But the next thing she knew there was morning light everywhere, streaming in the windows and bathing the room in its heat, and she could smell coffee. She sat up, blinking, and then padded over to the door. She peeked out to find Lanie in the main room, wearing a flowy sort of kimono thing over a tank top and tiny sleep shorts, all her honey-blond hair piled on her head.
She looked like a movie star, the bitch.
“Did I just hear a door slam?” Merritt asked, feeling as groggy as if she’d slept for a week. And she didn’t have to look in a mirror to confirm that she most definitely did not look even remotely glamorous.
Lanie slid a cool look her way as a car started up outside. “Certainly not.”
Merritt blinked, then squinted past Lanie to watch an SUV pull away, kicking up dust as it disappeared into the green.
“Was there…Last night? And you still came and got me?”
Lanie sauntered into the adjacent kitchen, her kimono trailing along behind her.
“That’s what best friends do, Merritt. I know you’re rusty on this. But I promise you, it’s in the manual.”
Merritt trailed her into the kitchen, and accepted the mug of coffee Lanie handed her. And very nearly smiled when her friend plucked the carton of creamer from her fridge—the one she’d bought only for Merritt, she’d told her the last time they’d had coffee here—and plopped it down in front of her with the expected overdone shudder of distaste.
“Is this the kind of man I’m supposed to ask after?” Merritt asked, dumping enough creamer into her mug to make her coffee almost white. “Or the kind of night we pretend didn’t happen?”
“That’s a complicated story for a different time,” Lanie said, and for a moment Merritt thought she didn’t look quite as sure of herself as usual. “And is unlikely to have a happy ending anyway, so really, why dwell?”
Merritt took a long pull of the coffee and instantly felt a little bit better. Or more accurately, less tired. She leaned back against one of Lanie’s counters, her coffee mug in one hand while she gingerly explored the raw places on her chin and cheek. It all hurt less than it had last night, though it was tighter and stiffer. Luckily that made room for how deeply and profoundly shitty she felt inside.
“Well,” she muttered after a moment, dropping her hand from her face. “That’s going around. Do you want to talk about it?”
“I really don’t.”
Lanie fixed her own mug of coffee—the black of lost souls, she’d once called it—and waved Merritt into the living room. She followed, and then they both sat with their legs pulled up on different ends of the couch. Merritt frowned out at the great, green expanse of the sugarcane fields that seemed to crowd the whole world on the other side of Lanie’s big windows and sliding glass door.
“I heard about everything that happened last night, obviously,” Lanie said into the silence. Her voice got fierce. “I wanted to come make sure you were okay with my own eyes, but Okie said Greeley had you. I thought that was a good thing. Then you called.”
“It was a good thing.” Merritt shook her head. There was too much moonlight in her memories of last night, making it hard to breathe. Or maybe it was Greeley. You’re in love with me, he’d said. I make you feel safe. Goosebumps prickled down her arms. “But then it wasn’t.”
“I wish they’d killed that fucking asshole with their hands in Doc’s backyard,” Lanie said, her voice shaking with rage. “I wish they’d tossed him into the bayou and let the gators have him.”
And Merritt’s breath left her in a long, shuddering rush.
“That’s the trouble,” she whispered. And then she said it. The thing that had woken her up in the middle of the night and kept her from going back to sleep. Then got her up and moving. “So did I.”
If Merritt expected the world to come to a crashing halt after her confession, she was disappointed. Lanie only gazed back at her, her eyebrows inching a little higher on her forehead.
“I wanted him dead, Lanie,” Merritt pushed on. She set her mug down on the table and climbed to her feet, ignoring the twinges from her skinned knees. “I knew they had him and I did nothing. I didn’t say a word. I just…let them do whatever they were going to do, and when Greeley told me they were letting him go? I was furious. At him.”
Lanie, still sitting in her corner of the couch, eyed her friend. “And that’s a problem because…?” She shrugged. “That man wasn’t here to have a chat with you, Merritt. He wanted to kill you. After he hurt you. Badly.”
Something was shaking inside of Merritt then and she was afraid to let it out. She was afraid of what it meant. What it would do.
“This isn’t who I am,” she said fiercely. “This is what happens in Lagrange. You don’t have to be in the club to be just as tainted and terrible. You become it by living here, one crossed line at a time.”
“Is it so terrible to want this monster—who’s made your life hell and wanted to do disgusting, horrible things to you—to pay for it?” Lanie asked. “Because I have to tell you, I don’t think it is. I’ve had some bad things happen to me, too, you know. Hello. Welcome to being female. It’s always made me feel better to know that when stuff happens here, I know a whole lot of scary ass men who will make sure someone answers for it.”
“Someone has to be reasonable,” Merritt insisted, sounding shrill to her own ears. “Someone has to take the high road or we’re no better than a pack of wild animals.”
“If you say so.” Still, Lanie was shaking her head. “But why does that have to be you? Why does that always have to be you?”
Merritt realized she was moving restlessly around the living room, unable to focus on anything, and made herself stop. She wrapped her arms around her middle, less to comfort herself than to contain whatever it was that was simmering inside of her, threatening to boil over.
“I’m supposed to be a lawyer. That’s supposed to mean something. If not, how about the fact that I’m an adult?”
“That man chased you. He hurt you. He wanted to rape you, Merritt, and then kill you.” Lanie’s voice got tight and hard. “And look what he did to your face!”
All her scrapes were tight and painful today. And they still hurt less than the inside of her. “I did that. I dove out my window.”
“That’s like saying it’s your fault the drunk driver hit you because you had the temerity to drive your sober ass down the road.” Lanie sat up straighter. “You’re not going to convince me that Antony doesn’t deserve a lot worse than he got. I wish I could kick his ass myself and believe me, I wouldn’t lose a single night’s sleep over it. Why would I?”
“But what does that make us?” Merritt burst out. “Who are we if we think people can just…”
She couldn’t finish. And her friend looked at her for a long time, very much as if she knew that Merritt was talking to herself. Because she was so terribly afraid of this slippery slope she was on and where it would end.
Or maybe, if she was brutally honest, because she wasn’t as afraid of it as she thought she should have been.
“I don’t want to be the kind of person who thinks getting bloodthirsty is a rational response to something upsetting,” she whispered.
“You mean…like any normal person in a bad situation? Why not?”
“Lanie, come on. It’s not right.”
Lanie leaned forward and set her own coffee down, then sat back, never shifting her gaze from Merritt.
“I envy people who can live in such a black and white world,” she said quietly. “It must be comforting to have such clear boundaries between everything, and to always know the exact right thing to do. But I live here.”
Lanie tipped up her chin and somehow indicated the sweet green fields outside, the bayou in the distance, wreathed in mist and secrets. The whole of Lagrange, muddy and mysterious, bright with the spring sunshine and heavy with the day’s heat already. To say nothing of its ghosts and mosses, draped all over everything.
Home, something whispered de
ep inside, the way it always did. And louder today than usual.
“And,” Lanie continued softly, “so do you.”
“I can’t,” Merritt said quickly. Too quickly. “I can’t live here.”
“Why not?” Lanie asked, and there was something in her voice then. It rolled over Merritt. It pooled deep in her gut, like a punch, though her eyes were kind. “Because your daddy told you so? Come on, Merritt. He had high aspirations for his only daughter, sure. But what do you want?”
“My daddy has nothing to do with this.” She laughed, though it came out hollow. “You know perfectly well that if he wasn’t dead he’d wonder if I shouldn’t maybe give rich, successful, perfect-on-paper Antony another chance. A wealthy, celebrated New York lawyer is exactly the kind of man I was supposed to end up with.”
She didn’t know why her heart was beating at her like that. So hard it made her vision go a little funny, but not so funny she couldn’t see the odd way Lanie was looking at her. Very much as if she was fighting some kind of internal battle of her own. Merritt told herself she was projecting, that was all.
“I went to see your father after you tore out of here five years ago,” Lanie said quietly, still sitting too still on the couch and keeping her gaze trained on Merritt.
“You hated my father. Maybe more than I did.”
“That was pretty much what I wanted to share with him. With a few colorful asides about his treatment of you, and not just that summer. Your whole life. Because in case I failed to mention it recently, I had a low opinion of his parenting skills.”
Merritt tried to imagine bold, impossible Lanie confronting her chilly, remote father. Something Doc Broussard had gone out of his way to avoid for years. Her mind blanked out. She couldn’t picture it.
“You did not.”
“Oh, I did.” Lanie smiled faintly. “What did I have to lose? It’s not like you were ever coming back and I didn’t care if his already bad opinion of me got worse. Why not share a few home truths?”
“Even imagining you doing such a thing is giving me a panic attack,” Merritt muttered, holding herself tighter.
“Basically, I told him he was a shitty excuse for a father,” Lanie said. “And do you know what he told me?”
“That you were a demon seed? Because that’s what he always said about you, and he wasn’t kidding.”
“That he was doing his job.”
Merritt was sure she was visibly reeling, that knocked her back so far. But when she looked down she was still standing in the same place she’d been before, her bare feet in the center of Lanie’s circular rug.
“I don’t know what that means,” she said. And she wasn’t sure she wanted Lanie to tell her.
“Your father was the club’s doctor,” Lanie said gently but firmly. “He didn’t live in Lagrange by accident. He moved here with your mom and he didn’t do it blindly. He did it for the job while your mom was pregnant with you.”
“I know that.” She frowned. “You mean he moved here to open his practice. The club thing happened because he was the only doctor in town.”
Lanie shook her head. “The club doesn’t just happen to a person, Merritt. You know that. He knew what he was signing up for. So did your mother. Think about that while you’re calculating who’s good and who’s bad and who’s morally compromised. But then you came along, and you were so smart. And by then he’d seen that most people who grew up here stayed here, mainly because they didn’t have any other options. And he liked Lagrange or he wouldn’t have moved here, but he wanted you to have options.”
Merritt couldn’t process this at all. “He told you all this? Really? My father?”
“After your mom died, he was worried you’d never see anything but Louisiana and this town, and he didn’t want that for you. If you ended up here, he wanted you to choose it.” Lanie’s gaze was steady. “But let’s be real. He didn’t want you to choose this place. He wanted you to choose anywhere on earth but Lagrange, because deep down, he always thought he was a little better than the people he treated. He knew his precious daughter was. So he was, in his words, a little tough on you to make sure you lived up to all that Broussard potential.”
Merritt couldn’t breathe. Her T-shirt was too tight. Or her heart was kicking at her much too hard. She couldn’t make sense of this. She’d come to accept the fact that she’d never know why her father was so cold to her—hadn’t she?
But if that was true, she shouldn’t have wanted to grasp onto this explanation and hold it to her heart, as if it could patch up the holes that had been there as long as she could remember.
“The thing is, I saw you that summer,” Lanie said softly. “And I know you, girl. You were happy. Here. With Greeley.”
“Stop,” Merritt whispered. Or maybe she screamed it. She couldn’t tell. Her head was ringing, worse than last night on her roof. “Please.”
Her friend only gazed back at her, something far too much like compassion in her eyes.
“And the thing is, you never seemed all that happy away at school. Or in New York.” Lanie shrugged. “Maybe you were, what do I know. But, Merritt. I wonder. Do you hate it here so much because you really, truly hate it here? Is that why you go out of your way to see the worst in everyone and the town, too?”
Merritt opened her mouth to answer that, but nothing came out.
Lanie nodded as if that was the answer she expected. “Or maybe—just maybe—do you hate it here because your father made sure you did?” She lifted one shoulder, then let it drop. “Because if it’s the second one, don’t you think it’s high time you asked yourself what happens if you decide to stay? If you do what makes you happy for a change?”
The whole world buckled beneath Merritt’s feet. She felt it roll and crash, and yet she still stood in exactly the same place, barefoot and ripped wide open on her best friend’s living room floor.
All the years of hard work. All those lonely years studying while everyone else—including Lanie—had been having fun. A lawyer or a doctor, those had been her choices. As long as she could remember, those had been her only choices. And she hadn’t wanted to be like her father, so a lawyer it was. She’d felt so lucky that it turned out she really liked it.
But even if she hadn’t, she’d never questioned it. She’d never fought it, because what did being happy have to do with anything? She’d never considered happiness one way or the other, not as a motivating influence. There was getting into a good college. Then there was surviving college, then keeping her grades up so she could get into a good law school. After she’d made it through her first year of law school, she’d been focused entirely on summer associate positions and figuring out what kind of law she wanted to practice and what sort of firm would hire her.
That summer had been the only time in her life she hadn’t thought exclusively about her future. If that was happiness, she’d about drowned in it.
“Happy?” Merritt cleared her throat. “I don’t know what that is.”
At that, Lanie smiled, deep and knowing, her hazel eyes gleaming.
“Bitch, please,” she murmured, nothing but love and laughter in her low voice. “Lie to yourself if you have to, but don’t lie to me. We both know exactly what makes you happy. Deliriously happy, in fact. If you’d just let him.”
—
Greeley didn’t bother with sleep after Merritt took off.
He sat out back on his porch with half a bottle of whiskey and silently dared the bayou to come at him, because a surly gator couldn’t do him any more damage than Merritt had done.
But the sun came up the way it always did, the sadistic bastard, and all Greeley had to show for it was a headache and an empty bed.
Not to mention, an iffy place in his beloved club after the shit that had come out of his mouth last night. He couldn’t let that stand. Greeley dragged his ass into a very long, very cold shower, and if he thought a little too much about the way Merritt had walked away from him again, well. That was between him and the
new hole in his wall.
When he was dressed and as close to clear-headed as he was going to get, he went looking for Roscoe but found Chaser and Uptown instead, working on a retro bike in Chaser’s yard. Right there in that weird little neighborhood of Chaser’s, filled with too many civilians for Greeley’s taste.
“How’s everything after last night?” Greeley asked when he’d finished admiring the bike and they were standing around with a few beers.
“It’s a load of crap,” Chaser muttered, scowling at the bike. He shifted that scowl to Greeley. “I don’t like this kind of shit in the club. I don’t like the questions and the bullshit answers. Or non-answers.”
“No one does,” Greeley agreed. He sacked up. “But last night is on me. I should have kept my mouth shut.”
Chaser only shook his head. “Maybe. Or maybe Digger didn’t have to provide you with so much ammunition to make a shitty situation worse.”
It was Uptown who threw Greeley a perceptive look then, because behind that pretty face of his there was nothing but pure calculation. God bless him.
“You know shit’s about to go down,” he said. “We all voted to let the mayor fall on his face when the new sheriff comes for him and his cronies.”
“About time.” Greeley let out a laugh. “Benny Chambless is the biggest douchebag in St. Germain Parish, and we have a whole lotta douchebags to choose from.”
Uptown grinned. “Agreed. But do civilians know what a piece of shit their mayor is? Or are they going to watch him go down for corruption and start thinking it’s time to get a hard-on for the club the way they like to do every now and again?”
“People are fucking stupid,” Greeley said.
“But you know how Digger thinks,” Uptown replied, his gaze never wavering. “His is the face that everyone in town is going to get in if they have an issue with the club. If they wake up the day after the mayor gets arrested all fired up to do something about the Devil’s Keepers. And what happens when Dig feels persecuted? He likes to spread that shit downhill with a little persecuting of his own.”