I sighed and turned to face him. “Honestly, this whole thing has me kind of fucked up.”
He furrowed his brow. “Fucked up in some other way than wanting to kill Todd and chop him into a million pieces before feeding him to a hundred different animals on the mountain?”
I scrubbed at the corner of my mouth with my thumb. “I’ve been thinking about my mom.”
He lifted his eyebrows. “Your mom?”
I nodded. “What Todd did to Maeve, what he’s doing to other girls, well… I’ve just been thinking a lot about my mom.”
I didn’t want to say it out loud, like saying it out loud might make it true.
“You’ve always wondered whether she left or whether she was taken,” Remy said.
I’d mentioned it before, but just in passing. It had never been something I wanted to think too hard about, She’d been gone since I was a kid. Whit and I had been raised by my grandparents.
What else was there to say?
Except I was finding I actuallydidhave more to say, more to think about the whole thing.
“Yeah, and I think I always told myself she left because even though that would be epically fucked up, it was better than imagining the alternative, even though that kind of shit happens to our people all the time.”
“Fuck. I’m sorry, man.” And I knew Remy was sorry. He was a good listener, a good guy. Not that Bram wasn’t. Bram just had a hard time tapping into his softer side. “I guess all this stuff with Maeve makes your mom’s disappearance feel close.”
He’d put into words what I couldn’t, and I nodded. “Yeah, that’s it. It feels close. Like I keep thinking about the night she went missing, wondering what it was like for her, what happened next, if she was scared and alone like Maeve.”
Remy crossed the kitchen and gave me a hug. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “That’s fucked up.”
“Thanks.”
“Anything I can do?” he asked, going back to the smoothie he was making for Maeve.
I shook my head and turned off the eggs. “It’s been over twenty years.”
He returned to the blender to continue making Maeve’s smoothie. “Did they ever… I don’t know, investigate her disappearance or anything?”
“If you could call it that. They told my grandparents that she’d probably left on her own.”
“Assholes,” Remy said.
“Yeah.” I sighed and ran a hand through my hair as if it would clear my thoughts of the past.
The numbers spoke for themselves: Native women were twice as likely as white women to go missing and a hundred times as likely to still be missing after thirty days, statistics most Native people in America knew because they were personally affected by them in some way. And yet their cases got a tinyfraction of the media attention showered on missing white women.
I didn’t begrudge the missing white women that attention. I just wanted all women to matter the same.
My mom hadn’t mattered to anyone but us.
I went to work setting Maeve’s breakfast on the tray, because there might not have been anything I could do for my mom, but Maeve was home where she belonged.
And I would do anything — sacrifice anything — to keep her safe and sound.
22
MAEVE
I spentthe day in Poe’s bed mostly against my will. We’d all slept together without so much as a discussion, like it was a given that I would sleep with all three of the Butchers, and I’d sunk into a long deep sleep.
Bram and Remy had been gone when I woke up, and Poe had ordered me to stay put with Ray while he made me breakfast. I’d passed the next few hours texting Bailey with my new phone, half-heartedly watching stuff on Poe’s huge TV (apparently the one in the living room had been trashed by Bram after I’d gone missing, a thought that was simultaneously terrifying and heartwarming) and picking at an assortment of food brought by Poe. I’d sipped three different smoothies, all made by Remy, who was determined that I needed the micronutrients hidden in the juice-and-protein-powder-packed concoctions.
