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If I played my cards right, they’d never see the nobody from Idaho coming. Not until it was too late.
My previous searches had unearthed several pictures of Elijah and his younger brother and sister. I had always thought Elijah looked like he was born to wear suits, that the Oak Park uniform fit him like a second skin, but it was even more obvious when I saw him next to his younger siblings. He looked so different than them, all his rough edges polished and smoothed down like one of the stones I’d picked up on the beach behind my grandparents’ house.
I’d also found several pictures of Penny, Cole’s eight-year-old sister. She looked sweet, with black hair just like her brother and a round, open face. I didn’t print those pictures though, because even if there was some way I could hurt him through her, I wouldn’t do it. I probably could—he’d beat that kid Preston to a pulp because Preston had talked shit about his sister—but I refused to sink to that level. She hadn’t meant to have a walking cock for a brother, and she didn’t deserve to suffer for it.
Today, I picked up where my last research session had ended and typed “Element Investments” into the search bar. Philip had told me my mom and the Princes’ parents used to be close friends, that they’d even started a company together after college.
There wasn’t a lot of information about the company itself available online, although maybe that shouldn’t have been too surprising considering it only seemed to have been around for a year or so. I found several articles discussing the inception of the company, but almost nothing chronicling its end. It seemed to have just sort of fizzled out, dying quietly and sinking out of the public eye.
I found a few pictures of the group of them—my mom and her college friends—from right before the company got off the ground, and I unconsciously leaned closer to the screen to stare at the images. My mom was young, just a few years out of college, and she looked so much like me it was almost like peering into a mirror. The Princes’ parents resembled their sons too—Cole’s father, especially, was the spitting image of his child—and the strangest feeling of déjà vu hit me as I gazed at the tight cluster of faces.
In another universe, that could’ve been me and the Princes.
My fingers reached up to gently brush against the screen, ghosting over the image of my mom’s face. It hurt to see her like this, smiling and happy and carefree, knowing that just a few years later, she’d leave Roseland and everyone in it behind—and that so many people, including her own parents, would despise her at the end.
A loud burst of music from my backpack made me jump, and I yanked my hand away from the screen as if I’d just been caught poking at a priceless old painting. The librarian raised her finger to her lips and hissed at me, even though there was nobody else here but an older man on the other side of the small bank of computers—and I was pretty sure he was too engrossed in his porn to care about my phone ringing.
Still, I scrambled to grab it out of my bag. The loud noise in the small, quiet space was making my nerves jangle, so I swiped across the screen quickly and held it to my ear.
“Hello?” I whispered, and the librarian hissed at me again. Waving a hand in her direction, I grabbed my backpack and slung it over my shoulder before heading for the door.
“Talia? Why are you whispering?” Mina sounded irritated and a little suspicious.
I held the phone away from my ear for a second as I pushed open the door and stepped out onto the sidewalk. My foster mom never called me. I’d given her my cell number and programmed hers into my phone the day I’d first arrived at her house, but I had never used it. And this was only the second time she’d used mine—the first time had been to ask me to bring her food once when I got off work at Big Daddy’s.
“I was at the library. What do you need?”
“Oh.” If anything, she sounded more suspicious at that. “Well, there’s a woman here to see you. Says it’s urgent.”
A thrill of nerves skated up my spine. It couldn’t be Janet, or she would’ve referred to her by name. So who else would want to speak to me? Who else even knew where I was?
Nobody cares about you.
Except, obviously someone did, if they’d tracked me down at my foster home.
But that wasn’t necessarily a good thing.
“Who is it?” I asked, my voice going quiet again for an entirely new reason.
“Says her name’s Erin Bennett. She’s a lawyer,” Mina reported, then added, “So are you coming back or not?”
“Um, yeah. I’ll catch a bus and be there in half an hour. Can she wait?”
There was a pause, filled by the muffled sound of Mina’s scratchy voice and a low, smooth response. Then my foster mom came back on the line, sounding more irritated than ever. “Yeah. She’ll be here.”
My heart thudded dully in my chest as I hung up my cell and slipped it back in my pocket, already walking at a fast clip toward the bus stop. Mina’s answers hadn’t meant anything to me, and worry about what the fuck would be waiting for me at the house made me simultaneously want to get back there faster and never go back at all.
Erin Bennett.
A lawyer.
Neither of those things meant shit to me. Not the name, and not why a lawyer would want anything to do with me. I hugged my backpack to my chest as if protecting the contents as I rode back across town.
Had the Princes hired a lawyer to fuck with me even more? Hadn’t getting me kicked out of my grandparents’ house, pulled from Oak Park, and sent back to the slums of Idaho been enough for them?
By the time I pushed open the door to Mina’s house, all my defenses were up, my whole body bristling with nervous energy as I prepared to face the worst.
But all that greeted me was a petite woman with ash-brown hair cut in a short style that hugged her head. She wore an expensive-looking suit that flattered her small frame, and everything about her looked out of place in this shabby, run-down house.
