You Look Beautiful Tonight: A Thriller



My mother pulls us into the driveway of the family home, and that weeping willow tree drags and sways against the pull of a windy day, a reminder of that night when I’d felt someone was here, watching the house. Watching me. Chills run down my spine, and I hug myself with the certainty that, yes, someone was watching me, and that someone was Adam.

When will he want to meet in person? When will I be forced to face him, kiss him, even touch him, just to stay alive? None of these things are options, and yet I am more captive now to him than I ever was to my own fears and insecurities.

My mother pulls the sedan into the garage of the family home and kills the engine. “Please tell me you will at least try to talk sense into your father.” She glances over at me. “If he comes out on top this time, all his hard work pays off. Finally he will see his worth. He will believe in himself.”

There is something in her voice, raw and raspy with emotion. She really is worried about him. She loves him. I don’t know why I doubted that. I really never did. I just thought—I don’t know what I thought. I guess it was more about them breaking down and falling apart over his self-induced hermit condition, which, she’s right, isn’t healthy. It’s like not getting back on the bike. Or did he? He does have a new path to success. I’m confused by what is going on with the two of them and emotionally twisted in ways that I’m not sure will allow me to discover answers.

For now, I do what I can. I glance over at her and say, “What if he’s humiliated again? Does he even come back from that?”

“I believe in him more than that. Don’t you?”

It hits me that maybe, just maybe, she believes in him more than I do, and that carves a hole in my heart. I should be his biggest cheerleader. I’m not sure I have been. Maybe she has, and she simply isn’t enough for him anymore, after all he went through. That idea twists me into knots. “I’ll talk to him,” I promise.

She surprises me and squeezes my hand. “Thank you. He’s really shut me out.” She sucks in a breath. “I don’t know how to deal with it.” She pulls back and grips the steering wheel, and in a rare confession she admits, “It hurts.”

Vulnerability.

Raw, real, and uncalculated.

I don’t know if ever in my entire life my mother has shown me that emotion, let alone been as real with me as she is now.

A ping in my chest comes with a question. Was my father so low after Lion’s Den that he was thrown into a midlife crisis, and he is the one who sought outside attention? Is that where the confidence to say no to Lion’s Den came from?

I don’t know the answers, but I know one thing: if I don’t have them when I talk to Adam later tonight, there will be consequences. But the answers I seek are not from Adam. They are from my parents. To bring them together again. To ensure their happiness. To keep them safe.





Chapter Fifty-Nine


A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person.

—Mary Karr

My mother and I find my father in the kitchen, holding his famous lasagna with two big puffy pot holders covering his hands and a grin on his face. “Cholesterol be damned,” he says. “It’s been too long since I had you both here together.”

Whose cholesterol? I wonder. His or hers, but I set that aside and focus on the bigger picture.

For instance, my father is cheerful, smiling, his hair in that mad scientist mussed-up mess that makes my father my father, but there is more, too. There is something under the surface of his happiness, a forced presence that reads like a secret. An easy read from me, the master of secrets these days. Oddly, though, so very oddly for me, more complex is the fact that my simple father is complex enough for me to wonder if he has one secret or perhaps more than one?

In that moment, I regret not calling Jess and checking in on my father’s bidding war, but as she said, Why would she know anything? She just hooked my father up with an attorney.

“Just in time,” my father announces, setting the hot plate down and removing his pot-holder gloves.

I round the counter and hug him. “Hiya, Dad,” I greet, tilting my chin up to inspect him.

His brow furrows. “Hi, baby. What’s wrong?”

“I’m about to indulge in your lasagna. What could be wrong?”

He studies me a moment and purses his lips. “Okay,” he says softly, running his hand up and down my arm. “We’ll get to it over the strawberry shortcake.”

The next hour is what I would describe as a holiday with the Griswolds, minus squirrels in trees and fires. We’re all together, our little family, and there is chitchat, but it’s as awkward as a holiday word game where some family member makes up words that don’t really exist. Or like the entire conversation is a Wordle puzzle, and no one knows the answer, so they just say random stuff.

The first moment of relief comes when my mother happily allows me and my father to retreat to his man cave. “Take your strawberry shortcakes and enjoy your father-daughter time,” she offers a bit too agreeably, considering she’s, well, her. And she’s never really that agreeable at all.

A few minutes later, my father and I are settled in the cozy sitting area of his mad, brilliant scientist lab, indulging in our desserts when he says, “What’s wrong with my daughter?”

It’s as if I’m in the midst of a hurricane, in the calm eye of the storm, in a safe place where I could tell him everything. But then what? Destruction? Devastation. I know him. He acts on my behalf, and in doing so, could he become a “liability” as per Adam? My father has always been my rock, the person I love most in this world, which is exactly why his life matters more than mine.

I settle the bowl of deliciousness on top of the table and angle toward him. “I’m worried about you,” I reply, speaking the truth if not the whole truth. “What is going on with your bidding war? And why are you not telling Mom? And why didn’t you tell me about the Lion’s Den offer?”

His expression tightens, and he sets his dessert on the table as well. “Your mother.” His fingers are laced together, his gaze fixed forward, not on me. “I thought she was having an affair.”

My insides twist and turn. “And?” The question comes out in a barely there whisper.

“I hired a PI.” He glances over at me. “She’s not, and now I feel like shit for having her investigated.”

She’s not.

I let that sink in.

It feels good.

It also feels accurate.

“Why do you think you were suspicious?”

“I was made a fool of on Lion’s Den. I was hardly a man. Of course she wants a man. All women want a real man, not a fool.”

I’m officially gutted, just gutted, hurting for him. “Dad—”

He holds up a hand and looks at me. “It’s a thing, baby girl, and you know it. A woman wants to know her man is a man.”

I’d push back on that, remind him that friendship, and love, are what matters, but he’s in a headspace that is his alone, and right now he’s letting me in that space. I need to let him talk and guide him to share more. “Is the potential affair why you’re hiding the bidding war from her? Because she knows something is off between you. So much so she even told me.”

“No,” he says in a surprising dismissal of this idea. “Nothing like that. I wanted to surprise her, show her that her man came through and in a big way.”

“Mom and I have our issues, Dad, but we connect on one thing: you. She loves you. You have nothing to prove to her.”

“But I want to,” he says. “I need to do this for her. And for me.”

“Okay. I understand. But you need to know that she’s pressuring me to get you on Lion’s Den again. She believes you will rock their world. That’s how much she believes in you. And I really wish you would have warned me about that whole situation. I was sideswiped when she told me about it.”

“I should have warned you.” He squeezed my leg. “I’m sorry.”

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