Page 49 of Your Every Wish

It’s Kennedy’s idea for me to come with her.

She’s under the misguided impression that Bent McCourtney likes me better than her, which is preposterous.

I’ve had no more than one conversation with the man in my entire life.

While he was friendly enough, it’s not like we have a special bond.

In fact, I get the impression he’s interested in Kennedy and this whole sparring thing they do is all for show. Or part of their mating ritual.

But his dogs definitely like me better than my half sister. Ever since we got here, they’re all over me, sniffing, sticking their snouts in my lap, begging for head scratches, which I happily oblige. Bent sends them upstairs with one command, “Go!”

His house is incredible. Views from every window, which are legion. And the finishes are so upscale that the place must’ve cost a fortune. Of course, he’s a builder, so he probably got a break on materials and labor.

We’re in the living room, sitting on the architectural but not-so-comfortable couches with great sightlines of the infinity pool.

It appears he lives here alone with his dogs.

He never uses the ever-present “we” that couples are prone to do and there are no pictures of him with anyone except an elderly couple, which I assume are his parents.

And there’s also the way he acts around Kennedy, like he’s totally into her.

“Do either of you want a drink?” He looks from Kennedy to me, then at the built-in bar on the other side of the room. “I have a feeling I’m going to need one.”

We both decline and he sits across from us in a wood-and-leather sling chair that appears to be as uncomfortable as it is gorgeous.

He leans forward and puts his hands on his knees. “I figure this isn’t a social call, so what can I do you for?”

Kennedy and I exchange glances and I nudge my head at her that she should go first.

“We need to tear down your stone wall,” she says with the finesse of a bear. The bear that had been getting into everyone’s garbage at Cedar Pines, to be exact. Besides flinging trash far and wide, he (or she) had laid waste to Harry’s barbecue.

To Bent’s credit he doesn’t so much as flinch. “And why’s that?”

Kennedy meets my eye. We’d talked about this. Who to tell and who not to tell. A large fortune is probably buried in that wall. An unscrupulous person . . . well, who knows what ends someone would go to for that kind of money? I already feel the burden of it weighing down on me like a heavy coat.

I give her a small nod. We can’t very well ask Bent to let us destroy his wall without giving him a good reason.

Kennedy clears her throat and tells Bent the whole story. About how Willy hid the note in a book in the wall of his garage. How Azriel Sabag helped us crack the code. How Misty had visions of the golf bag, rocks, and stacks. That one earns an eye roll from Bent but he continues to listen anyway.

Kennedy tells him about the riddle and how Misty figured out that the golf bag is buried in the wall, where his cedar tree stands.

“I did have the rock wall built about the time your old man bought Cedar Pines Estates,” he says.

“As long as you reimburse me to have the wall rebuilt, I’ll give you permission.

Hell, I’ll help you take it down myself.

I’m a descendant of Gold Rush Forty-niners and can’t resist a good treasure hunt.

But I’ve got to tell you, the whole thing sounds iffy to me.

I’m more inclined to agree with Emma. This was Willy Keil’s way of punking the FBI.

And even if the money is there . . .” He stops to consider his words.

“Let’s just put it this way: people usually deposit their money in a bank, not in a rock wall. Did you stop to consider that?”

In the nicest way possible, Bent is trying to tell us that even if we find money, it’s probably bad money, money either owed to the IRS or ill-gotten gains from, say, insider trading.

Kennedy and I have discussed it ad nauseam.

I even called Sam to ask him if the money could cause us legal troubles down the road.

He gave me a lawyerly answer that didn’t really answer anything, just a lot of hypotheticals about what could or could not happen.

Liam thinks we should go to Mr. Townsend.

Dex says that under no circumstances should we unearth the money.

But Kennedy’s time is running out. And I’d be lying if I said the money wouldn’t make a difference.

I could get my own place in the city, even though Dex wants us to move in together, which is really a dream come true.

But it would still be nice to have the option of my own apartment.

Even more important, we could make Cedar Pines shine again.

Unmuck the pond, retile the pool, resurface the tennis courts, fix the leaky toilets, install new carpet in the clubhouse, put in working streetlights.

Maybe even turn it into a destination, like the parks in Malibu and the Hamptons.

And then there are the wishes. Can we undo something that has been set into motion by a universal diviner? It’s already out there in the cosmos, like fairy dust in the wind. No way to stop it now.

“We’ve considered it,” I say. “And I guess we’ll cross that bridge if we do indeed find the money.” It was sort of the truth. There was still a lot left up for discussion. But until the money becomes a reality, agonizing over it seems premature.

* * *

And yet, for the next two days that’s all I do. I even imagine that we’re being watched. That this is somehow a test. A test of what? That is the part I’m not completely clear on.

“Did you call the lawyer?” Liam asks.

“Kennedy doesn’t want to. She thinks he’d be legally bound to tell us not to do it and then we’d be liable if we did because we’d been advised by an attorney not to. My mother’s boyfriend, Sam, also a lawyer, says she’s not wrong.”

“What did he say you should do?”

“I didn’t ask him because then we’d be liable if we didn’t listen. ”

He arches a dark brow. “That’s kind of convoluted reasoning, don’t you think?”

“Probably. What do you advise we do? Wait, don’t tell me.”

He takes my hand and laughs while we stroll along the creek side, occasionally stopping to skip a stone across the water. “I won’t. But here’s an unsolicited suggestion: Don’t move in with Dex.”

That had come out of nowhere. Well, not completely. We’d been dancing around it for days, ever since Dex left to go back to the city and I told Liam about his proposal.

“Why not?” I lean against a tree and zip my jacket all the way up.

“A lot of reasons. You probably won’t like any of ’em, though. ”

“Try me,” I dare, though I probably won’t. Since my small fallout with Kennedy over Dex, she at least has treaded lightly on the subject. I wish Liam would do the same.

He heaves a sigh. “First and foremost, I don’t want you to leave. But putting my own feelings aside, I think Dex is an asshole. And as blind as love can be, I also think you know he’s an asshole.”

“Yeah, but he’s my asshole,” I say because it’s easier than admitting the truth.

For a long time, he took me for granted.

It wasn’t until Liam came along that Dex did and said all the things I wanted my boyfriend of a decade to do and say.

And then there’s the wish. Who knows if Dex is really under the influence of Misty’s superpowers?

I sort of laugh to myself because the whole notion that she made him love me is patently absurd and yet I can’t help but wonder.

“Let me ask you something.” Liam steps up to me and gently removes a twig from my hair. A wave of warmth flows through me. “As an advice columnist, what would you tell one of your readers if they described Dex to you?”

“What would the description be?” I ask.

“Pompous. Self-entitled. A guy who wouldn’t come through for his long-term girlfriend when she needed him most. Your basic run-of-the-mill asshole.”

“That’s just mean.” He’s so close I can feel a whisper of his breath on me, and my stomach does a somersault.

“What would your advice be?” Liam won’t let it go.

“That maybe he’s misunderstood. That maybe people focus too much on the superficial and miss seeing the real him.

I don’t want to play this game anymore and I’m cold.

” I push off the tree and start to walk again.

“You know what? I’m going to head home. I’ll see you Wednesday morning.

” That’s when Bent is bringing the excavator to dig up the wall.

“Ah, come on, Emma. Don’t be angry.”

“I’m not.” And I’m really not. But Dex and I are finally working out the way I’d always dreamed. I don’t need Liam of all people raining on my parade.

When I get home, Kennedy is in the living room, talking to Madge on the phone.

She shakes her head, a message that she hasn’t told her mother about the rock wall and has no plans to anytime soon.

We talked about it, and she decided that she doesn’t want to get Madge’s hopes up.

But my Spidey Sense tells me that Madge is an empty hole of need and Kennedy doesn’t want the pressure.

I give her a thumbs-up in support and go into my bedroom to give her a little privacy.

I dash off a quick text to Dex with a heart emoji, check my email, and leave a voicemail to my editor, reminding him to schedule tomorrow’s column before he leaves for a journalism conference in Orange County.

I do my twentieth Google search on the legal consequences of finding hidden money and wind up reading a story about siblings, a brother and sister who found eighty thousand dollars in cash stashed in a suitcase in their late grandfather’s attic in Dayton, Ohio.

Along with the cash was a collection of newspaper clippings about a 1968 bank robbery.

It turned out that their grandfather and his best friend had done the stickup.

Afraid that the money was marked, the grandfather had hidden the cash in the attic for sixty-three years.

Upon his death, the siblings, trying to do the right thing, called the police, who impounded the money until they could tie it to the bank robbery, which sure enough they did.

Shortly after the robbery, the bank offered a two-thousand-dollar reward to anyone with information about the whereabouts of the money and the identity of the robbers.

Back then, two thousand dollars was equivalent to eighteen thousand today, so no small amount.

You guessed it, the sister and brother duo were rewarded the two thousand bucks and their family’s reputation was stained forever.

I made up that last part, but who wants to find out that their sweet old grandpappy was an armed robber?

I tap on a story about money laundering but before I can read it, Kennedy pops her head in my room.

“I’m going to kill her,” she says.

“Madge? What did she do now?”

“Nothing, that’s the problem.” She sags onto my bed.

“She was going to ask Max for the money to pay Sterling. But he’s still waiting for his deal to go through and has to keep his books clean, yada, yada, yada.

How much you want to bet that Max would have no compunction spending Willy’s dirty money? Clean, my ass.”

I sit next to her. “Kennedy, you already knew they wouldn’t help.

This is old news, so why are you dwelling on it now?

If the money is in the rock wall, which I’m starting to believe it is, then Madge and Max .

. . they’re moot. You’ll have what you need, and Brock Sterling will be a distant memory. ”

She sniffles and I can tell she’s holding back tears.

I grab a wad of tissues from the box on my side table. “Why are you crying?”

“I’m not crying.” But she is. “What if the money isn’t there? Or worse, what if it is and as soon as we start spending it, we’re arrested by the feds for being an accessory to a crime or whatever criminal statute there is for spending a convicted felon’s money?”

“There’s nothing illegal about inheriting our late father’s money.” Which isn’t strictly true as we’re both aware of. But on the face of it, without the nuances, the money should be ours to spend. We’re Willy’s only living heirs.

“You’re right.” She swipes her eyes with the back of her hand. “What are you going to do with your share of the money?”

“Fix up this place. Um, not the trailer, which I might fix up, too, but the whole park.” I pause. “Are you planning to go back to Vegas?”

Kennedy doesn’t answer at first, then gives a half-hearted nod. “It’s where my job is—if I still have one. There’s always the Bellagio or the Wynn. Both have been trying to recruit me for months.”

“There you go.” But the thing is I’ll miss her. Sure, it’s less than two hours to Vegas by plane. But it won’t be the same. I rest my hand on top of hers. “I’ve really loved getting to know you these last few weeks. I wish you weren’t going.” And there it is. I very much want her to stay.

“I’ll come to you, and you’ll come to me. Maybe we can buy our own private jet with all the loot we get.” She turns her hand over and squeezes mine.

“Did you ever think we’d like each other so much?”

“Truth? Before we met, I hated you.”

“Why?” I should be appalled but it’s such a Kennedy thing to say. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. She’s honest to a fault, which is part of her charm.

She waits a beat, then says, “I had this idea in my head that Willy loved you, that you were his legitimate child, and I was the mistake. The one he wished never happened. I was convinced that you had a relationship with him.”

“Nope. I had exactly what you had, a whole lot of nothing. But I do believe that in his own way he loved us both. He wouldn’t have kept all those pictures of us if he didn’t.

Plus, he made us his only heirs, and if it pans out, went to a great deal of trouble to leave us his fortune.

That has to count for something, don’t you agree? ”

“I do,” Kennedy says. “But the best thing he did was bring us together. We may not have had him, but we have each other. ”

My heart feels like it’s beating out of my chest, and I repeat, “We have each other.” Because we do.