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Besides, if there was one person in the whole world I would never be able to lie well enough to, it was Bayleigh. She knew me too well, would be able to hear things beneath the surface that I wasn’t ready to talk about yet.
Like how I was falling for him.
And how I was terrified that he was going to realize how painfully… average I was. Then be quick to shrug me off and move on with his life.
While I spiraled.
“Honey, is everything okay?” my mom asked, and I realized I’d been mostly yessing her to death the past few minutes while my mind raced.
“Yeah. I’m just a little stressed out lately,” I admitted.
“You could come visit,” she suggested. “We could go get massages and mani-pedis. Really relax. It would be good for us both.”
It would.
But I couldn’t face them.
Not yet.
“When my schedule lets up, definitely,” I told her. I meant that. Whether that was a week from now when the charges were dropped, or a decade from now when I got out of prison.
“Okay. Call me, okay? If you just need someone to vent to. I hate that you’re there all alone now.”
“I’ll be fine,” I assured her, putting a little extra pep in my voice that I didn’t really feel as I walked further away from the clubhouse, heading closer to the mountains. “But thank you. I’ll call you soon, okay?”
“Okay. Love you, honey.”
“Love you too,” I said, and oddly felt tears spring to my eyes as I hung up.
I exhaled hard and kept walking, needing the fresh air and exercise to clear my mind.
Lost in my head, I didn’t realize just how far I’d gone until I saw that I was closer to the prison than I was to the clubhouse.
I must have zoned out.
I glanced back toward the clubhouse, wondering if Detroit was back yet.
“Knew you’d come out of there eventually,” a voice said before there was a sharp pain to the back of my head… and nothing else.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Detroit
I was sitting in the little cubby in the line of cubbies at the county jail, staring ahead at the glass that Gav was supposed to appear on the other side of at some point.
I couldn’t see the door where the inmates came in through, but I could hear the jangle of chains each time someone came in to sit down with their loved ones.
Three cubbies over from me, a woman who was holding a baby who couldn’t have been more than seven or eight months was sobbing and rushing to speak, tripping over her words to, I imagined, the father of her child.
A few down from her, a mother and father had been trying to be upbeat for their son. But as soon as he was taken away again, the mom had broken down in her husband’s arms.
This was a place full of misery for all involved, it seemed.
I think I was the only person in the area who didn’t seem to be dealing with some intense personal emotion.
Because I barely knew Gav.
And the only emotion I was feeling was a bone-deep need to prove Everleigh’s innocence.
