Page 86 of Sweet Ruin

I take a shuddering breath. My throat feels tight and achy. “I thought the affair was just over a year old. But there’s a Marriott charge from twenty-six months ago. And then there’s one before that. And another before that one.” I take the planner out of his hands, finally, and he lets me. “It’s not fourteen months—it’s years. I don’t even know how many yet, because I ran out of paperwork before I ran out of knives in the back.”

Kane watches me and waits.

“So I got a pen,” I say, “and I started marking the dates where it seemed plausible that they were together. And every single one of them is a day I remember. Family holidays, mostly.” I flip it open and turn it toward him and point. “Easter. I ran the egg hunt in the backyard for my cousin’s kids, and he came out of the house with his hair messed up and said he’d been helping my mother in the basement. Fourth of July, him and Vivian went out for ‘ice.’ Thanksgiving, he stayed home to finish up work stuff.”

“February seventh,” Kane says, tapping that date with one tattooed finger. I’m not surprised that he remembers. He heard me rehearse it in a pantry. He saw the slideshow. He knows what it means.

“That one I already knew about. It can’t hurt me any more than it already did.” I close the planner. “It’s the others. Those were good days. If you’d asked me in November to name the best days I had, I’d have named half of the ones that have X’s on them now. And because of what they did to them, they’re gone. Not just the day, but the whole memory of it. It’s tainted. I can’t get at any of them anymore without them standing in it.”

My eyes are stinging, so I look at the register drawer.

“It’s fine,” I say. “It’s a calendar. Just a bunch of stupid holidays. Whatever.”

Kane doesn’t move for a long moment.

Then he says, “No.”

“No what?”

“That isn’t right.”

“Yeah, well.” I shrug. “Take it up with them.”

“I intend to.” He takes one step back from the counter. His face has changed. Not softer. If anything he looks angrier than he did when he was talking about buying my husband’s testimony. But I feel oddly protected from it.

His rage and violence isn’t aimed at me anymore.

“They took your holidays from you. They did it in your house, around your family, on the days you did the work. And now, you sit here and tell me it’s fine? Where’s your fucking rage?”

“What do you want me to do, cry in front of a mob boss?”

“I want the record corrected.” He scowls at the planner in my hands. “It can’t stand like that. I won’t let it.”

“That’s a nice sentiment, but time only runs one direction, so⁠—”

“Then we don’t fix the old ones,” he declares. “We put new ones on top.”

I stop. “What?”

“I’m making you a new offer.” He reaches out to grab my hands in his and pull me toward him. The counter is between us, but Kane’s grip is tight and unrelenting. “Every holiday between New Year’s Eve and Easter, you spend with me.”

I laugh right in his face. “I’m sorry, what?”

“New Year’s Eve, whatever comes after it, Valentine’s Day. All of them, right through Easter Sunday.” He nods at the planner. “They stole those days in your book. I want them back. So we’ll take them, one at a time, and by the end of it, when you look at that page, you won’t see them anymore. You’ll see me instead.”

I blink a few times, but the mirage that is Kane Makov doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

Maybe he’s real after all.

“You’re out of your mind.”

“You’re not the first person to tell me that.”

“And what do you get?” I question. “Because you’re not a charity. You’ve made that extremely clear.”

“I get what I want,” he says, “which is my business to know, not yours.”

“That’s not⁠—”