Page 7 of All That Glitters
And one of these days, when no one expected it, I’d make Hale Troye pay.
2
Helen
“Hale? Are you okay?”
“I…” He held up his cell phone. “I just got a call from Ashton.”
The surprised shock on his face matched the surprised shock I felt inside. After months of radio silence, why would he be calling now?
“Really?” My brow furrowed. “How did he sound? What did he want?”
The look morphed into the familiar uncertainty that I’d been seeing on his face as the new racing season drew closer. We were only a couple of weeks away now.
It was no secret that I was worried about him, but my concerns were dismissed anytime I brought it up.
“To come by tomorrow. He’ll be here around noon. And he sounded…fine, I guess. I…”
He settled in the nearest chair and I walked further into the room to take a seat on the coffee table in front of him. “Are you okay with that? Maybe you should meet him somewhere… I don’t know. Public?”
“Why? Do you think he’ll take a swing at me?”
“Are you sure he won’t?”
“Yeah. He’s my best friend outside of you. All of us are best friends. That has to count for something.”
I wish I shared my brother’s optimism. “We all were best friends, Hale. No one seems to know what’s going on with him.”
“I know. I hear things in shop and around others that no one has seen him, there’s no talk about press or anything really, but he’ll come around, right?” He stared at me with questions swirling in his eyes, questions I didn’t know how to answer. “He’ll realize… After all this time, he’ll have realized that…”
I placed my hand on his knee as some form of comfort. I doubt it did any good at all.
“Ashton Glitterati isn’t the most level-headed man at the best of times, and I’m pretty sure all that he’s been through hasn’t changed that part of him.”
“It was an accident,” he said, the words soft and pained. My brother had been through a lot of emotional and mental shifts since the wreck that sent Ashton into the nearest barrier and being life-flighted from the track.
Hale had gone to therapy, but if it helped him, I didn’t know. He rarely talked about the wreck, his sessions, his prep for the season… He wasn’t the same man, either.
I started to say something, anything, but instead I just sat with him.
That one crash had changed all of us. Friendships. Business relationships.
Hale scrubbed a hand over his face and up into his hair that was the same shade of midnight black as mine. He fisted and tugged on the short strands before surging up, treading heavily across the room. He was fidgety – hands in his pockets, arms crossed over his chest, fingers pressing into the wall. He was never calm and casual anymore.
“He should know it was an accident. He has to know.”
The uncertainty and the lack of confidence broke my heart every single time.
“He should,” I agreed.
Hale saw the best in people until they showed him a different side. He wanted to believe Ashton would see things clearly, but I didn’t have that same faith. Ashton was the do first, think later type. He ran roughshod over everything and everyone in his way. It was what made him dangerous.
Great.
Exciting.
And he was last man I needed to still be crushing on, the last man I needed to want in the worst possible way. Not seeing him for so long had been hard when we were used to seeing him all the time.
