Dee and two other women are decked out in matching T-shirts that read “Good girls go to heaven. Bad girls go to Vegas.” They’re posing in front of Caesar’s Palace. Dee’s in the middle. The rare crooked grin she’s wearing knocks me further off center.
“Who are they?” I ask.
She glances up from filling a tumbler with ice. “Oh.” Her eyes, a beautiful mosaic of brown, gold, and amber, smile. “My best friends.”
That shocks me. Dee didn’t have them in high school. She had only me.
“Jordyn, on the left, talked Lexie and me into doing the tourist thing. I have to admit, I thought Vegas would be tacky, but we had a blast.”
My jaw muscle twitches as my agitation grows. The uncertain girl who wore baggy clothes to hide her body, who read the endings of her books first to circumvent the unknown, and who remained on the outside looking in wouldn’t go to Sin City for a good time.
Clearly Dee’s not that girl anymore. Her changes scrape at my barely suppressed temper like nails scratching across a chalkboard. It takes every drop of willpower not to grab her by the shoulders, shake her hard, and demand answers to the questions that have haunted me since the night she packed up her shit and snuck away without a trace.
It took me a hell of a long time to get over Dee—to stop looking for her in every woman I saw with dark curly hair, to function without a drink. But the anger over her disloyalty and abandonment are still there, now compounded by her happy, vibrant life.
Did I think that I’d find something here to suggest she had any regrets, that there’d been a gap without me? If so, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
“So you wanted to talk?”
“What?”
“Dwayde,” she says and adjusts her shirt, which has once again slipped off one shoulder. “You said you came here to talk about him.”
Shit.I let her screw with my head and almost forgot my purpose. I turn my back on the picture and, clearing my throat, hold her gaze. “Dwayde’s threatened to run away.”
She doesn’t respond. Just blinks those spectacular eyes and waits for me to say more.
“He told me today that if a judge rules in favor of the Franklins, he will disappear.”
“He was upset.”
“This wasn’t an idle threat, Dee. Dwayde meant it and I’m not going to stand around waiting for that to happen. We both know the Franklins could get custody just because they’re blood relatives, despite the fact that Dwayde is better off with Victor and Isabelle.”
“It’s true the system favors relatives,” she allows. “But that doesn’t mean the court won’t consider the alternative and what Dwayde wants. That’s why you hired me.”
“That was before Dwayde met his grandparents and decided living on the streets was better than having anything to do with them. How many cases do you know of where the foster parents won over relatives?”
She pulls the tab off the can and pours the drink over ice. “Each case is different. Don’t worry about the numbers.”
“How many, Dee?”
She looks up.
“How many Dee?” I repeat.
“Two so far,” she relents. “But—”
“Christ!”
“It means there’s precedent, Mick.”
“It means the Franklins’ odds are even better than I thought and that ours are shit.” I stalk toward her. “I want you to do whatever it takes…whatever it costs…to get the Franklins to back off.”
She stares at me as if I’ve lost my mind. “Have you been famous for so long that you’ve forgotten how things work in the real world? You think you can wave your millions around and presto”—she snaps her fingers—“problem solved? Well, let me tell you something. The Franklins have millions, too. Unless they willingly back down, which I doubt, there’s a legal process that we have to follow. Next Wednesday, we’re scheduled to meet with a judge to discuss evidence. At that time, we’ll know the strength of the positions on the table.”
“And in the meantime, Dwayde is supposed to sit in limbo, his future uncertain, waiting for his fate to be decided by some judge who doesn’t even know him. Who’s to say he won’t run before then? If he gets scared enough that this thing is going south, he’ll take off. You saw that firsthand today.”
“What I saw was an angry kid who took off and went to you,” she says with contrasting calmness. “Someone he trusts. He didn’t run away.”
