“Fuck!”Kayley breathed.
I tried to claw back some shreds of parental authority. “Okay, under the circumstances I’m giving you a free pass up until now. But if one more curse comes out of those lips, I’m suspending your Kindle account.”
Kayley gave me a look...but she also looked strangely relieved that things were back to normal. Well,sort ofnormal.
“So you’ll be here all the time?” she asked, looking around.
“Most of the day, yes, when I’m not at the garden store. I’ll be back at the apartment every night. No more emergencies...I hope.”
“But I’ll barely see you,” Kayley said. “Can’t we all just move in here? There’s plenty of space.”
“WHAT?”
“I could help with the plants.”
“NO!”My chest had clamped tight with fear. “Kayley, you areneverto come here again, understand?Ever.”
“Okay, okay, whatever.” She looked around ruefully. “But this place isawesome!”
“We need to get you home,” I said. “Right now. Come on, I’ll drive you.”
She sighed but trailed along behind me. The fact she knew—about the growing and about Sean—had my stomach in knots. But, oddly, I felt lighter. It was only now I’d stopped lying that I realized how much it had been tearing me up inside.
We were almost out of the room when Kayley suddenly broke away from me and ran back to Sean. He’d started to turn away and swung back towards her running footsteps just to get a small warm wrecking ball in the chest. Heoofedand staggered back a step, then looked up at me in wonder as he realized she was hugging him.
“Thank you,” said Kayley. “I know she wouldn’t have pulled this off on her own.”
Sean looked down at her awkwardly, as if he’d never had a kid hug him before. Then it hit me that, in all probability, he hadn’t. “That’s okay,” he said at last.
Kayley finally pushed back and looked up at him. “Don’t you dare break her heart,” she said hotly.
Sean nodded solemnly, then glanced at me. “I won’t.”
53
LOUISE
With the secretout and the tension between Sean and I gone, I thought things would get easier. But as we hit the flowering stage, things went from stressy toinsane.This period was critical: every tiny adjustment in light, water, air and fertilizer now made a huge difference. This was when the plants would shoot up and turn potent...ifwe got it exactly right. It was like sitting a college degree course that has a single final exam right at the end worth 100% of the credits: you could work your ass off the whole time but then blow it all at the end.
I’d get up early, get Kayley up and dressed and set her some schoolwork, make breakfast, rush off to my job, work a shift, drive to the mansion and then work straight through until the evening, rush back to the apartment and cook dinner, then spend a few hours trying to figure out which bill to pay to avoid anything being cut off. Kayley offered to help: “I’m four-freaking-teen,” she told me. “I can cook my own dinner.” But every day, she was getting weaker. No way was I leaving her to fend for herself, not now.
Dr. Huxler was starting to get worried. When I brought Kayley in for her next blood test, he took me aside. “I don’t need to see the test results,” he told me. “She needs to be in Switzerlandnow.”
“You said six months,” I said.
“Leukemia doesn’t stick to a calendar. I held it off for as long as I could—any more chemo would have killed her. Now it’s free to progress and it’s going faster than I’d hoped.” He shook his head. “From this point on, every day counts.”
Just another week,I thought.That’s all I need.But every day, Kayley got paler and weaker. I couldn’t leave her...but I couldn’t leave the plants, either. I felt like I was tearing myself in half: if I left Kayley on her own, I was the worst mom and sister ever. If I left the plants on their own, I was going to blow it all and Kayley would die. Something had to give, but I couldn’t take any more time off work: I’d used up every bit of vacation time and every personal day I had.
“Quit,” Sean told me one morning.
“What?We need that money!” Sean had been contributing some cash from the jobs he still took from Malone and the other dealers, but it wasn’t nearly enough.
He put his hands on my shoulders. “The plants need you. Kayley needs you. This’ll give you more time for both. And the money won’t make a difference—not now. If for some reason we can’t sell the crop, we’re fucked anyway.”
I slowly nodded. Going all-in made my stomach twist and tighten into a cold, iron knot...but it also made me realize that really I’d been all-in from the start, ever since that first conversation in Dr. Huxler’s office. If we pulled this off, I’d just have to find a new job and a way to pay off my debts. If we didn’t, if Kayley died...I honestly wouldn’t care about any of it, anymore.
So I quit my job and started running the grow house like the laboratory I’d always wanted to work in. For the final week, everything was timed down to the minute. I taped up the doorways with plastic sheeting so that I could control airflow, precisely timed the lighting cycles, brought in exotic mixes of plant nutrients to give them that final boost....I could see it working but I was utterly exhausted. On the fifth day, I fell asleep face-down on a table and didn’t even wake when my phone’s alarm went off. Sean, who’d been fixing a leak in the plumbing, had to gently shake me awake.
