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I shut my eyes tight, trying to keep myself even.
“Do you want me to stop?”
“No,” I replied quickly. With certainty, I gave another quick, “No.”
“Nothing ever came of it back then. Laz didn’t look at me that way. I kept my crush a secret, and he kept coming to see me. We got closer, and I told him momma wasn’t any different. He saw the bruises. Even when I defended myself, she still gave them to me. It was always worse when I tried to stop her.”
“Jesus,” I whispered as my chest ached and my head began to pound. The ever-present guilt I felt deepened slightly with her admission though I knew she wasn’t trying to guilt me.
“When I turned eighteen, I had managed to save enough money to get a place with a girl I worked with. Momma refused to let me leave when I told her. I didn’t expect that. I thought she’d just accept it and tell me to get. Instead, she tore my room apart and took all of my things, my clothes, even my underwear, and refused to give them back. She stayed home watching my every move, threatening me. When I told Laz what was going on, he made it to where I could leave.”
“How did he manage that?” I asked.
“He gave her the only thing she cared about more than keeping me hostage.”
“Meth.”
Amber absently nodded.
“Your invitation will be with the driver, and he will pick you up at six,” Ross said as she brought in the black bag that held my dress and hung it on the back of my office door. “I’ve arranged hair and makeup to be here around four thirty. Are you sure you don’t want me to look through your contacts to find you an escort?”
“No, that will be all, Ross. Thank you.”
I sat back in my chair, contemplating my next move. I’d thought about inviting Amber to the event but wasn’t sure she was ready for something as formal as a corporate party. She had been working her ass off, and we’d been spending all of our free time together—what little we had—to ge
t to know each other again. After her confession that Laz had finally freed her from the hell of that house, she’d told me of her loyalty.
They had been close due to their circumstances. Laz came clean one night when he was coming down off of a high and told her everything about his relationship with me. After years of his protection, Amber had confessed to me that her feelings for him had only grown deeper. She was confident that Laz saw her differently than she’d hoped, but she’d thrown herself at him in a moment of weakness. He’d been drunk and down, and she’d been convenient.
“It only happened once,” she said one night as we dined on my back porch. “I thought I was in love with him. It’s just . . . no one had ever looked out for me like that, cared for me like that. He regretted it the minute after it happened. It took me a long time to forgive him. And when we found out I was pregnant, something inside of him broke. He knew . . .” She looked at me with careful eyes. “He knew you would never forgive him. I think he assumed you would eventually come back, that one day the two of you would be together again.”
“He was delusional,” I said with contempt. “The man was morally bankrupt when I left Dyer. I was never going back to him. I was finished with him the minute I left.”
“He began to hate you then,” she said as an afterthought. “I could never really understand what went through his head, but I knew. I’ve always known he loved you. But when he spoke about you after I got pregnant, it was like he blamed you for everything. I can’t explain it, but it was like he wanted you to pay for everything. When Joseph was born, he became fiercely protective over us both. Our relationship changed. He saw our son as a kind of ownership over me. Things got worse. He started using more and began to really become reckless. Joseph’s arrival did absolutely nothing to slow him down.”
I cringed at the thought of Joseph trapped in a world so hopeless.
“I began using after Laz decided I needed to ‘earn’ his protection. I would make runs for him and collect money. I was trying to keep Laz content while trying to take care of Joseph. My first excuse for using was to keep up with Laz’s never ending demands and then . . .”
I looked over at her as she wiped a stray tear from her face. “You liked it.”
“I loved it,” she said as she looked over at me carefully. “It made everything disappear in a way. I wasn’t numb, but I could ignore it all.”
I nodded, but without a true understanding of the effect of the drug.
“Laz just got worse. He was never hands-on with Joseph, just protective. He found me using one day and went ballistic. I tried to quit so many times. And Laz still forced me to make deliveries. It was too tempting. I’d traded one hell for another, except I had this precious little boy,” she whispered tearfully. “If I didn’t have him, if he hadn’t needed me, I probably would have ended it.”
Fear crept through me as I heard the desperation in her voice. “I could never leave him, and then I screwed up, and they took him from me.” She looked at me, destroyed. “I can’t do it without him, Taylor.”
“You won’t. We will get him back.”
“But Laz,” she said with fear in her voice.
“He’s a thug and a criminal, and no matter what power he has in Dyer, he’s just a street rat anywhere else. I’m not afraid of him.”
“Taylor, he’s unpredictable and crazy,” she warned.
“I saw it.”
