Page 87 of The Chaperones

Chapter Sixteen

Saturday afternoon, 2:00 p.m., twelve hours later

Cassie

I fiddle with my bracelet, pinching the mesh and releasing it so that it falls flat against my wrist. I cross my legs, then uncross them again. The stool’s unforgiving beneath me. I’ve been waiting in this spare room since morning. I have no idea when they’ll retrieve me for the mainland. I can’t begin to anticipate what’s waiting for me when I get there. If my lawyers are already working to get me off. If I’ll avoid all the culpability I deserve.

The cabin is eerily silent. Occasionally, I hear the sound of another door shutting. The rangers and the scientists who stay here tiptoe around me, speaking in hushed whispers when they talk at all. The birds are quiet too. The wind. It leaves me with nothing but my mind for company.

Even as a child, Travis was intense. It’s always been his defining characteristic. That, and his looks, which have probably been more dangerous. For his entire life, women have consistently been drawn to him. Before it was romantic, it was his teachers, my mother, me. I’ve tried to protect Travis. I just assumed it was from the outside world. Not the other way around.

I didn’t find out about Emmy until the settlement was over and signed. I was living in New York then, in Brooklyn, playing house with Dave and trying my hand at being a designer. Travis called so often those days. I regularly blew him off. I loved him, but I couldn’t take care of him, not while I was trying to establish my own life and to move on from our parents’ accident. He was twenty. He should have known how to pay the water bill, to cook himself dinner, to file his taxes. During the police investigation, the charges filed and dropped, the negotiation, and all the anxieties in between, I had no idea any of it was going on. I should have known. I should have sensed that when he called me incessantly, it was different from his normal constant contact. My sisterly intuition should have kicked in. It didn’t.

When I learned what had happened, you’d better believe I was furious that he’d allowed himself to be swindled by a teenage girl and her parents. That was what he told me, so it was what I believed. Believing anything else was impossible. Even so, I couldn’t have prevented it. I didn’t answer the phone. Travis never blamed me, not overtly. He didn’t need to, because I blamed myself. Because I’ve never stopped blaming myself.

The mesh is scratchy against my fingers. The diamonds are hard little knobs that I can’t break. I keep playing with the bracelet, thinking about the past. Travis would never have even told me about Emmy if he hadn’t needed to sell our parents’ house to pay the settlement, hadn’t required me to sign off on it. Even then, he was reluctant to go into the details. I didn’t press him on them. I thought it was too painful for him to revisit, that the best thing was simply to sell our parents’ house, pay off that greedy girl, and let him move on with his life. Plus, I was so busy, working around the clock to fill orders, just me and our spare bedroom in Williamsburg, covered in cans of paint and silk screens and jeans I was spending too much money on. It’s why I designed that first skinny cut, to cut down on costs. I never dreamed it would be the start of a company. I never dared to imagine the empire that Travis made a reality.

He said he’d gotten into trouble with a girl, which naturally I’d assumed meant that he’d gotten her pregnant, although that didn’t explain why he had to sell our parents’ house. I’d had to travel back to Santa Rosa to get the story out of him, and when I did, I could see the broken man before me who’d been scammed, taken for his inheritance, the sister who hadn’t bothered to step in until it was too late.

I’ve spent the last seventeen years trying to make it up to him, to get him to forgive me for being absent at his lowest moment. I offered him a job even though Indigo & Denim didn’t make enough money to justify an assistant. It gave him something to focus on. And Travis had a mind for business. He was the one who came up with the name Bent, who convinced me to put away the silk screens and let the jeans speak for themselves, to lean into eco-friendly when no one else was doing it, the vegan leather, the couture, the flagship store before I thought we were ready, the outdoor line, the campaign on Antarctica. But it wasn’t enough for Travis. Nothing ever is.

I stare down at the bracelet. Travis’s bracelet. It’s the only thing he ever designed. I could tell he was growing frustrated at our agreement, despite the fact that his salary increased each year and he received generous bonuses with every new collaboration. It had always been my company, my face, my story. Travis never wanted the spotlight, but he did want the recognition. He wanted me to formally acknowledge that I could not be Cassie Bent without him. And I gave it to him because he deserved it. Because I continued to believe I’d abandoned him at his lowest moment. Because, even if Travis never said anything outright, he never let me forget that I wasn’t there for him when he needed me most.

At the ten-year anniversary of Bent, I gave him 50 percent ownership of the company. Dave was incensed. Justifiably. It wasn’t Dave’s company, though. His guilt. He’s never understood my relationship with Travis. He’s an only child. His parents are still alive, active in his life and Lily’s. You’ll regret this, Dave had promised me. I don’t think either of us could have imagined how right he was.

I believed I was in control. It was my company, after all. And I had assumed Travis could be controlled. Over those first ten years of Bent, there were situations. With women, but also with hotel managers over trashed rooms, with vendors he’d stiffed, and with bartenders he’d given black eyes. It had to stop. I imagined more responsibility was the way to do it. If I was going to make him my partner, he had to promise me it would stop. With this bracelet, he assured me that it would. I assumed it had. In the last six years, there have been no more journalists paid off, no more missed meetings, no more fights. There was always a girlfriend, a breakup because she didn’t understand him. But there were no more Emmy Carters. There were no more women who accused him of anything. There were only girls who quietly faded away. I believed that it was a matter of Travis finding the right woman, someone who could control him like I did. That was never going to be Stella.

Oh god. Stella.

The bracelet, that was genius. A promise to me, as well as a sign of how much he brought to my company, now our company. We’d had a hundred of them made. They were meant to represent the silk screens that had started this whole venture back in my apartment in Williamsburg. We’d sold out in a weekend. They dangled on the wrists of trendsetting movie stars and models. There were constant requests for us to make more. We didn’t. I thought it was constraint. Really, it was control.

I can still feel the reverberation of the gun in my hands, the power when I shot it once and then a second time into his defenseless body. I would have kept shooting if Emmy hadn’t stopped me. I would have kept on shooting him for my entire life.

I squeeze the bracelet so tight that the diamonds cut into my skin. I start pulling, desperate to get it off me. I find the clasp with my nail and unhook it. I can’t remember the last time I took it off. I remove my engagement and wedding rings each night. This bracelet, since Travis put it on my wrist—it’s never come off. I expect to see a band of untanned skin beneath it, but it’s porous. Shifting. The sun able to shine through.

Emmy didn’t read me my Miranda rights or treat me like a criminal. Instead, once her partner ranger arrived to help Mona, to take care of Travis’s body, she drove me straight to the cabins.

“You can stay here,” she’d said, almost apologetically, like I was waiting for a spa treatment and there was a delay. “I’ll be back.”

It’s been hours, and she hasn’t returned. Dave hasn’t come to see me, either, not that I deserve his support. Nor Lily, thank god. Nor Sofía, although between Stella and Mona, she’s had her hands full. I want to be angry with Mona, to blame this on her and her constant meddling. I’m done deflecting, though. I’m done making excuses for Travis and for myself. For my daughter too.

The bracelet dangles across my palm. There’s no denying how lovely it is, even in the low light of the cabin. I stare at it, transfixed by the pattern of the platinum, the uniformity of the small diamonds. Lily said those things to Javi. Even as I denied it, I knew it was true. It was easier to disavow than confront.

Across the room, there’s a waste bin beside a modest dresser. I walk over and throw the bracelet into the trash. It’s too late for Travis. Too late for me. It’s not too late for my daughter.

I’m still staring at the basin of the trash when there’s a knock on the door. Slowly, it creaks open. The boat must be here, ready to bring me to my fate. I stand taller, ready to accept everything that awaits me on the mainland.