”

“Would it be alright if I came to Wyoming with you?”

He stops decimating the flower. “We talked about this. Your grandfather’s funeral is the same morning as the graduation.”

I swallow, trying to keep my voice easy. “I know.”

“Isn’t that a big deal? You have a speech and everything.”

“Yes and no.” I shrug. “It would annoy my family, but they’ll get over it.

” He accepts the lie because that’s how normal funerals work.

No one outside my world could comprehend the irreparable damage that will come from the family heir refusing to attend.

Every business partner, present and future, will question the stability and leadership of the company.

If Archie knew what I was considering, he’d do anything to stop me.

Jude collapses onto his back in the grass and drags me down after him, my head on his chest. “I guess you can come, if I can scrounge up a seat on my private jet.” He sounds relieved.

I close my eyes as he strokes his fingers up and down the side of my neck and focus on how good it feels to know that I took care of him, whatever it may cost.