When I Reached the Accident Scene to Save My Biker Husband, I Found His Mistress Wearing My Tenth-Anniversary Gift for Him novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Lakeshore

The bank trail leads to a lake cabin where Misty is waiting with a cast and a smirk, and Travis tells Bree she co-signed a $140,000 loan.

Travis said the money was tied up in the business, and he would fix it by Friday.

Gus said, "Travis," in a voice that made him stop talking.

Then Gus looked at me and said he would come by the shop, and he rode away without answering anything else.

I scrolled the shop's statements on my porch while Travis called his friend for a ride and left his bags where they sat.

I found it by the fourth page.

LAKESHORE CABINS, thirty-eight hundred dollars, on the first of every month since February.

There were two extra payments of a few thousand each, and one for the deposit.

I added them in my head.

Sixty-one thousand four hundred dollars.

"Where's Lakeshore?" I asked.

Hank leaned over my shoulder and read the screen.

"Forty minutes north. It's a rental place on the water." He took his keys back out. "I'll drive."

"It's your day off."

"I know what day it is, Bree."

Misty had been discharged that morning, and I knew because I had read the board at the hospital before I left.

We found the cabin on a gravel road at the edge of the lake.

It was small and tidy, with a porch swing and a blue kayak against the rail.

Misty sat on the porch with her cast propped on a cooler.

She had put on lipstick.

She watched us get out of the truck, and she did not look afraid.

"Well," she said. "The paramedic."

"Misty."

"I figured you'd come." She smoothed her ponytail. "He told me who you were yesterday. Husband's name is on his phone, and yours was on the screen. I knew your voice from the grass."

"Then you know why I'm here."

"For the helmet, probably." She tipped her head at the helmet in my hand. "Keep it, I guess. He'll buy me a better one."

Hank said nothing, and I felt him step half a pace behind me.

I looked at the porch.

There was a gray flannel shirt on the swing that I had bought Travis for his birthday.

There was a razor on the rail and a coffee mug I had never seen, with his initials on it.

And against the wall, under the window, sat a red steel toolbox with F.C. stenciled in white on the lid.

My father had owned that toolbox for forty years.

Travis had told me last spring that it was lost.

"Where did you get that?" I said.

"This? It's Travis's." Misty crossed her arms. "He uses it on my bike."

"It's my father's."

"Funny, because it lives here."

"It's my father's toolbox, Misty. He carried it to every job he ever worked, and Travis stole it out of my garage."

She shrugged one shoulder.

"He said you'd be too busy to notice. He said you'd never leave." She smiled, and her lashes lifted. "He said if you ever found out, you'd just pick up an extra shift and work it off. That's what he said you do. You work."

I had been standing very still.

A cold, steady calm settled over me.

"Hank," I said.

"Yeah."

"Pick up the toolbox."

He walked up the porch steps.

"Hey!" Misty said, and she tried to stand and could not, because of the cast.

"You can't just take that, it's mine, he gave it to me!"

"He gave you something that wasn't his to give," Hank said, in the same easy voice he used on frightened patients.

He lifted the box with one hand and carried it down to the truck.

"I'm calling him," Misty said. "I'm calling him right now."

"Please do."

I walked up to her, close enough that she had to look up.

"The helmet was a gift for him," I said. "Mine. Ten years. He painted nothing. He doesn't know which end of a brush to hold."

The smile slipped off her face for a moment.

Then it came back, thinner.

"Does it matter who painted it? He gave it to me."

"It matters to me."

Behind me, tires crunched on the gravel.

I turned and saw Travis's pickup come down the lane too fast, with his good hand on the wheel and his sling bright against the window.

He braked hard and got out.

He looked at Hank loading the toolbox.

He looked at Misty.

Then he looked at me, and I saw the moment he decided to stop pretending to be sorry.

"Let me save you some time, Bree," he said. "Hit me with whatever you want. Take the toolbox, fine."

"Thank you."

"But you signed a loan in April. Remember? The lift for the shop. A hundred and forty thousand dollars, and your signature is on every page of it."

I had signed it at the kitchen counter, on a Sunday, with the coffee going.

He had flipped the pages for me, and I had signed where he pointed.

"If I walk," Travis said, "that debt doesn't walk with me. It stays with the person whose name is on the deed."

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