Chapter 2 - ASHES AND SUNFLOWERS
The wind slicing across the Framingham parking lot carried the damp, thawing scent of Massachusetts earth, but nothing felt quite real until I took that third step beyond the razor-wire gate. The asphalt was cracked, gray, and endless. Standing twenty yards away, leaning against the fender of an unpretentious dark blue Subaru with salt stains crusting the wheel wells, was Lucas Hayes.
He looked older than the boy who used to pull Rachel and me out of neighborhood scrapes in South Boston. The boy who had spent twelve years working round-the-clock shifts as a forensic accountant while Rachel drained his accounts. His dark coat was buttoned crookedly against the March gale, his jawline shadowed by several days of dark stubble, and his fingers were white from gripping a massive, unwieldy bundle of sunflowers wrapped in brown butcher paper. Sunflowers. My mother had grown them along the wooden fence of our childhood backyard until the day she passed away. Michael had never bothered to learn that detail, but Lucas had remembered for three decades.
“Evelyn,” he said again as I reached the edge of the pavement. The wind caught his voice, fraying the edges of it, making him sound raw, like an open wire. “I’ve waited a long time. Come home with me.”
I didn’t reach for the flowers. In prison, you learn that your hands belong strictly to yourself, kept flat against your thighs or folded tightly over your chest so no guard or inmate misinterprets a reflex as a provocation. For thirty-six months, nobody had offered me a single living thing that had petals or sunlight on it.
“You’re her brother, Lucas,” I said. My voice was a gravel road, low and stripped of its former boardroom polish. “If you’re here to serve me with an amended civil suit or tell me she walks with a limp, save your breath. The state took my house, my accounts, and my thirty-fourth, thirty-fifth, and thirty-sixth years on this earth. There isn’t anything left for the Hayes family to harvest.”
Lucas took a slow, deliberate breath, his throat bobbing as he swallowed down whatever pride had survived his sister’s disgrace. “Rachel isn’t my family anymore, Evelyn. She hasn’t been since the day she took the stand at your trial wearing that pearl choker you gave her for Christmas, weeping for the jury while Michael’s high-priced firm funneled your life savings into offshore dummy accounts.” He stepped closer, not in a way that crowded me, but like a man stepping between someone he loved and an oncoming locomotive. “I didn’t come here to talk about her injuries. I came here because I spent the last three years auditing Michael’s architectural firm. I know where the money went, Evelyn. And I know what they’re planning to do next week.”
A strange, electric shudder passed through my spine, colder than the Framingham wind. When I had swung that bat three years ago, I had aimed for their bodies, for the physical insult of their skin against my cotton sheets. But prison had hollowed out that hot, sloppy rage, replacing it with a crystalline precision. Michael had sued me in civil court while I was awaiting criminal sentencing, pleading grievous bodily harm and emotional trauma, utilizing an ironclad marital tort clause written by the city's slimiest litigators. With my corporate assets frozen and Rachel backing every fabricated account of my unprovoked, psychopathic violence, I had been stripped down to a solitary state-issued duffel bag.
“What are they doing next week, Lucas?” I asked, my fingers finally touching the rough stems of the sunflowers.
Lucas held my gaze, his hazel eyes completely devoid of the hesitation I remembered from our youth. “Michael is breaking ground on the HarborView Center. It’s the sixty-million-dollar municipal project your boutique firm drafted before you were indicted. He stole your architectural blueprints, registered the intellectual property under a shell entity named ‘Starlight Holdings,’ and on Friday night, he and Rachel are hosting the black-tie launch gala at the Boston Harbor Hotel.” He paused, his jaw tightening until the muscle ticked visibly beneath the skin. “They’re getting married at midnight during the celebration, Evelyn. They sent out four hundred invitations printed on gold foil. And the company financing the entire project? It’s registered under your stolen social security number. If the building collapses under budget fraud, you’re the one going back to prison for life.”
May you like
The duffel bag in my left hand hit the asphalt with a soft thud. I looked down at the bright, arrogant yellow of the sunflowers in his hands, then up at the gray institutional walls rising behind me. I wasn’t going back. Not ever.
“Open the passenger door, Lucas,” I whispered, a slow, predatory smile touching my dry lips for the first time in three years. “We have an anniversary to plan.”
