PROLOGUE
The day I first got chest pains was the worst day of my life.
I was leaning over the edge of the water. The dry heaving had stopped a few minutes prior, but my knees still quivered under the weight of my hands. The bile and foam I’d tossed left streaks on the river’s surface, tainting my reflection. It was disgusting, but not nearly as disgusting as some evil in the world.
Heck, our entire paradise by the river was tainted.
Not by the vomit though.
“You ‘bout done, you think?” Her southern drawl was low, hoarse.
“Think so.” I spat into the water a few times and straightened. My muscles were screaming. I turned back to her. She’d put her shirt and pants back on, and I was relieved about that.
She patted the empty spot on the hammock beside her. The ropes groaned when I sat. Her long hair was trapped under the collar of her t-shirt, like she’d forgotten to pull it out. I freed it for her, careful to be as gentle as I could.
“Thanks.” She tried to smile but couldn’t. I knew why. No use in trying to make light of things. Her eyes were bloodshot, and her voice shook. “Pat, I’m so sor—”
“Stop.”
“This is my fault. If I’d have just told you—”
“It’s not your fault.” My head was throbbing. I shifted down in the hammock, and she followed suit, curling into my side. My arms came around her. Gingerly though, unlike before. “None of this is your fault.”
She didn’t argue, and we fell silent.
We were two kids holding the weight of the world. And man, oh man, the weight was crushing. I took a deep breath and gripped my chest when a stabbing pain shot through my ribcage.
“You alright?”
“Yeah,” I said. Biggest lie I’d ever told.
The two of us were thrown into a current we had no business being in. And the people who were responsible for putting us there would burn in hell. I wasn’t supposed to think things like that—Mama’d have a fit if I said it out loud. But after I explained why, she would agree with me and march down into the pit of Hades herself to stoke the flames.
The rage I’d felt fifteen minutes ago was being pushed out, muted by grief. Things shouldn’t have been this way.
Her breathing was fast, shallow. She asked what I was too afraid to ask myself. “What–what do we do?”
Hindsight truly is twenty-twenty.
What weshould’vedone is gone straight up the hill to my Mama. We should’ve told her everything then and there. She would’ve helped us—gone to battle and done things the right way. Mama always did things the right way.
But we were scared senseless. Didn’t know up from down or black from white. Brains don’t tend to think rationally in the face of terror.
So we decided to run.
ONE
Patrick
“Big day for you.” Danny’s speech was as I remembered—slow as molasses and hindered by a Marlboro hanging from his lips. Though his window was cracked, the secondhand smoke stung my eyes.
I kept my gaze on the blur of trees whizzing by. A knot in my throat prevented me from agreeing out loud. Didn’t have much to say anyway; the weight of everything paralyzed me.
Like a coward, I couldn’t bring myself to look at Danny. My emotions teetered at their threshold. He was uncomfortable, too. I could tell because his fingers were drumming against the steering wheel like a concert pianist.
“I don’t want to overwhelm ya, but I do have a proposition.”
“Shoot,” I squeezed out.
