June
Shivering in my wrap dress and sandals, I press the intercom button for the fifth time.
Nothing happens.
Backing up a bit, I peer through the white security bars that separate me from my parents' mansion. It’s my home, the place I spent the first seventeen years of my life, and no one will answer the door to me.
There’s no sign of anyone in the windows of the gray three-story stone mansion. The long white gravel driveway means I’d have little hope of someone even hearing me if I shouted.
I knew my parents wouldn’t open the gate, but I hoped that seeing me or at least hearing my voice in the intercom would awaken their parental instincts.
I should have known better.
After pressing the intercom button for the sixth time, I wait for another two minutes, then let out a sigh and walk back to the cab driver who had, thankfully, agreed to wait for me.
Waiting costs extra, so the ride downtown will eat up the entire twenty dollars Dr. Whelan gave me. I told her I was going to stay with a friend. From her furrowed brow, she didn’t believeme, but she gave me money from her own pocket so I could afford a cab ride from the hospital to my parents' house.
All I have are the clothes on my back, a polka dot wrap dress, brown sandals, and my great-grandmother’s gold bracelet.
That’s it.
“Downtown?” the cab driver asks when I slide into the backseat and close the door.
Though his blue gaze briefly meets mine in the rearview mirror, there’s no mockery in his voice or judgment in his eyes, given that I told him I was going to my parents' house and he just watched me ring the intercom and get no response.
“Thanks. Just near the shops,” I say, vague about where exactly I intend to go. What I’m about to do feels wrong, and I’d rather avoid admitting it to anyone if I can help it.
I snap my seatbelt on as he drives away from my old home, leaning my head against the window as we pass the other mansions tucked behind gates on this quiet, leafy road. All I wanted was to find out if River was okay, and my parents didn’t even want to tell me that.
When my eyes prick with tears, I turn my face away from the front of the cab and subtly wipe my wet cheeks.
Wherever you are, River, I will find you. I will.
“Seven hundred? That’s all?” I ask the man in the pawnshop.
This was the first pawnshop I found that didn’t terrify me to walk inside. The other one looked like someone had smashed the front window with a baseball bat, and a man was staring at me from across the street, making me nervous.
A subtle nod. “Seven hundred.”
My fingers itch to snatch my gold love knot bracelet back, even though he’s only lifting it to look at it. The bracelet is beautiful, and I rarely ever take it off, but that isn’t why I’m feeling so possessive of it. It’s the only thing I have left that means anything to me after my scent matches shredded the book my sister gave me.
“It has to be worth more than seven hundred dollars.” My grandparents said it came from one of the best jewelry stores in the city. I’d expected to get two thousand dollars for the antique gold bracelet with tiny emerald stones woven through it. Enough to start a new life.
The man on the other side of the glass screen gives the bracelet one last look and pushes it across the scarred white counter. I take the bracelet, my fingers wrapping around the metal warmed by his thorough examination.
“Seven hundred is all it’s worth to me. It’s distinctive. People don’t want distinctive. It’ll cost me more to melt it down than it would to sell as is.” Brown eyes flick over my right shoulder, toward the door I pushed open minutes before. “Take it or leave it, lady. You say you need the cash. Seven hundred’s my final offer.”
I don’t want to let this last piece of my family go. It belonged to my great-grandmother, the only Harrington who found actual love in a society mating, and that only came about through luck than because she went looking for it. Letting this bracelet go so cheaply feels wrong, but I need the money for an apartment, and I need to not starve on the street on my first night out of the hospital so I can find my sister.
“And I can buy it back?” I ask, fiddling with my bracelet.
I wouldn’t have walked in the front door if the big sign outside hadn’t said so.
The pawnbroker drags a thick white pad with pink sheets toward him and pats the front. His short, wide nails have dirt sodeeply encrusted that I look away. “I’ll write up a receipt. One for you and one for me. You've got thirty days to buy it back. After that, I sell it.”
Uncurling my fingers from around my bracelet takes serious effort. Pushing the bracelet under the screen toward the man makes my heart hurt. “Fine. Seven hundred dollars.”
My wrist is naked, and the pocket of my polka dot dress is bulging when I walk out of the downtown pawnbroker’s shop five minutes later. If I’d known I would have nothing to my name on the day I rejected Pack Wells, I might have reconsidered my hasty decision to leave everything behind.
