Gone.
All of it, gone.
Unless she could find a miracle.
Her mother’s hand closed over hers.
Warm. Steady. Inexplicably calm.
“It’s okay, sweetheart.” Dolores’s voice was soft, peaceful in a way that made no sense given what they’d just learned. “God will make a way for us.”
Andie forced herself to smile.
She didn’t say anything.
Couldn’t say anything, not when her throat was tight with all the words she wanted to scream. Words like “how” and “when” and “what if He doesn’t.”
Her mother had changed lately.
Dolores Jackson had always been nice. Proper. The kind of woman who baked casseroles for sick neighbors and nevermissed a Sunday service. But she’d also been stressed. Worried. Carrying the weight of single motherhood and medical bills and a life that never seemed to get easier.
Ever since she’d started attending that new church, though...
Something had shifted.
Her mother had become inexplicably peaceful. Content in a way Andie didn’t understand. Even now, facing the loss of everything they had, Dolores wasn’t worried.
Not even a little.
Andie bit her lip, her mind racing.
Her mother had never talked about her younger sister. Never mentioned Joyce at all, not once in Andie’s entire life. But small towns had long memories and loose lips, and Andie had heard the gossip.
Joyce had run away from home at seventeen. Said Dolores was too strict, too religious, too suffocating. Said she would never help her sister with anything.
Not even if it killed her.
The words echoed in Andie’s mind as the bus rumbled on.
What if...
What if she went to Joyce?
Because another thing she learned from the local gossips was how rich her aunt was now. Richer than anyone this town had seen. And definitely rich enough to give—not lend even, but give—Andie $55,000...for the right reason.
She racked her brain for anything and everything else she heard that pertained to her Aunt Joyce...like the fact that she could be really vindictive.
Right, right, she had heard the others confirm this multiple times.
With one of them even going as far as describing her aunt as perversely vengeful because of how Joyce had flirted with Dolores’ first boyfriend and made him cheat on her, and all because she was pissed that her older sister refused to help her obtain a fake ID.
Someone that vindictive...would indeed rather die than help Dolores with her problem. But what if it was the other way around?
What if Andie played the rebel like her?
What if...what if she claimed to need the money for something Dolores would absolutely loathe, and thus something Joyce would surely find delightful?
It was crazy.
