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  “Then I’ll sign whatever you need. Dump her in the ocean or the garbage, we don’t care. She stopped being our sister a long time ago.”

  Cali felt a little ill. “Okay, thanks.” She got off the phone with him and stared at it for a long time. Finally, she e-mailed Ross.

  I need a favor…

  By the time she’d finished grocery shopping, he had a reply to her question, followed by one of his own.

  Don’t tell me you’re thinking about doing what I think you’re thinking about doing.

  She thought about it before replying.

  I was blessed by finding Sean and Max. You know my story. I’m no better than Lydia if I have a chance to do one good thing and ignore it.

  Ross called her as she was heading home.

  “You’re crazy. This isn’t something for you to do.”

  “I know. Which is why I need to do it.”

  “Do Sean and Max know?”

  “I’d rather they don’t.”

  She could hear his aggravated sigh from the other end of the line. “Fine. I’ll make the calls and find out bare-bones basics on the cremation and get the arrangements made. Please tell me you’re not having a funeral.”

  “No. Just want to get her cremated. Cheapest place possible. I’ll take her out to the beach and scatter her ashes.”

  “Loren and I will pick up half.”

  “I’m not asking you to do that.”

  “Yeah, but if you’re going to be all altruistic and everything, the least we can do is help out.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’ll let you know what the cost is.”

  “Thanks.” She got off the phone just before pulling into the driveway. Once she put the groceries away, she headed to the bedroom to try to nap with her guys.

  No, she didn’t want them to know. She wanted it to be done and out of her mind, Lydia finally gone for good.

  If, for no other reason, to assuage her own guilty feelings about wanting to pound Lydia after finding out what she’d done to her guys, and over what Lydia had tried to do to her, too.

  Chapter Seven

  The next Thursday, Cali, Loren, and Essie sat around the table on Essie’s lanai.

  Essie had just bolted for the bathroom to puke.

  Loren leveled her gaze at Cali. “Ross said Lydia’s ashes should be ready next week. He got the notarized forms from the brother and filed them with the Medical Examiner’s office. They’ll call the funeral home to get her.”

  Cali nodded. “Thanks.”

  “Not to be crass, but your share will be around six hundred.”

  “That’s fine. Can I give you a check?”

  “Sure.”

  “Check for what?” Essie had snuck up on them.

  “Nothing,” Cali said, her face aflame.

  Essie sat and glared at her. “No, no no no. Don’t play that game with me, bestie. What’s up?”

  Loren was absolutely no help, either, arching an eyebrow at Cali.

  Cali finally confessed. “But don’t tell my guys, please.”

  Essie’s expression softened. “Why are you doing that?”

  “Because it’s the right thing to do, even if she was a shitty person. Maybe that makes it even more right.”

  Essie turned to Loren. “So what’s it cost us, each, if I go in thirds with you?”

  “Essie—”

  She shushed Cali. “Well?”

  “Four hundred each.”

  Essie nodded. “I’ll write you a check.” She looked at Cali. “If you asked Marcia and Derrick, I bet they’d take up a collection.”

  “Everyone hated her. She was banned from the club.”

  “Even better.” Essie grinned. “Good PR. Shows we’re the better people.”

  “That’s not why I’m doing this. I don’t want PR. I just want her gone for good.”

  “Cremated and dumped in the Gulf is a good way to accomplish that.” Essie stood. “I’ll be right back.”

  Cali assumed she was going to go get her checkbook. “I’ll have to give it to you this weekend, unless you want me to run down to the house now.”

  “Whenever’s fine,” Loren said. “If you want to give it to us the night of the Thanksgiving party, that’s fine, too. I know you’re good for it.”

  Essie returned a few minutes later with her phone and her checkbook. “What’s twelve hundred divided by five?”

  “Five?”

  “Yeah. Leah and Shayla said they’d chip in, too.”

  “You called them?”

  “Yeah, but don’t worry. They promised not to tell Sean and Max.”

  Essie was starting to write out a check when her phone buzzed from an incoming text. She read it. “Scratch that, it’s divided by six. Tilly wants in.”

  “Oh, good lord! How’d Tilly find out?”

  “I texted her. Duh.”

  Cali dropped her head onto her arms on the table. “Oh, no,” she moaned. “I just wanted her gone. I didn’t want this to be a big freaking deal.”

  “It’s fine,” Essie assured her. “Everyone knows your guys aren’t supposed to know. Hey, and it’s a smaller amount. Why should you foot this bill yourself? If people want to chip in, let them. Spread the altruism around. She pissed off most of us at one time or another, or pissed off friends of ours. It’s our final ‘fuck you’ to her that we get the final say.”

  “That’s not why I want to do this!”

  Essie arched an eyebrow at her. “Really? Because it seems I remember that bitch trying to tank what you have with Sean and Max. She did it for sheer meanness.” She tapped the table with her finger. “I think living well is the best revenge, but this is a close second.”

  Cali knew she wasn’t going to win this argument. Especially if Tilly was now going in on it with them. “Just…remind everyone to please not tell the guys.”

  “No problem.”

  By the time Cali returned home, she had four others who’d e-mailed or texted her about chipping in, including Gilo and Abbey, and Marcia and Derrick.

  By the time Sean and Max got home from work, they were down to $50 a person, and Loren was coordinating things so she could keep a running tally and give everyone the final amount as more people signed on to chip in.

  Cali had a bad feeling someone was going to let the cat out of the bag, accidentally or not.

  As they prepared for bed, she decided it was best for that person to be her.

  * * * *

  Max had been fighting a headache all day.

  Maybe I need glasses.

  He’d managed to escape needing them, but as he closed in on fifty, those odds greatly reduced and he knew it.

  Cali seemed a little stressed, too. Once they were all snuggled together to go to sleep, she spoke up.

  “I need to tell you guys something, and I hope you aren’t mad at me when you hear it.”

  That was definitely not a lead-in to set Max’s mind at ease. He sat up, as did Sean. “What’s up?” Max asked.

  “This blew up bigger than I thought it would…”

  His stomach churned as she told him about Lydia, and what Ross had helped her do—and what their friends were helping them do.

  Sean’s blue gaze focused on the bed but he didn’t comment.

  “What do you want me to say, babe?” Max quietly asked.

  “I want you to not be mad. I…I’m sorry. I never meant for it to get this crazy. I was going to pay for it out of my fun money. I had enough. Then Ross and Loren offered to go halves. My mistake was talking about it in front of Essie.”

  He closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I’m not…I’m not mad. I’m confused.”

  “I don’t want to forget how lucky I am. Lydia’s own family disowned her, so yeah, she was a shitty person. But if the last thing I can do for her in her life is to at least set her free, then that’s not a bad thing. Is it?”

  Sean still didn’t comment. Max worried about him, because while they didn’t get into graphic
detail with Cali about the shit Lydia had done to them, Sean had taken more than Max had, including humiliation play that had dug into his soul and taken Max a couple of years to help him get over.

  Lydia had tried to break Sean down in ways in which Max had been stronger.

  Far stronger.

  Sean finally nodded. “Okay.”

  But he didn’t sound okay.

  “Are we okay?” Cali asked him.

  Sean slowly nodded. “Yeah. It’s way better than she deserves, but yeah. I guess that’s the point. We get the final word.”

  “I was just going to pick up the ashes when they’re ready and scatter them off Siesta Key or something.”

  Flush them.

  But Max didn’t say that.

  It’d be kind of antithetical to the very purpose Cali wanted to achieve.

  “We’ll go with you,” Sean said, surprising Max most of all.

  * * * *

  “Buddy, are you sure?” Max asked.

  Sean damn well knew that tone.

  Are you out of your fricking mind?

  That’s what Max was really asking. They both knew exactly how Lydia had given Sean an extra heaping of hell during their time together because it amused her. Not because it was fun, not because it was something Sean wanted, but because she’d been trying to bend and break him and Max was too strong for her in that way.

  It’d almost worked.

  “I want to send her off,” Sean said. “Exorcise her from my brain once and for all.”

  He spotted Cali’s confused expression, the way she looked from him to Max and back again.

  She finally asked. “Okay, sweetie, is there something you guys haven’t told me about what she did to the two of you?”

  “Yeah,” he admitted. “But I…I can’t talk about it. Not right now. Please?”

  She caressed his cheek. “Okay. I’m sorry.”

  “Please don’t apologize. You didn’t do anything wrong. I agree, this is the right thing to do, regardless of the reasons. We’re the bigger people. Max and I always wanted to be the bigger people where she was concerned. That’s why we still have friends who love us and a life she envied and she…” He didn’t know how to end that without sounding like a complete asshole.

  Except these two people were the only two people he could talk to about Lydia like this.

  “And she didn’t,” Cali said.

  “Yeah.”

  They turned off the lights and snuggled in their familiar puppy pile to sleep. Sean was afraid he’d have nightmares about Lydia and he wasn’t disappointed.

  In this night’s scenario, she’d managed to do one of the things she’d privately threatened, driven Max away and turned Sean totally into her slave to be used for her amusement.

  All while she cuckolded him and brought men in to use him as a fuck toy.

  How she’d latched on to his secret fears that he couldn’t make a life for himself without Max or someone else to carry his load for him. That he was a loser without friends—that his friends were actually Max’s friends.

  That she was the only one who really wanted him, and he didn’t deserve any better.

  It had taken Max a lot of time to undo that damage. After Sean shook himself awake long after Cali and Max had fallen asleep, he lay there and remembered the final breaking point, where he’d gone to Max in tears one afternoon after work and told him everything Lydia had been saying to him and asking Max if he really felt like that about him.

  That’s when Max had gotten angrier than Sean could ever remember seeing him, and they’d started taking notes. Max had actually driven them back to the office and texted Lydia that they had to work late on an emergency project. They’d spent hours writing down everything, Max painstakingly piecing together the patterns until, finally, Sean realized it wasn’t him.

  That he wasn’t crazy.

  That he wasn’t worthless or broken or bad.

  And then they’d planned and watched and waited for the best time to make their move in a way Lydia couldn’t come after them about. If they’d tried to evict her through conventional means, she would have dug in legally and used every trick in the book to stay longer while dragging their reputations through the mud and probably bringing strange men into their house.

  Their house.

  Not her house.

  He pressed his face against Cali’s shoulder and deeply inhaled. She was everything Lydia wasn’t, and even the hiccup they’d gone through when Lydia had lied to her and tried to convince her they’d screwed Lydia over was just a minor footnote in the grand scheme of things.

  Cali was theirs—and part of them.

  And that not one, but two beautiful people loved him as hard and deep as they did went a long way to helping him quiet all those stupid, angry ghosts that sounded like Lydia.

  But they didn’t completely silence them.

  Chapter Eight

  The Tuesday before the Thanksgiving party, Cali, Essie, and Loren sat around Cali’s dining room table and stared at the plain, plastic urn while Eddie tried to coax Baxter down from the kitchen counter to come play with him.

  “I thought it’d be bigger, honestly,” Loren said. “I mean, she wasn’t exactly a small woman.”

  Essie reached over and, keeping a hand over the top, gave it a shake. It made a hollow, grating noise indicating more than a little air space inside.

  “What are you doing?” Cali asked. “It’s not a pepper mill.”

  “I wanted to see. I chipped in. Hey, y’all might have been altruistic, but I was more than a little ‘fuck you, bitch’ with my donation.”

  Cali had picked up the ashes from the funeral home earlier that morning. The final contribution per person or couple or triad or whatever had come out to $15 each.

  That included getting a couple of long-form death certificates for her brother and the roommate, so they could handle a few legal odds and ends and make their lives a little easier.

  “I wonder how much it’d cost us per person to pay Kimbra to defend the guy—”

  “Essie!” Cali glared at her.

  “I’m kidding.” She sat back. “Sort of.”

  “I can’t deny I thought that, too,” Loren admitted. “Ross even said it. She might not have deserved to die, but she certainly engineered her own karma. His friend at the sheriff’s office said there were red flags all over the place about this guy, but he’d promised to pay a hundred dollars, cash, and she needed the money.”

  Sean had finally confessed to Cali in more detail some of the things Lydia had done to him. Max hadn’t fared much better, but Sean had certainly taken the brunt of it.

  It left a bitter taste in Cali’s mouth that the woman’s ashes were now sitting on her dining room table, but since she’d started this, she’d finish it.

  Then she could put Lydia out of her mind for good.

  She hoped.

  Lydia’s siblings had sent Cali a thank you card for handling it for them and assured her they didn’t want her ashes or need any pictures or…anything.

  They apparently wanted her gone from their lives as much as Cali wanted her gone from hers.

  “I like Scrye’s suggestion,” Essie said.

  “We are not dumping her in Venture’s ashtray.”

  “June liked it,” Essie muttered, a little pouty.

  “And June is more vindictive than Tilly. At least Tilly hasn’t killed anyone.”

  “That we know of,” Loren said, her expression dark.

  Cali held up her hands. “When Sean and Max get home, we’re going to drive over to the beach, dump her, and then go out to dinner. Boom, done.”

  “What are you doing with the urn?” Essie asked.

  It had been the cheapest one they’d had, only twenty dollars. They’d offered her the option of a cardboard, water soluble “scatter urn,” but it was, ironically, more money, and even Cali couldn’t make herself use cardboard.

  “Probably dump it in the garbage.”

  “We could use
that as a butt holder at the cl—”

  “No, Essie. I don’t want her or her urn around the club. I want her completely gone from our lives.”

  Loren stared at Cali. “What’s going on?”

  Cali sat back. “Let’s just leave it at there’s a lot more to the story than others know, and no, you cannot tell anyone that. Not Ross, not the guys, not Tilly. No one. Max and Sean don’t want to talk about it, much less have it be public knowledge. Suffice it to say Lydia was more of a bitch than any of us realized, and my guys should be sainted.”

  “And if you knew that before you came up with the idea, you wouldn’t have volunteered to do this?” Loren asked.

  “Yeah.” Cali blew out a long breath. “Exactly.”

  Essie winced. “Sorry, hon. Didn’t mean to yank your chain. No, I won’t say anything.”

  Loren leaned in, her tone somber. “Sometimes, you can’t fix something. Sometimes, you can only make it right. In this case, you made it as right as you could. In the future, Sean and Max will love you even more for this.”

  “It’s a good thing I didn’t know more sooner,” Cali said, “because I’d be the one needing bail money.”

  “Neither you nor Tilly can wear prison orange,” Essie joked.

  “Tell me about it.” Cali picked up the urn and took it out to the garage, setting it on the washing machine. She couldn’t look at it anymore right then.

  When she returned, she noticed the way her friends studied her. “What?”

  “You okay?” Loren asked.

  She slumped into her chair. “I will be after tonight.”

  * * * *

  The three of them stood on the beach and stared at the plastic container. Cali had offered to carry it, which the men didn’t object to.

  She finally set it down and removed the top. Inside, a plastic bag closed with a twist tie held the actual cremains. She opened the bag and removed it from the urn.

  Luckily, the wind was coming from the east and blowing out over the Gulf, away from shore, so it wouldn’t get in their faces. She stared out at the horizon for a long moment. “Hope in the next life you find peace and aren’t such a twatwaffle. You didn’t deserve to die, though. Don’t know what happened to you to make you that way, but you hold no power over us anymore. Be free, and namaste.”