Page 16 of Thicker Than Water
“Do you know why Jason might have had Gavin’s phone?” Julia asks. “Sienna thought maybe Gavin left it at the Marriott and Jasonpicked it up for him. Or maybe he drove Gavin home that night and he lost it in his car?”
Maeve is slow to shake her head, eyes pinned to the wall as if watching her thoughts play out there. “I don’t know. Gavin might’ve left it behind, I guess. But I seriously doubt Jason would’ve given him a ride home.”
“Well, if Gavin was drunk,” I explain. “You know our history, right? With our parents? You said Gavin was knocking back drinks, and Jason wouldn’t let him drive like that.”
“No, I know, it’s just—Jason was pissed at Gavin last week. And he definitely wasn’t thrilled to have to spend the whole day with him on Friday.”
Julia and I exchange a puzzled look.
“Pissed at him?” she asks.
“Yeah, you know,” Maeve says, “about the promotion. The sales manager position.”
The line in Julia’s forehead deepens, a shallow trench dug into her skin.
“Right,” she says, “he’s been anxious to hear about it.”
“Oh—no.” Now it’s Maeve who looks confused. “Jason didn’t tell you?”
Julia straightens in her seat. Her lips curl inward, sealing together, but otherwise, she’s remarkably still.
One… Two… Three…
“Didn’t tell her what?” I ask.
Maeve pivots toward me. “Gavin picked somebody else. He announced it last Monday.”
Julia’s lips part. Her eyebrows cinch together. “Oh,” she says.
I sit back in my chair, sympathy whooshing through me. For months now, Jason’s been talking nonstop about that promotion—the extra hours he’s been working, the sales he’s been racking up—and I was actually surprised it was so important to him. It’s not like home services is his dream job; he’d planned to go to grad school for architecture, but when Julia got pregnant, he took a crew position at Integrity Plus, which was close and hiring and willing to train him. Then, after seven years of sunburns and callouses, of smelling like a warehouse whenever I saw him, he was promoted to sales rep, a job that plays to his strengths: he has a deep interest in people’s needs, and he cares about helping them.
“Sienna, did you know?” Julia asks, an odd tremor to her voice.
“No. But he was probably just processing it still. We know how badly he wanted it.”
The job seems awful to me—managing other people, no thanks—but it would have provided a significant salary bump, which Jason had been fixated on.
“But Maeve,” Julia says, face stamped with a dark expression, “you said he was pissed at Gavin about it? At the conference, too?”
“Well, yeah. But I just mean, he still seemed kind of raw about it. Scowling at Gavin, stabbing him with his eyes.” Maeve chuckles a second, before sucking in a breath. “Oh god, terrible word choice, with the knife and the blood and everything. I didn’t mean it like that. He was upset about it, sure, but he wouldn’t… I didn’t mean he’d—”
“It’s okay,” I say. “It sucks that Jason didn’t get the job, but that had nothing to do with Gavin’s death.”
Still, I know from my years with Wyatt: if the police catch wind of Jason’s anger toward Gavin, they could view it as motive.
“Right,” Maeve agrees. “Of course not.”
I look at Julia. She blinks, as if her vision’s gone blurry. Then, meeting my gaze, she gives a curt nod. “Of course not,” she echoes.
And I don’t understand it—the speckle of doubt I see in her eyes.
Chapter FiveJULIA
By the time Sienna drops me off at home, streetlamps halo the sidewalk. I head to the front door, ignoring the newspaper tossed onto our driveway. I already know its headline—Community On Guard as Killer of Local Business Owner Remains At Large. It glared at us from kiosks as we left the hospital, and now the neighbors prove it right: up and down the street, all the porchlights are on, shining through the night like eyes keeping watch.
Sienna’s high beams swish over me as she reverses out of the driveway. I told her not to come in. Told her I wanted to talk to Aiden, make sure he’s okay. But our house is dark, the shades pulled tight. He must have gone to bed early—and it’s terrible how relieved I am, how I can breathe a little easier than I did in Sienna’s car.How do you know Dad didn’t do it?Aiden asked last night, and I’d never heard him sound so cynical or suspicious about his father. It’s made me worry what else he might press me about, what other questionshe might have when my mind already swarms with so many of my own—sharp, stinging ones I’ve tried all evening to swat away.
Inside, I linger in the foyer, pressing my forehead against the front door, pushing back against the ache that’s pulsed there since Maeve’s visit. Why didn’t Jason tell me about the job? For an entire week before his accident, he knew he didn’t get the promotion, but he never uttered a word. I try to think of the last time he mentioned it: how the new position would fix everything, how it would allow us to replenish our honeymoon savings, fund a trip even bigger and better than the one we’d planned. But in truth, I’d started to tune those comments out. Because even though I’d been anticipating our vacation for years—learning basic phrases in French, Spanish, and Italian; doodling the Eiffel Tower in the margins of grocery lists—it wasn’t the money, the lost trip, I was most concerned about. It was the furtiveness of it all, the fact that he hid it from me, that his story about the bad investment, the secret someone who’d lured him into it, was so vague and incomplete that it seemed obvious there were even more secrets he was squirreling away.
