Page 75 of Savage Justice
“Was what?”
“His business.”
He abandons his work and swings around to fully face me. “He loves you.”
“He does not!”
“It looked like that to me.”
“He has a lousy way of showing it, then. He said…” My voice trails off. I don’t even want to repeat the ridiculous slur.
“What did he say?” Marlowe presses me.
“He implied that I was a whore.” There. I’ve said it out loud.
He tries and fails to conceal his grin. “Oh dear. I bet he’s regretting that.”
“He’d better. He did say he was sorry, but—”
“But you stormed off?”
“How did you know?”
“You always storm off, sweetheart. It’s one of the things I like most about you. No long, drawn-out goodbyes. Just a ‘fuck you’ and the door slams. Keeps things simple.”
I subside onto the sofa and drop my head in my hands. “You know how much I regret that.”
“You mean just now, with Nico? Or back then, with Tris?”
“Both,” I moan. “Tris mostly.”
“You can’t change what happened.” His voice is gentle now, no longer laced with his usual note of mockery or challenge.
“No, but…”
“Tris is gone, Molly. It wasn’t your fault, the accident…”
“I know that, but if I hadn’t walked out when I did… If we’d stayed longer at the party, then he wouldn’t have been on that road, and …”
“Tris was taken out by a drunk driver. You and I both know that. Killed instantly, they said. It was the driver’s fault, no one else’s, and he’s still inside for it last I heard.”
I nod. The lowlife who’d downed nearly eleven pints then got behind the wheel and mowed down an innocent pedestrian got twelve years for causing death by drunk driving. With remission and suchlike he should have been out by now, but apparently, he’s not been able to behave himself in prison. He might be coming up for parole soon, I daresay. But nothing will bring Tristran back.
“You and Tris, you were finished anyway,” Marlowe reminds me.
That’s true, but does he need to be so brutally honest?
“That doesn’t mean I wanted him dead. I loved him. Once.”
“You weren’t his type. It would never have worked out.”
That’s Marlowe’s not-so-subtle way of reminding me that Tristram was gay. He played around with me for a while because it suited him at the time to have a girlfriend on his arm. We had a brief affair, he got me pregnant, then cheated on me with another man. We rowed about it, and I did my usual storming out trick.
“I know there was no future for us, but I still miss him.”
“Me, too,” Marlowe agrees.
“He was your brother. Of course you miss him…”