Page 91 of Thicker Than Water
Maeve digs her teeth into her bottom lip, staring at the swatches of color, the single stroke each of lavender, light blue, green. The overabundance of red.
“I left first. I must’ve made a mistake in the email.”
The heat inside me spreads. She’s lying. I sense it in the slant of her eyes, angled firmly away.
“Are you sure about that?” I ask.
I step toward her, close enough to see a speck of paint on her cheek, a drop of blue, like a drawn-on tear. Even still, Maeve skirts my gaze, her own skittering around her store before landing on the single tote bag on the floor. I lock onto it, too—its elegant design, its vibrant colors.
Its intricate stitching.
My breath hitches. My words fall out in a whisper: “You sewed Gavin’s lips.”
Julia grabs my hand, and I grip hers back.
We watch Maeve’s mouth seal shut. That skillful, perfect seam.
It’s a long time before she looks at us. The accusation hangs in the air like smoke. But when she finally turns her head our way, the answer blazes on her face. She doesn’t look guarded or cornered. Doesn’t even look caught. She’s glaring at me with an anger so vivid, so familiar, it’s like staring into a mirror.
“I wouldn’t have done it,” she says, “if it weren’t for your brother. Everything that happened that night—it’s all because of Jason. I had a plan. I had it under control. And I’d told Jason to stay out of it. But as soon as he heard me offer to drive Gavin home, he yanked me aside, insisted that Gavin would hurt me, and I told him to back off, I could take care of myself, because what about howJasonhad hurt me? Not just hounding me about the holiday party, but the way he’d scurry over to tell me every sick little thing Gavin said in those sales meetings, as if I could fix it for him. But I wasn’t in those meetings! The time to fix it wasthere, in the moment, in that room. But when I asked him why he never told Gavin to stop, he said, ‘It’s awkward, he’s my boss, I’m worried I’ll seem too difficult.’?”
The sentence almost flattens me. I recognize its rhythm, a close replica of another Jason said:I was a junior, he was a senior, I was worried I’d seem… uncool.
My heart hammers. The cut on my hand throbs.
“Just think about that a second,” Maeve says. “Jason would rather be complicit in Gavin’s behavior—which created a hostile environment for any woman who worked for him—than risk seemingdifficult. He’d rather give me ten thousand dollars to help me get away from Gavin than actually talk to his boss about his actions.”
Maeve scoffs before she continues. “And yeah, I took the money; this store is my dream, and I had every intention of paying it back. And even though it bothered me, the way Jason acted—or didn’t act—with Gavin, I still considered him a friend. But then the party happened. And the hounding. And the nightmares. Then, as soon as I’m ready to take matters into my own hands, Jason can’t have that. He follows me to Gavin’s. He leaps out like some white fucking knight, wielding aknife, and ends up stabbing him. And then he has the audacity to tellmeto leave, thathe’lltake care of it. But I hadn’t gotten my fucking answer from Gavin yet. So I demanded that Jason leave. I told him to stay away from me for good, that for months all he’d done was make things worse, and I didn’t need him—not now, not like this; the time when he could’ve helped had come and gone and he’d donenothing.”
Maeve laughs, icy and humorless. “You should’ve seen his face after I said all that. He slinked back to his car, all wounded. Meanwhile, Gavin was stillbleeding on the ground, so I bent over him to check he was okay, and then he—” She pauses, raising her hand to skim her knuckles across her lips. “Then he reached up, blood on his palm, and tried to kiss me.”
“Kissyou?” I spit out—an involuntary response.
Maeve nods, her gaze growing distant. “I pushed him back down. And then he said—” She stops again, grimacing like she’s going to be sick. “Aw, come on. You liked it last time.”
I suck in a breath, instantly queasy. Julia clasps my hand tighter.
“It was as good as a confession,” Maeve says, before mimicking him again:“You liked it last time.”She stares at the wall as she speaks. “It was enough for me to know he’d done something to me the night of the party. And I was… shocked. Couldn’t even move. But then he said”—her lips pull back in disgust—“?‘We both know you wore this dress for me tonight.’ And that was it, I couldn’t let him speak again,couldn’t let him say another thing I’d probably never get out of my head. So I put my hands over his mouth, and I don’t know how long I held them there—it must have been a while, a long while, I must have been pressing so hard, but I— I don’t even remember him struggling. In my memory, it’s just that sentence, over and over:You liked it last time, you liked it last time.” She trails off, shaking her head. “When I took my hands away, his mouth was still open. Gaping at me. As if, at any moment, he might say something else. And I thought of all the other things he’d said—to me in the warehouse; to men in meetings; to countless women, I’m sure—and then… I thought of the sewing kit in my bag. The needle and thread I bring everywhere.”
My stomach sloshes.
I hold my fist to my mouth.
I’m overcome by horror. Not only of these images—Maeve’s hands, Gavin’s mouth, first smothered, then sewn—but of Gavin’s words, too:the last time, vague as a drunken memory, specific enough to incite such fear, such rage in Maeve.
Next, I feel a surge of bitterness. For more than a week, Maeve has kept this from the police. She lied to them, lied to us, let Jason remain a suspect.
And yet, beneath that bitterness there’s relief, a rush so powerful it nearly collapses me. Jason didn’t kill Gavin. He made terrible choices, he hounded Maeve, he stayed silent when he should have spoken—but he’s innocent, at least, of murder.
I take out my phone, turning to Julia. “We have to call the police. Let them know Jason didn’t kill him.”
“You can’t do that,” Maeve objects. “Haven’t you been listening? Jason started this. And he escalated things with the knife. Things I hadunder control. If you tell the cops, you won’t be saving Jason. He still stabbed Gavin, whether he meant to or not. He’ll still be arrested. Assault with a deadly weapon.”
My thumb lifts off the phone screen, my pulse ticking in my throat.
“And Sienna,” Maeve pushes, “look where we are.” She sweeps her arms around her store, its walls blank but for the swatches of paint, like an idea still forming. “I’m so close to having what I’ve always dreamed of. You’re going to letGavin Reedtake this from me? After everything he already took? Jason says you get so angry about every injustice. Well, doesn’t that count, Gavin assaulting me? Isn’t that an injustice, too?”
It is. I know it is. Heat prickles the back of my neck, thinking of Gavin. Because fuck him. He brought this on himself. If he didn’t want a woman to take his life in her hands, he shouldn’t have toyed so viciously with hers.
