Hooker dress? Jesus fucking Christ. How much alcohol had she had? She’d never consumed enough to blackout before. Unlike her mother, she’d always known her limit.
Until now.
Lowering her head, she cradled her face in her hands.
She was never drinking again.
Never.
Again.
"Get ready," Penny shouted, making Alyssa glance up. "Jack says we're landing now and to make sure you're strapped in." After passing on the order, Penny faced forward.
Alyssa checked her belt then turned to look out the window. Inhaling and exhaling slowly, she willed the concert in her head to quiet down and the fog in her brain to clear. Lights sparkled below, coming closer and closer as Jack bought the plane down. Off in the distance she could see the city lit up like the fourth of July. She'd seen the view once before when Jack had flown them to Vegas for a four-day weekend last December.
As soon as they landed, she would have to find a moment to pull Jack aside and talk about what they were doing. Surely he didn't think they were getting married. She'd kept him at arm's length since Penny arrived on her doorstep in February and Alyssa knew her decision to end the benefits part of their friendship had pissed him off.
If she were honest, she had to admit to being a bitch to Jack in recent months. She'd pushed him away again and again. Hadn't even allowed him to be the friend he'd been. There was no excuse other than she didn't have the mental capacity to work a demanding—sometimes life-threatening—jobandnavigate the hoops and red tape required to make Penny a permanent part of her life, never mind the situation with Jack.
Then there was her mother. The lawyers and social services couldn't find Gina but the woman had managed to find Alyssa's number and called every few days. Calls that went one of two ways, promises of kidnapping charges or whining woe-is-me,my life is so hard, and that girl is so difficult you have no idea what I've been throughcalls that left her feeling angry and frustrated.
Alyssa wasn't stupid; she knew exactly what Gina was up to. Both calls were an attempt to get money out of her with no doubt the promise of going away if she were successful.
But Alyssa had given money to her mother for the last time fifteen years ago, and that hadn't been by choice. She could remember the day as though it were yesterday; she had come home from school to find her mother passed out on the couch. Unfortunately, that hadn't been an unusual sight. Finding her bedroom tossed and her savings stash missing however, hadn't been Gina's usual.
No need to guess where all Alyssa's hard-earned cash had gone. Except it hadn't bought booze. It—according to Gina—had paid for an abortion.
Alyssa hadn't even known Gina was pregnant.
Everything Gina had done before that—dumping Alyssa into care repeatedly, leaving her alone for days on end without food, drinking moneyshe, not Gina, had earned—none of that had been unforgivable. But the reason behind that stolen money had been the final straw.
She still didn't understand how she could have overlooked all of those other horrible things. She'd been a child. It was Gina's responsibility as her mother to take care of her. And yet, until that day Alyssa hadn't hated her.
But the abortion? Yeah, that had been a line Alyssa hadn't been aware she had, and Gina had stomped over that thing with tequila-fueled glee.
Alyssa had spent her last two months of high school sleeping on a friend's bedroom floor, sneaking in the window after Stacey's parents had gone to sleep. After graduation she'd taken the small amount of money she'd managed to save in those final weeks, a suitcase, and a backpack filled with everything she had grabbed from her mother's house and boarded a bus for the closest major city to where they had been living at the time.
LA. The city of angels.
It was a miracle she hadn't ended up living on the streets or dead in an alley somewhere. She'd been lucky to find a shelter within hours of hopping off the bus, and there she'd found a woman who'd taken her under her wing and given Alyssa a place to stay, then helped her find a job and enroll in college so she could get her nursing credentials.
Maris had been a savior—an angel—one who'd left everything to Alyssa when she died five years ago.
That inheritance had made the move to Sunnyville possible. Alyssa had used a portion of it for a down payment on her little house and squirreled the rest away. Good thing too, because she'd had to use some of her nest egg for legal fees recently. And when she'd made the decision to upgrade to a bigger place, she'd been lucky property values had increased over the last four years and she didn't have to dip into her savings to purchase their new home.
A home that was necessary in the fight to keep Penny. A home she still wasn't sure she could really afford.
It didn't matter. If she had to live on bread and water, she would. She'd work as many shifts as she could get in order to afford that bigger house for her sister and Mrs. Alverez, their—soon to be live-in—housekeeper-slash-babysitter.
"Hey."
She turned to find Jack leaning in behind the flipped forward pilot's seat.
"You okay? There's a bottle of water in your bag." He glanced at Penny who waited on the tarmac behind him before adding, "Pain meds too."
How had she missed her sister and Jack climbing out of the plane? Frowning, she undid her belt and reached for the backpack on the floor at her feet. "I didn't even notice we'd landed," she muttered while digging around in the bag.
"Penny wants to grab food after we see Elvis."
