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  Pushing the thoughts from her mind, she reached into one of the bags on the table and took out the bag inside. She twirled the new handbag, pretending to be examining it while her thoughts were consumed by the payment due later that night.

  The money was draining out of her bank account faster than before. Just two days ago, she had paid off her blackmailer. Now, she was to prepare another three thousand dollars.

  It had started out with a few hundred dollars. Within two weeks, her blackmailer had quickly upgraded the demands. Besides demanding more money, her blackmailer was increasing the frequency of the demands as well.

  “You don’t like them?”

  Kate’s voice broke her thoughts. Evelyn looked up, rearranging her features into a small, pleasant smile. “You know I love them. I was just thinking about some stuff at work. Speaking of which, I brought some new projects that you might be interested in. They’re in my car; I’ll get them.”

  Before anyone else could say another word, she was up from her chair and out of the kitchen, heading toward the main door.

  Evelyn knew she wasn’t acting like her usual self very well. Before driving up to the mansion, she’d reminded herself to behave as normally as she could. Kate was particularly astute at picking up emotional disturbances in people, and Evelyn knew she had to be careful or Kate would be all over her.

  She tried; she genuinely did, but it was difficult to keep up her smile with the apprehension of meeting a ghost that had latched onto her.

  Halfway through the living room, she heard the familiar ringtone she had grown to dread.

  Crap. She spun around and sprinted back toward the kitchen.

  Why did she put down her phone to play with her new bag?

  The moment she got back to the kitchen, she saw her phone in Kate’s hand.

  Without thinking, Kate tapped on the screen and answered the call. “Hello?”

  Evelyn’s eyes widened and she snatched the phone from Kate’s hand. “Don’t pick up my calls.”

  She could see the confusion on Kate’s face and felt the stares directed at her. She knew her strong reaction would appear to border along temporary insanity, especially when they all knew how close she was to Kate.

  “I always answer your phone when you are not around,” Kate stated hesitantly while Evelyn checked who the caller was.

  “Stop doing that,” she hissed, and headed out of the kitchen with the phone in her hand.

  Hastening her steps, she exited the mansion. Once the door was safely closed behind her, she lifted the phone to her ear. “What do you want? I know I’m supposed to hand you the three thousand dollars tonight.”

  “Is that your friend?”

  “What do you want?” Evelyn repeated her words, irate at the situation she was in and at how senseless she was behaving toward the only person who gave a damn about her.

  “I changed my mind. I need five thousand.”

  “Don’t push it,” she said through clenched jaws.

  “No, Evelyn, don’t push me. I’m sure you don’t want the-one-who-always-answers-your-calls-when-you-are-not-around to know what’s going on, right?”

  Evelyn hung up the call and clenched her phone. Boiling, but with nowhere to vent, she got into her car and began to beat up her steering wheel.

  She slammed her arms against the steering wheel while jolts of pain shot up her arm. Though her hands became the eventual victims, her anger was slightly appeased.

  Her fingers pinched the bridge of her nose, and she forced herself to take in a few deep breaths while her arms burnt with a dull pain.

  After a minute, she rearranged her features into a carefully placed smile and got out of the car.

  As she entered the kitchen, everyone kept their eyes on the food that was on the table, and no one said a word to her. Although they had all been polite to her, they had never been overly concerned about her.

  Evelyn didn’t blame them. She was the one who kept everything to herself, and that had the tendency to keep everyone out.

  In fact, she rather enjoyed people staying out of her business. It saved a lot of time and effort from explaining things that she rather not talk about.

  Kate looked up from the table and smiled at her, a smile that didn’t reach her eyes.

  Act normal. Evelyn sat and slotted her phone into the back pocket.

  From the corner of her eye, she noticed Kate staring at her arms, which were red and slightly purple at certain areas where bruises were beginning to form. She quickly pulled her hands back and placed them on her legs. She was sure that if she refused to speak about it, Kate wouldn’t pry it out of her, not right now anyway.

  And she was right.

  After a moment, Kate turned away from her and casually asked, “Where’s the work you mentioned?”

  “Oh, right.” She got up, shaking her head at her absentmindedness. “I’ll get it.”

  She turned and left the kitchen again. This time, she cast a brief glance over her shoulder, a glance long enough to see Dan staring at her. Their gaze held for a moment until she tore her eyes from him.

  It pained her to see the questions, or maybe accusations, in his eyes.

  Each time, she had only turned from Dan when he had tried pushing her into a serious, committed relationship.

  This time, she had simply shut him out of her life for what would appear to him as no apparent reason.

  It was difficult to be so near to him and yet be so clearly separated that they might as well be a thousand miles apart. She wanted so badly to let him understand why she pulled away from him, but she could never find the words and she didn’t know where to begin.

  Taking the files from her car, she ran her finger down one side of the files while kicking the door close.

  This was exactly what she needed—work.

  With Kate being on honeymoon for the past few weeks, as her business partner, Evelyn should have been free as a bird. Instead, she scoured through the projects handled by the different teams they had and insisted on custom making pieces of furniture that was readily available in stores.

  She had even begun trying her hands at keeping a good set of accounts; something she’d always avoided at all cost.

  Her work was the one escape that kept her from thinking about how screwed up the other aspects of her life was.

  “Here are the few I thought you might be interested in. If you don’t want them, we can assign them to the teams. Let me know,” she said the moment she got back to the kitchen. “I have to go.”

  “Where are you going?” Kate asked as she took the files, her eyes staring intently at Evelyn.

  Pausing by the chair, Evelyn hesitated a moment, a moment that turned the curiosity on Kate’s face into suspicion.

  “Nowhere,” Evelyn quickly said. “I just need to run some errands.”

  Be casual. Evelyn reminded herself.

  She smiled and gave Kate a pat on her shoulders. “See you tomorrow.”

  Not giving Kate a chance to ask another question, Evelyn grabbed her bag and presents, made sure she kept a smile on her face, then left without saying goodbye.

  Chapter Two

  Dan forced himself to keep his eyes on his plate instead of looking up at Evelyn’s disappearing figure.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Kate asked. “You haven’t gone out with her since we went on our honeymoon?”

  He pushed the food around on his plate as he looked up at Kate. “Something like that.” He tried to speak as nonchalantly as possible, but when he saw Kate’s lips thinning, he realized he wasn’t doing a terrific job of concealing his feelings.

  Months before the wedding, someone had set fire to Kate’s house, a fire that almost killed both Kate and Evelyn. Immediately after, Evelyn retreated into her shell, barely speaking to him.

  He’d thought that experiencing a life and death situation would bring about the epiphany of living life to the fullest and the treasuring of the people she loved.

  Either that was
a whole load of crap, or Evelyn just wasn’t like normal people.

  Evelyn’s cold-shoulder treatment toward him continued until the preparations for Kate and Tyler’s wedding kicked into high gear. The planning for the wedding and the renovation of the mansion forced them to work together.

  It was clear that whenever they were together, they couldn’t get enough of each other.

  It was undeniable that they had terrific chemistry.

  Whenever they were working together or going out on a date, they would spend half the night laughing away, and time always flew by way too quickly.

  But despite all the laughter they shared, there was always an invisible barrier between them.

  The past she refused to speak of.

  He didn’t mind. He believed that, with time, she would trust him enough to tell him what happened, and he was willing to wait.

  When Evelyn wasn’t busy pulling away from him or being all mysterious, she had a genuinely open and candid personality. He had never met anyone like her before.

  He hadn’t been with many women in his life. The two most prominent ones were already too much for him to handle. Throughout his life, his dramatic mother never spoke her mind, and loved resorting to theatrics to instill guilt in him. Guilt was his mother’s sole weapon of manipulating him into doing things her way.

  Unfortunately, that unbearable characteristic had passed down to his sister as well.

  Evelyn’s frankness was a refreshing change. She had no problem telling the truth about anything, and they could chat about everything under the sun; everything except relationships and her past.

  Each time he spoke of something that had happened when he was young, she’d laugh at his anecdote, but never reveal any of hers. On the occasions where Dan asked about her childhood, she would clam up and simply state that there wasn’t much to talk about.

  Though they weren’t officially in a relationship, they spent all their time together and dated no one else.

  But Dan wasn’t satisfied with their ambiguous status.

  He knew what he wanted in life. He wasn’t one of those who had flings and left a trail of broken hearts behind. He took each relationship he had seriously.

  With Evelyn, he didn’t even know if what they had qualified to be considered a relationship.

  They always had a great time when they were together, and he couldn’t think of any reason why they shouldn’t be together.

  When he tried to push Evelyn into a relationship, she’d push as well. She would push him away; all communications would cease to exist between them and she would treat him as if he never existed.

  Initially, everyone assumed they had a fight and were in a cold war. Dan never explained to them either. How was he supposed to explain when he had no idea what was going on?

  A week later, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, she would call in the middle of the night and ask to meet up for supper. They would then begin to talk and go out again until Dan took another shot at pushing her into a relationship.

  After so many cycles of the ridiculous routine, he thought he would have gotten used to it.

  He tapped his fork against the plate, then pushed it away.

  Everyone, especially Marianne, had been asking him about the situation between Evelyn and him. To get himself out from the need to answer the questions, he had adopted Tyler’s classic style of shrugging, then keeping his lips locked.

  Eventually, the guys learned to stop asking questions. Marianne, on the other hand, wouldn’t stop bugging him about it.

  Perhaps that was how real mothers behaved; he couldn’t be sure. His own mother was always more concerned about herself and his younger sister. To him, Marianne was more of a mother than his parents ever were. Despite that, it didn’t change the fact that her questions were getting on his nerves.

  Sometimes, he wished he had an answer for Marianne.

  Despite Evelyn’s straightforward personality, there was plenty that he didn’t understand about her.

  For one, he didn’t understand why Evelyn always isolated herself and pretended that she didn’t give a damn about anyone else. He was sure Evelyn wasn’t such a person and the kitchen he was sitting in proved it.

  He looked up from his food and turned to the newly renovated kitchen.

  The cherry wood cabinets that had been in the house for nearly three decades had been removed and was now furnished with dark brown cabinets. The wooden countertop had also been replaced with a light gray slab of granite. Those were the basic designs that Kate had chosen, but the degree that Evelyn went to customize it for Marianne showed how much she cared.

  Every cabinet was designed specifically to suit Marianne’s needs.

  Instead of the standard shelf height, Evelyn had noted down all the things that Marianne had placed in the different cabinets and adjusted the height of the new shelves to fit those needs. She even solved Marianne’s problem of having too many spices with not enough places to store them by completely revamping one of the cabinets into a multi-layered turning tray that allowed Marianne to store and reach her spices easily.

  Evelyn had noted every complaint that Marianne ever had about the kitchen and designed the new cabinets to suit her needs.

  And she did all of that without even having to ask Marianne.

  “Ryan and Joseph working?” Kate asked, bringing his thoughts back to reality.

  Though Dan was glad that Kate wasn’t harping on the problem between Evelyn and him, he was hoping that he didn’t have to be the one to break the bad news.

  He looked over at Marianne, then back to Kate. “Joseph is working while Ryan is in the hospital.”

  Kate’s eyes widened, and Tyler finally took his gaze away from his beloved wife.

  “He got injured at work; a part of a wall fell down on him,” Marianne clarified. “He’s recovering now, so there’s nothing to worry about.”

  “How is he? When did that happen? Why didn’t you guys tell us earlier?”

  “He’s fine, around a week ago, and we didn’t want to disturb your honeymoon. We knew you’d want to return immediately if we had told you,” Dan answered and flashed a bright smile at Kate.

  Kate narrowed her eyes at his condescending answer. “I called Eve so many times, and not once did she think to tell me what happened.”

  “She didn’t know.”

  “Huh,” Kate said, studying his expression. Then she continued. “We should visit him, now.”

  Tyler hesitated for a moment. “Are you sure? I thought you were tired?”

  “I’m fine. We should go see him. How bad is it?” She turned back to Dan and glared at him, warning him from lying to her.

  “Got some slight burns, broke his right arm, dislocated it from his shoulder, and tore the ligament in his leg.”

  Kate’s jaw dropped.

  “There’s good news though, for him at least,” Dan said, and continued when he saw Kate frowning. “He gets to stay home for three whole months, and since Marianne didn’t want him staying in his apartment alone, he’d accepted the invitation to crash here until he recovers.” As Dan was finishing his sentence, he turned to look at Tyler, grinning when he saw Tyler shaking his head.

  Before Kate came into his life, the guys always made sure they gave Tyler his space. They only appeared to devour Marianne’s cooking, then disappear. Now, all of them had become semi-permanent residents of the mansion.

  Before, Tyler had no qualms about chasing them out of his house, but Kate loved their presence in the mansion, and he loved seeing her smile.

  “I can’t believe you’re joking about his injuries. It sounds serious; we should visit him right away.”

  Tyler smiled and stood, stretching out his hand for Kate.

  “I’ll drive,” Dan volunteered. He didn’t want to be left behind in the house, where he was certain Marianne would ask him over and over again if he was serious about Evelyn and why hadn’t he taken a stand on the relationship he wanted them to have.

  He
trailed out of the mansion along with Kate and Tyler, watching Tyler run his fingers down Kate’s hair.

  When Tyler met Kate, his personality changed so drastically that it made Dan believed it was possible for things to turn around with Evelyn, too.

  Kate had told him once that Evelyn treated him differently, and it was something she hadn’t seen before, just like how Tyler treated Kate entirely different from everyone else. Dan had come to believe he would be different enough for Evelyn to break free from the mysterious shadow of her past; the secretive past that Kate refused to talk about, even to her dear husband.

  The two women were like sisters, and Kate guarded Evelyn’s secret fiercely.

  Dan understood Kate’s reason; it wasn’t her story to tell. Still, it didn’t change the fact that the whole secrecy around it was simply frustrating.

  Tempted as he was to ask Evelyn, Dan hadn’t dared to step over that particular boundary. Each time he’d pushed Evelyn into taking a step closer, he’d only succeeded in pushing her further away. He had an inkling that if he did push Evelyn on this particular subject, she would close her door to him completely.

  Looking up at the genuine smile on Tyler’s face, a smile that was non-existent until Kate appeared in his life, Dan felt a sense of jealously surging through him. In spite of the many things that Tyler had, Dan never coveted any of them except for what he now had; someone whom he could love, someone who would reflect the joy that he had, and someone who only had eyes for him.

  “You all right?” Kate asked when they got into his car.

  Dan’s face blanked and he stared back at her; he had missed her question.

  “What happened this time?”

  She didn’t have to elaborate. Dan knew exactly what she meant. Though she was the newest member to his group of friends, Kate was the only one Dan had spoken to about Evelyn. Perhaps he was hoping that Kate’s understanding of Evelyn would help shed some light on what he was doing wrong.

  “I don’t know. I swear I didn’t push her this time.” He thought back on the last time they met. “She had this strange look after picking up a call, then she hurried away. After that, she just cut me off,” he said. “Maybe she’s seeing someone else.”