Chapter 110 Cheekie

Chapter 110 Cheekie
POV: BRIGAIL
She remembered the exact moment.
Jerry running across the Fortenberry's backyard, his blonde hair plastered to his forehead. Maxine Fortenberry in her Sunday dress yelling at him for the mud on her freshly waxed floor. Henry chasing after Jerry with a white face, begging his mother to stop.
The smell of hickory pork on the grill. The sting of grease on her arm when she flipped the meat.
Dad ain't comin' home, Sook.
The tong falling on her foot. Running. Jerry calling after her. The porch of the farmhouse, her grandmother's face, and knowing before anyone confirmed it that it was true.
She remembered all of it as she stared at the man in front of her.
It wasn't him. She kept telling herself that. They had buried her father. She had stood at the graveside in the Louisiana heat and watched them lower the box into the ground. She had placed her hand on her grandmother's arm and felt the old woman shaking.
Then the man opened his mouth.
"Cheekie."
Her lungs stopped working.
That was what he had called her for as long as she could remember. For her cheekbones, or for her cheek, depending on his mood.
Jerry was beside her instantly. Trembling. Speechless. The man's eyes were their color. His hair was their shade. His face had more lines than she remembered, and a scar she had never seen before that ran from below his left ear to the corner of his mouth. But the freckles across his nose were the same sixty-three she and Jerry had counted on a Sunday afternoon when they were young and the world still made sense.
"Dad?" Jerry said.
"Yes, Jase." The man smiled and a dimple appeared on his right cheek. "It's me."
His guards lowered their weapons. Pam's followed.
Jerry covered the distance in two strides and threw both arms around the man's neck. His shoulders heaved. He wept without any attempt to hide it, his face buried in the crook of the man's collar.
Brigail did not move.
She stood exactly where she was and watched her brother cry and watched the man hold him, and she felt nothing except a low, spreading cold that started at her sternum and moved outward.
"Cheekie." The man raised his face and looked at her over Jerry's shoulder. He held out one hand.
She shook her head.
"Sook." Jerry pulled back and turned to her, eyes red and wet. "What the hell? Dad's here."
"We need to go," she said. "Eli's landing soon."
"Brigail." Jerry grabbed both her arms. "What is wrong with you?"
The man stepped forward quickly and put a hand on Jerry's shoulder. "It's alright, Jase. She's in shock."
Brigail turned her head at the hand on her brother's shoulder and the man stepped back from whatever he saw in her face.
She broke free from Jerry and walked toward the BMW.
Footsteps behind her. Fast.
A hand caught her wrist. Calloused. Familiar in the specific way that only muscle memory could produce.
She spun and yanked her arm back. "Leave me alone."
"Cheekie, please. Let me explain."
His face was wet. She had not seen him cry since she was seven years old and he thought no one was watching.
It almost worked.
"There's nothing to explain," she said. "You're dead. You've been dead for a long time." She held his gaze. "Stay that way."
His shoulders dropped. His lower lip moved. She had aimed well and she knew it and she held her ground.
"I know you're angry," he said. "But you have to know why I did it"
"You are not my dad." The words came out flat and final. "My dad would never leave us the way you did. He wouldn't let Gran die thinking she had no son. He wouldn't let his children grieve for him. He would not do that." Her voice cracked on the last word and she hated it. "You are not my dad."
Her knees went.
She didn't fall. She sank, slowly, and sat on the concrete of the parking lot with her head bowed.
She heard him kneel beside her. She felt him hesitate, waiting for her to push him away.
Then his arms came around her. Long and tired and familiar.
She didn't have the strength to fight anymore.
"How could you," she breathed. "How could you do that to us."
"I wanted to come home." His voice broke completely. "I wanted to come home every single day."
He pressed his cheek to hers and she felt the ridge of the scar, and she sat in the parking lot of St. Mary's hospital and wept with the man she had buried ten years ago.
POV: ELI
Sixteen hours earlier, in the air between Macau and Nevada.
"The shotgun didn't belong to Earl Havens," Jimmy said through the line. "Registered to a Fintan Brigant, small-time businessman out of Tennessee. Prints on the barrel are his too. But aside from a filing address and the firearm registration, Fintan Brigant doesn't exist anywhere else in the United States. No birth record. No taxes. No death. Just a name on a gun."
Eli set down his glass.
He already knew who had built the ghost identity. He had known since he read the inscription on the barrel in that tool shed in New Orleans.
To Adele, my divining rod. - E.
Not Earl. Edgington.
He told Jimmy to keep digging and ended the call.
He laid it out in his head the way Godric had taught him: start with what you know and follow the thread.
Russell Edgington, the youngest son of a Mississippi gambling dynasty, had grown up alongside an orphan boy named Earl Havens, who had been taken in as a gardener after his parents died in one of the Edgington plant fires. They were inseparable until they met Adele Hale, a middle-class girl four houses down who could break up a fight with a slingshot and a glare.
Russell fell first and fell hard. What he didn't know was that Earl had fallen too.
When Russell's brothers left him as heir to the Edgington empire, his father tried to buy off the Hales. Russell found out and tried to elope with Adele. His father intercepted the plan. In a jealous rage, Russell had Earl beaten badly enough that he nearly didn't survive it. Earl went to Adele. Adele confronted Russell. And Russell, to his credit, did not lie about what he'd done.
I do not tolerate traitors. Especially those who try to take what is mine.
That was when Adele saw it clearly. She and Earl fled to Dallas, then to Louisiana, where Earl's great-grandfather had a piece of land. It took Russell five years to find them. By then Adele was on the porch swing with a blonde boy asleep in her lap and Earl beside her, laughing at something she had said.
Russell left Mississippi with his ego in pieces and his patience intact. No one made a fool of an Edgington. He could wait.
Four years later the Edgington Industries was a formidable force in the South and Russell had finally decided to take Las Vegas. But before he left, he settled the debt.
Two bullets in Earl Havens's chest.
Three days later he went to the cemetery and sat in his blue Cadillac and watched Adele be the last one to leave. She walked to his window. He rolled it down. Before he could say a word she said, quietly, "I know you did it, Russ."
She had recognized the gun. She would have recognized the inscription.
They looked at each other for a long time. Then Adele turned around and walked away. She had a son to protect. She knew better than to fight an Edgington with nothing but a slingshot.
She kept his secret and shielded Corbett from his own father.
Russell left for the desert.
Eli pressed his thumb to his lower lip and stared at the window.
The son Corbett never knew he had. The granddaughter Russell had been circling for years. The Scarface chip passed from Russell to his own blood and then sold on by a middleman who stole the money and let the Havens children spend a decade thinking their father was in a box in the ground.
He reached for his phone. Pressed number one on the speed dial.
It rang three times.
Then her voice.
"Hey hi, this is Brigail. I can't answer right now. Leave a message after the beep and I'll give you a holler as soon as I can."
The beep didn't come.
Her voice again, lower this time. Quieter.
"Eli, if it's you. Don't bother leaving a message. I won't hear any of it." A pause. "And just so you know. I will nail your ass for leaving. Count on that, Ghost."
Then the beep.
He sat with the phone against his ear for a long moment after.