“Sounds good to me.” Boone stood. “Do you want some water?”
Henry nodded as he pushed himself to a standing position. “Let’s s-si-si-sit outside.”
“I like that better than another game.”
“You don’t have to hold my hand all the way to the front of the house.” Henry lifted his head, which seemed to have slumped to the left slightly since the stroke. “I think I can manage.”
“And God forbid a gremlin came from under the woodwork and you fell on my watch? Imagine what Paget would do to me. Nope. No way. I’m not taking the chance. She scares me.”
That caught a hardy laugh. Henry lifted the metal walker over the small hump going from the living room into the foyer. The right side of his body handled the step well enough, but his left foot didn’t want to leave the ground. He shuffled forward, trying to fling his foot over the two-inch rise, but try as he might, Henry just couldn’t do it. “Goddamnit,” he mumbled, pushing the walker out in front of him, causing himself to stumble back a few steps.
“I got you.” Boone looped his arm round Henry’s waist, holding him steady. “Why don’t you try rocking back on your heel and then scooting your foot forward and over the hump.”
“Easy for you to say, you’re not a cripple.”
“No. I’m not. But my mother had multiple sclerosis and getting around became quite the challenge.”
Henry glanced in Boone’s direction. His blue eyes softened. “Is this one of her more effective tricks?”
“That and what we called the hip checker.” Boone flicked his right hip out and then his left, trying to mimic how his mom would move her hips in order to get her legs to move. She would always make a grimace face with a half-smile and eventually break out in a belly laugh. She always told him if you couldn’t laugh at the hardest, most horrible things in life, then your heart was too hard.
“Did your mother do that with her face?” Henry waved his fingers over his cheeks.
Boone nodded. “She resented that I had to see her struggle for most of her life, so she always tried to make light of it.”
“That look would have scared the crap out of me.”
Boone stood beside Henry as he made his way through the foyer and out onto the porch. “Well, she was a lot better-looking than I am, so I don’t think she could have made an ugly face if she tried.”
Henry waggled his finger. “Now that’s a good son.”
“I’ll be right back with some cold beverages and a snack.”
Boone left Henry on the porch and circled back to the kitchen where he found some fresh iced tea and homemade banana bread with chocolate chips. He warmed a few slices in the microwave and stared at a family portrait displayed on the counter. He reached out and lifted the wood frame.
Paget looked so much like her mother with their matching vibrant smiles and their eyes so full of life.
He pulled the image closer so he could read the date marked on the corner.
Shit.
It was taken three months before her mother died.
He pulled out his cell and found Ariana’s contact information.
“It’s rare I actually get a phone call from you. Is something wrong?”
He shouldn’t be surprised Ariana would ask that right away. He normally communicated with her in email, using only the Maverick email, needing to keep himself as far removed from the company as possible.
“It’s FeelGood50 and specifically Molly Sour.”
Ariana sighed. “The second I heard there was a death from that supplement living in that town, I knew I should have worked harder to get you to leave that godawful place.”
“It’s the most amazing little town in the world,” he said. “But I think she’s the death that gets that case reopened and puts my ex-wife out of business.”
“You know that will force you out of hiding.”
“We both knew that was probably going to happen at some point, but I can’t live with myself knowing that fucking pill killed people and my ex-wife used a chemical compound I created and proved in certain amounts with other drugs, it was unsafe to do it.” Boone squeezed his eyes shut. The first roar of a pounding headache bellowed between his ears.
“Stop blaming yourself, Boone. She reduced the compounds to levels that didn’t require—”
“Don’t patronize me,” he said. He’d heard all the excuses. All the reasons why this wasn’t his fault. Why it wasn’t anyone’s fault. The judge ruled it a horrible mistake and that all the evidence supported that the supplement was safe. That the benefits outweighed the risks.
So, why did they take it off the market if it was still considered safe?
According to his ex-wife, it was because they found a better combination. Time to find out exactly what was in that new drug.
“Don’t get snippy with me.” Ariana never took his shit, one of the reasons he’d hired her and kept her around.
That, and she was damn fucking good at her job.
“Sorry,” he said. “I need you to find out whatever you can about Molly Sour and others that we pinpointed—”
“Already on it and before you keep asking me to do shit I’m already doing, you should know I contacted the attorney who tried to take on Rylee before. He’s willing to work with me, and keep it quiet, until we have something. At that point, there will be no muzzling him.”
“Hopefully, once we can prove my ex-wife willingly and knowingly used a chemical compound that could bring on a heart attack in some people with certain conditions, I won’t care about keeping my identity under wraps anymore.”
“Are you sure about that? I think you like being the mysterious, sophisticated hippie with a taste for expensive scotch and Cuban cigars that owns a bar and grill in the middle of Nowhere, Idaho.”
“Well, when you say it like that, it makes me sound all sexy.” He pulled the banana bread from the microwave and placed them on a couple of paper plates on top of a carrying tray. “Just find me my smoking gun.”
“I’m working on it. But you also have to remember that Molly suffered from a rare, inoperable, untreatable cancer, and other medications that she was taking could have caused a strain on her heart.”
“Perhaps. But she’s a starting point. A person we have potentially more access to and I seriously can’t live like this anymore. I can’t.”
“I hear you, but we need to get a sample of that supplement, and I haven’t been able to find one from the original batch anywhere,” Ariana said.
“I know. It’s like they destroyed it all and put out a supplement without the compound, only to take that off the market. A perfect cover-up,” he said.
“I agree. Oh. Before I forget. The patent came in for the Gripguard. Production starts next week, and the first order should be out the door right on time.”
“That’s my girl.” Not only had she gotten everything done on schedule, but she managed to calm him down and bring him back from the edge before he even knew he was there.
“I’ll talk to you later. But if you’re going to keep calling, you might want to give my husband a shout too; otherwise, he might start to get jealous. He’s already bitching about being lonely in the lab without you.”