Page 124 of Angels Are Falling

“I don’t care what Kai said. I’m your brother, and you will listen to me. Go inside. Now.”

Kai set down the tongs. “Careful.” One word, and it was enough to feel the ice behind it.

Bella’s bottom lip wobbled, and the twins hugged her on instinct, August with his hands on her shoulders, and Jamie glaring at me with an expression I had never seen on him before. They were disappointed in me. I’d been gone, and now they saw me as the stranger threatening their happy life inside their own home.

They eventually left. August steered Bella by the shoulders, her lip still wobbling. Even through my anger, that wobble snagged at my chest and tore a little as it went past. I’d apologize later. I filed it with everything else I’d fix later.

Right now, I had more pressing matters to address. Jamie slid the door shut, and then it was the two of us, the smoking grill, and the ocean minding its own business at the bottom of the sky.

I didn’t beat around the bush. “Your parents killed mine.”

The document the private investigator had uncovered was forty-one pages long, and I’d read each page so many times by now that I could recite it by heart. An inquest report from New York. Two vehicles, black ice, a curve. Four fatalities. My parents’ names on two of the death certificates. I never found out anything about the people in the other car. Because the man in front of me had made it so.

The file uncovered the date Kai Cavendish’s parents died. It happened the same night. In the same county. At the same crash site.

Kai’s parents killed mine, and he had covered up the fact. He had known it every single day he’d lived in this house. And he was currently in my backyard, flipping burgers for my siblings, wearing a ring to honor his commitment and fidelity to my wife.

He didn’t blink at the accusation, didn’t breathe differently, either. “Yes,” he said. “Technically.”

He closed the grill lid and turned it off without hurry, the way a man moves a meeting along to its next item.

I had read the document from front to back, but it had never once sounded real. From his mouth, it sounded like the truth.

“You’ve known the whole time, and you’ve—” The words were arriving out of order. “Is this some sick game to you?”

“On the contrary. I lost my parents, too. They were driving to NewTech University, just like your parents. It was a coincidence they hit their car.”

I was visiting Amelie in New York, and my parents asked to tag along. They had never been to the East Coast, but for once, they wanted to splurge on a vacation because it was their silver jubilee anniversary. Dad took Mom out to dinner while we babysat. They were on their way back to Amelie’s dorm to pick up the kids when their rental car was run off the road by Kai’s parents.

My ire should be focused on that. Instead, it was on the other thing he had revealed. “Why were your parents driving to NewTech University?”

“They were meeting me.”

I sneered at him. “Because you were at NewTech to stalk Amelie.”

There was no shame in his voice. “I was.”

My back teeth found each other and ground down on the ache that had been there since I read that damn file. Amelie had always been his end goal. He had watched her for years, all the while spinning a tale about some phantom woman from his past.

“But that doesn’t change the fact that our parents’ deaths were just that—an accident. No one was at fault.” A pause, measured. “Whatever private investigator you hired should have disclosed that to you.”

My laugh came out wrong. “What about the financial damage you caused us? Did my private investigator get that wrong as well? The unexpected IRS bill. The lapse in our insurance. The loans that were requested to be repaid immediately. You ruined us before moving into our lives. At least admit to it.”

“The crash was an accident,” he repeated. “Everything else you said—yes, I did all those things.”

The admission should’ve soothed my anger, it was validation that I wasn’t crazy. Instead, he had just poured oil on the fire.

“Why?” It tore out of me, raw and loud. “Is this your sick way of punishing me because you think my parents were at fault for killing yours?”

“Not at all.”

“Then why did you do this to me?”

“You were standing in the way of the only thing I ever wanted.” He straightened his sleeve. “Everything else that happened to you was collateral damage.”

I didn’t think, I swung.

The first one he slipped like weather, my knuckles skimming his jaw, and his counterpunch landing in my ribs. I barely felt it. It was the cocaine. Adrenaline pumped through me, and I didn’t register any pain.