Chapter 105 Works Just Fine

Chapter 105 Works Just Fine
Chapter 105: Works Just Fine 

Leo

Later that evening, after I put Callum to bed, I sat in my room with the laptop open and the box Anderson had given me on the desk like it might explode if I touched it wrong.

Five years.

I had spent five years telling myself I was over it. That the hospital, the photographs, the sound of Ivy crying in a doorway no longer had the power to rearrange my insides. 

Physically, I was in a good place. Training had come back easy. The comeback schedule was brutal and demanding. Pain I understood. Pain I could measure.

Maddie and I had built something that worked. Not a romance. Never that. That was a line neither of us crossed, no matter how lonely the house got. 

I handled the money, the travel, the noise that came with my name. She handled the home, Callum’s routines, the little things I was still bad at. 

She had never tried to turn it into more. No late-night knocks. No seduction tactics. She was just there for me, in her own steady way, and I was grateful for it in a language I didn’t use often.

I had flings for when my hands and my imaginations weren’t enough. Nothing that lasted. Nothing that came close to what Ivy and I had been before it burned to the ground. 

A part of me hoped nothing ever would. She had been it. She was still it, and would always be it for me. Even when I pretended otherwise.

Anderson’s confession at the restaurant had not shocked me as much as it should have.

After my father got out of custody, the truth I had refused to see finally sat down in front of me and refused to leave. 

My mother had not walked away because she stopped wanting me. She had walked away because he would not stop putting his hands on her. 

She had walked away to stay alive. Anonymous files had arrived years ago—photos. I suspected Anderson even then. The injuries on my mother’s face in that hospital hallway were not rumors. They were a record.

That was why I had not spoken to Solomon Teague in five years. Why I had not looked at him. He had wanted Iceland. A fresh start. Father and son against the world. 

I would not go. Not after I understood what he was. He had built me out of loyalty and rage and then used both like a leash. But I cut it.

I picked up the first stack of papers.

Fifty thousand dollars.

Deposited into Anderson’s account from a holding company I recognized because I had grown up watching my father move money through names that were not his. Beneath the bank pages were printed conversations. 

Instructions for him to frame the girl. Get something visual. Make it look like a choice she made. Use it.

The more I read, the sicker I felt.

This was the man who had taught me how to wrap my hands. Who had sat in the front row for every fight. Who had told me love was a distraction and women like Ivy were a door you should not open. 

He had paid a boy to pressure an unwilling girl so he could hold the result over my head. All because he thought she wanted my money. 

Because she was Marcel’s daughter in a way. And that offended him. Because he could not stand the idea that I might choose anyone he had not approved.

I had lived in a bubble. Everyone else had been living in the house with the lights on.

I slotted the flash drive into the laptop.

The folder opened on a handful of files. Dates. Labels that made my jaw lock. I sat there for a long time before I clicked anything. 

I already knew what the public version had looked like. I had carried those stills in my head for five years: Ivy in a bed that was not mine, Anderson too close, the kind of image designed to end a relationship without questions. 

I opened the longer file.

I did not watch it the way he had wanted it watched. I couldn't stomach that. I watched it the way you watch evidence. Angles. Cuts. The places the camera was moved. The places the story jumped. 

Anderson talking to himself over a girl who was not awake. Setting a scene. Admitting, out loud, that Solomon had paid him. Admitting he would not do what he had been paid to do because she would know and she would hate him. 

Covering her. Staging the thrusts, the movement. Everything I'd believed five years ago. I was a fool.

She never even opened her eyes. He never did what the photographs claimed. I had been fooled by a camera angle and a man I used to call Dad.

The video ended. The room was too quiet. I could hear the air conditioning and, faintly, Callum shifting in the next room.

I sat back and pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes until color burst behind them.

Idiot. That's what I was. 

I had let anger drive. I had let Solomon hand me a story and I had swallowed it because it confirmed every ugly thing I already feared—that I was not enough, that she would always go back to Anderson, that love was just another way to lose. 

I had broken up with her in a hospital bed while my chest was still wired to machines. I had told her to leave. I had watched her walk out carrying a goodbye I had asked for.

And she had been telling the truth.

The rage that came after the shame was strong. 

Solomon was not going to walk away from this the way he had walked away from everything else. Money had buried my mother’s case once. It was not going to bury this. I would make sure of it.

I closed the laptop just as my phone rang on the nightstand.

Ivy.

The name on the screen knocked the air out of me the way a body shot did when you were not set for it. I straightened, cleared my throat, and answered like I was still the man in Principal Skye’s office.

“Miss Lennon.” Formal. Flat. “Good evening.”

Silence on the other end. Then she cleared her throat. “Good evening, Mr. Teague. I’d like to confirm the time for tomorrow. We didn’t discuss—”

“Whatever is convenient for you,” I said. “That’s fine. I’ll make sure Cal is ready for his lesson.”

“Two p.m.,” she said. “Does that work for you, Mr. Teague?”

“Works just fine, Miss Lennon. I’ll alert the security desk. They’ll let you in.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Quiet. Exactly the same voice that used to say my name years ago.

I hung up before I could say any of the things stacking behind my teeth. Before I could tell her I had been wrong. Before I could ask about the mark on her neck. Before I could ask if she was happy, and mean it, and hate the answer either way.

If Callum had not already decided she was his teacher, I would have deleted the number and found someone else. That would have been the best choice. 

Stay in our lanes. Do not open the past. Do not sit in a house with her in it and pretend my hands did not remember her.

He was already charmed. That was the excuse I was going to use.

I set the phone face down and looked at the closed laptop.

We had gone from knowing each other in the dark, to Miss Lennon and Mr. Teague on a Tuesday afternoon because a four-year-old needed help with letters.

I turned off the lamp.

Tomorrow Ivy Lennon would walk into this house. I would let her in. I would stand at a polite distance and watch her kneel beside my son and be gentle with him, and I would not tell her what was on that drive until I knew what telling her would cost.

I had already cost her enough.

I went back to bed and stared at the ceiling, wide awake, while five years of certainty quietly came apart in the dark.