Hazel In The - Chapter 34

Hazel spent the rest of the weekend working on a painting of the pond on Will’s property and he dragged a camping chair out there using reading as an excuse. He hardly managed to read anything since he was too enthralled by the look on his wife’s face as she painted.

It was obvious that she loved to draw from how many of those crayon drawings she gave him way back when but they were all done during daylight hours. He never actually saw her do them.

In the past few weeks she had been living with him, Will had plenty of opportunity to watch her work. She always got this tiny little divot between her brows when she was concentrating. He wondered if she was even aware of it. Probably not but it was very cute.

Once it got too dark to paint, Hazel either played pool with him or worked on the digital art for that comic. And when they went to bed she refused his request to cuddle.

It appeared that the other night had been a one-time deal. That nightmare must have really rattled her.

He was willing to bet it was the same one she had when she was younger. The night they first met when she mentioned she was in for not speaking and nightmares he instantly knew those screams were hers. He hadn’t before then. There were so many wackos in that place.

It made him angry. She never told him what the nightmares were about but he was pretty sure he knew. Who wouldn’t have nightmares after watching their parents get murdered right in front of them?

Will sighed as he gazed at the sleeping woman beside him. If he could make her forget everything to do with her parents’ murders, he would. But he supposed he owed a lot to Charlie. They never would have gotten as close as they did if it hadn’t happened.

Hazel was a normal, happy little girl before her parents’ deaths. Normal, happy little girls didn’t typically come to depend on psychopaths.

That was what the doctors and nurses at the mental hospital called him. He didn’t think they were quite right, having read a number of books about psychopaths. The books described psychopaths—or to use the medical term, people with antisocial personality disorder—as people with no sense of right or wrong who ignore the feelings of others.

Will wasn’t all that bad. Sure, he tended to disregard the rules when they benefited him and had no qualms about doing whatever was necessary to get what he wanted but he wasn’t all that violent. Unless the situation called for it, of course.

The situation had called for it an awful lot after leaving the mental hospital. It was a means of survival. Wuxiaworld for visiting.

When Hazel ran off to find help for him after he collapsed from the strain of carrying her through that smoke he knew he couldn’t let anyone know he had been an inpatient. They would simply lock him up again somewhere else and that wouldn’t do.

He promised Hazel he would take care of her and he was smart enough to know that getting out of a mental hospital at age 18 with no diploma and no skills wouldn’t allow him to do that. Leaving Oakland was his only option at the time. He needed to start over somewhere else with a new identity.

Will’s alarm went off, breaking through his musings. Time to get up and go to work. He shut it off as quickly as possible so it wouldn’t disturb Hazel’s rest and gave her a lingering kiss on the cheek before getting out of bed.

He put on a button down shirt and slacks before grabbing a yogurt and banana on his way out the door. Sometimes the commute truly was troubling but he infinitely preferred Park City to Salt Lake.

There were far less nosy people here than in a big city; he had more than his fill of urban life living in L.A. for so long. Besides, he had known Hazel would love being so close to nature when he managed to win her over. Overall, it was the best choice.

Will wasn’t actually a real estate developer. He called himself that because it was one of the side businesses he managed throughout the city. His real business was smuggling anything he could get his hands on and money laundering.

Had this been what he wanted to do with his life? No. But as a kid on the street who barely managed to hitchhike down to southern California, when someone offers to take you in, you do what they want you to do. It wasn’t like he had any career ambitions of his own anyway.

Alfonzo had been his mentor. They had a similar view of the world so they got on pretty well.

If somebody wasn’t useful to Alfonzo, he got rid of them. Will discovered this early on and made sure to always be the most useful person on his team. Eventually he worked his way up from errand boy to the man who succeeded Alfonzo when he got shot by the cops in the middle of a warehouse raid.

Will became especially careful after that. He stayed behind the scenes and had other people do the dirty work for him. Nobody back in L.A. knew the boss’s name anymore.

Only a select number of people in Salt Lake did because they were involved in Will’s legitimate businesses used to hide the smuggling money. Those people didn’t know about any of his illegal dealings so they couldn’t rat on him.

His alibis were airtight, his papers were perfectly in order, and no one suspected a thing even though he took over from Alfonzo way back when he was in college. Despite his love of learning, school felt like a waste of time because it was meant to be used to get a job and he already had one. But if he didn’t have a degree, it would look suspicious that he had such a lucrative business.

Will wanted to look like everyone else. To blend in. College was the perfect disguise. There was one thing that hadn’t felt like a waste though—he took a bunch of art appreciation classes as electives so he would have something to talk to Hazel about when he met her again.

He wanted to be able to hold a decent conversation with her about it. Or at the very least to understand what she was saying when she went on about color theory or certain types of brushstrokes. Hazel only cared about art but Will only cared about Hazel so he sort of had to care about art too.