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Two simple tasks I’d been doing my entire existence, and yet, right now, it seems impossible. “I’m okay,” I assure her, cracking my knuckles. “Tell me what they said to you.”
After watching me a moment, making sure I won’t explode, she says, “Your mom told me that Joseph had bought an apartment near your campus, so that she could visit whenever she wanted. But, she knew that once she told you, you would ask me to move in there with you, and she said that…” She breaks off to suck in a breath, let it out slowly. “She said that under no circumstances was I to sayyes.”
“Why would she…” This doesn’t make sense. None of it does.
“They also told me that they weren’t happy with law enforcement’s progress on our case, so they’d hired a private investigator to find our attackers. The PI started asking around town if anyone knew about it. Eventually, people started pointing him toward this low-level drug dealer who was going around bragging about it.”
“We’re not involved in drugs, Jamie. That doesn’t make sense.”
“We’renot,” she’s quick to say, her eyes unfocused as they shift away. “But I know someone who is.”
Beaker.
She continues, her tone flat, lacking any emotion. “The PI mustn’t have been very good because he stopped investigating after that. He didn’t connect me to Beaker or anyone other than that one drug dealer. So I guess, in a way, it’s understandable that your mom accused me of being an addict.”
I let my head fall into my hands, my fingers curling, grasping at my hair. “Jesus Christ.”
“Meth and heroine, she assumed. And, of course, she believed I had a drug debt I couldn’t pay off, and that’s why they came for me. Forus.”
“Jamie, it wasn’t your fault,” I breathe out.
Something in those words, or the way I say them, has her breaking down again. “I didn’t believe them at first,” she cries, “because it doesn’t make sense.”
It still doesn’t.
“And then I got up to leave, and she yelled at me in front of everyone at the diner… she said…” she breaks off tobreathe. Then swallow hard. “She said, ‘My son had a gun held to his head because of you!’ and I just remember collapsing back in the seat because…. because I didn’t know about a gun.”
Idid. I put it in the police report.
I lift my head, trying to fight through the anguish pumping inside of me, and focus on Jamie, pushing aside the images swarming in my mind… of Jamie sitting there, withmy momand herhusband, as they destroyed everythinggoodinside her.
Jamie releases an exhale, her eyes drifting shut. “And then um…”
“Thenwhat?”
“Then Joseph—he slid over a check. He said that it was more than enough money for me to start a new life somewhere else…” Her eyes meet mine again. “Somewhere far away from you.”
I dig the heels of my palms into my eyes, hiding my tears, hiding my pain. “Did you take it?”
“Of course not, Holden. Do you honestly think I would?”
“No,” I tell her truthfully, lowering my hands. “I know you wouldn’t.”
She looks away again. “I didn’t take the money, but I took what they said, and I went to the source of it…”
My stomach falls, and the ground slips from beneath me. “You went to see Beaker…”
44
Jamie
Five Years Earlier
It didn’t make sense.
As I sat in the pool house after Tammy and Joseph’s ambush, reading the police reports over and over, comparing our accounts, all I could think wasit didn’t make sense.
Holden’s recollections of that night were far different from mine, and I couldn’t grasp how that was possible.
