Page 89 of Her Unending Horizon

But the questions stayed.

How big was this operation? How many places like this were running on any given night? How many kids like Tyler were being promised a way out and handed a loaded gun pointed at their own heads?

And how the hell was I going to explain any of this to Nash or Simon without something solid?

My ribs hurt. My face hurt. My conscience hurt worse.

I tightened my hands on the wheel and drove toward Jasper Creek, toward home, with one thought pounding in rhythm with my heartbeat.

This wasn’t just some back-room fight ring. Whatever I’d stepped into tonight, it went deeper.

I’d just watched it put its teeth into a kid with a baby on the way.

And if I didn’t move fast, it was going to kill Tyler.

Chapter Nineteen

I pressed the key fob for my little red Miata and it came to life, and for a moment I just stood there looking at my baby, but seeing nothing. My therapist Kate had kept insisting it was normal to grieve. That grief wasn’t weakness, it was truth. That I was allowed to cry. I had practically run out of our session.

Sure, I was allowed to cry.

Allowed didn’t mean I wanted to.

I pressed my lips into a thin line, willing myself not to break down in the parking lot like a woman who’d lost her mind. I could fall apart inside my apartment like a civilized adult. I could put on pajamas, make a cup of tea, sob into a blanket, like an appropriate Victorian Miss on Netflix. Just not here. Not in the sunlight. Not where people could see.

I slid into the low leather seat and pulled the door closed. The familiar scent of my car wrapped around me—old coffee, charcoal from a million art supply runs, the faint strawberry lip balm I always lost somewhere in the center console.

I started the car. The engine hummed. My eyes stayed dry. Only my hands shook.

The drive home was muscle memory. Turns I’d taken a thousand times, traffic lights I barely noticed. My brain had apparently tapped out ten minutes into the drive, because the next thing I knew I was inside, standing in my living room with my purse on the floor and my shoes still on.

Then I blinked, and I was on my couch.

And my phone was in my hands.

Like it had appeared there by divine intervention. Or desperate instinct.

The screen illuminated my face. I stared at it, waiting for it to tell me what to do. Waiting for it to give me instructions. Waiting for it to save me, like Kate hadn’t been able to.

I frowned.

A drop of water fell onto the glass.

What the hell?

Then another.

My chest clenched and my nose prickled.

Tears. I watched them land with the kind of fascination normally reserved for eclipses. Then another tear fell. And another. I wondered if my phone was waterproof. I couldn’t remember if I’d bought the waterproof model. I wiped the screen with the heel of my hand, but the tears just kept coming.

More fell.

More fell.

More fell.

“Chloe?”