“I didn’t think about that,” she says.
I nod. “I know. I’m just saying… there’s what you can see, and what you don’t, what you can lose sight of. There’s good with the bad. You have to find it.”
Janella’s expression shifts. I’m almost certain she’s going to shut down again. But she doesn’t. She exhales, and all the tension leaves her body at once. “I miss my mom,” she breathes. Her breath fogs in wisps of smoke. “My mom was good.”
“So, tell me about her.”
Astonishing me, she hooks her arm through mine, going back to licking her cone, pulling me into step with her.
“She had a café. The Great Escape. It wasn’t anything grand. Just a small and cozy space. There were only ten tables, I think. But my mom was magical. She could take the shittiest place and make it enchanting.”
“Did you work on it?”
Her laugh is light. Sweet. “I was too young. But I’d sit at the counter after school, doing homework. She’d make me hot cocoa and lemon sugar cookies. We’d dance to her beat-up record player while cleaning. She had a wish tree people could hang their dreams on.”
“She sounds great.”
“She was.” She finishes her cone with a crunch and licks her fingers clean. “I think, when she—when she left me, I lost my faith in good. I think it may have died with her.”
I don’t know what to do with my hands, so I plant one at the small of her back. She leans into the contact. I guide us around the corner.
Janella lets the silence blanket her. I don’t know what she’s thinking. I don’t know what I am, either.
“I don’t think you’re weak,” I say finally. “I just don’t understand why you’ve never run. You’re beautiful and smart. Your mother’s been gone for a long time. You work at that fucking club. But you have no money of your own.”
I don’t understand you.And maybe that’s what’s eating at me.
I’m good at reading people. It’s probably what keeps me alive, despite my taste for chaos. I can spot a liar at fifty paces, predict violence before it explodes, see through masks people love to perform with. But Janella, a walking contradiction, perplexes me.
One moment, she’s meek and red-cheeked. The next, she’s flinging a dagger at a man’s dick. I try to remember she’s fucking fragile? She walks through the place where she was lastbroken like she owns it. I pat myself on the back for having saved her, and she shows me she can save herself.
I don’t know what the fuck to do with her—except to know her.
I don’t understand her, but it’s fucking killing me not to.
We’re almost to the apartment building now. It feels too soon.
“I tried to leave once,” Janella confesses just in time. I’m not sure I didn’t mishear her. My stomach drops like a boulder. “Did you know that?”
“No.”
“Oh,” she says, as if thrown by that. “Yes. I was eighteen. I’d been saving what I could. Hiding money like a squirrel does nuts, you know? Whatever I could get away with. I honestly thought I could—”
She swallows thickly. Her voice has become hushed, hurting.
“I was going to start over somewhere new. I was going to open my own café. He sold my mom’s after she died. We were in a lot of debt. I was going to make my own happy place and make as many happy memories as I could. I was going to drown out all the bad. Until life happened.”
I don’t want to know. I do. I don’t.
“What happened?” my mouth asks.
“He found me three days in at a motel in Providence,” Janella answers, numb and matter-of-fact. “I don’t know how. But it didn’t go well.”
I don’t have to ask how it went. I know.
The doorman bows his head and holds open the door for us. I rein in my rage and ask her, “How bad?”
Janella presses the elevator button. Her hands aren’t shaking tonight.
