Page 48 of No Headlines Please

Holy hell. "Are you serious?"

"Yup. But to be fair, she didn't empty the whole account."

What the fuck? "Fair?"

"Okay…it's awful…obviously. But when she withdrew the money, my account balance was a lot higher. Over sixteen grand."

I stared. "So?"

"So it's not like she knew she'd leave me broke."

I dragged a hand across my jaw, trying not to say what I was thinking.

Delaney shifted in her seat. "The real problem was my quarterly tax payments cleared the very next day, which wasn't anyone's fault. I'd set them up ages ago before I knew I'd be short."

What she meant was, before her mom stole eight grand like it was nothing.

And Delaney wasn't finished. "And between federal and state, those payments totaled even more than the eight thousand. It wasn't a lot more, but it still ate up my buffer zone."

The way it sounded, Delaney had done everything right. She'd planned ahead, set aside money for taxes, and scheduled her credit card payment to keep everything humming.

But then, her mom had derailed the whole system by helping herself to a few grand on the sly. The taxes cleared, but the credit card payment bounced, along with who-knows-what afterward.

I recalled her two examples.

Her cell phone bill.

Her health insurance.

What was she doing for grocery money?

Shit.

And here I thought my own family was fucked up.

At something in my expression, she said with a nervous laugh, "Hey, at least my car's paid off."

The Ford Focus. I knew why it was paid off. The car was so old, they didn't make them anymore. "And where is it?"

"My car?" She stalled with another sip of her drink. "It's um…not too far away."

Nice try. "Meaning here in the parking garage below us? Or somewhere in the city?"

In spite of my question, I knew her car wasn't in the building's garage. If it was, she wouldn't have been walking down the sidewalk dragging that suitcase. The way she'd looked, she'd been dragging it for a while.

She glanced away. "Oh, it's a garage…just not the one below us, that's all."

"So, where is it?" I persisted.

Was I being bossy? Hell, yeah. But there were places in the city where she'd need her own bodyguard to retrieve that car.

Wherever she'd left it, was the car still there?

When she said nothing, I told her, "We should go get it."

"Yeah…well…I can't."

"Why not?"