I look away from her for a moment, out the window and toward the leaves racing across the street. My grunt is the only response I want to give her, but I have to give her something.
She nudges my shoe underneath the table with her own. “Do you two still talk?”
I keep my attention on the leaves, watching them swirl around the ankles of those who walk the sidewalk. “No.”
“When did that change?” she asks softly.
I focus my attention back to her, pulled by the sincerity of her tone. “I walked away from home when Megan went missing.”
She cocks her head to the side. “Why?”
“My mother is a gambler,” I force out. “She spent all her money at the casino.”
“Okay…” she presses on when I seem like I want to say anything else. And I don’t. I want this conversation to end here and now, but I know that, once she gets started on a mystery, she doesn’t let it lay to rest on its own.
I sigh and roll my neck to relieve some of the strain of sitting ramrod straight as soon as the topic arose. “I don’t have proof, but I know she was the one who sold my cousin into sex trafficking. Into this business.”
She blinks rapidly for a few seconds, and then she slumps in her seat. “For money? For gambling?”
I flex my jaw, and my face hardens at the memory of confronting my mother about it all those years ago. She had denied it, but magically, she had all this money to place bets. Even though I was young, I wasn’t stupid. I knew, and she knew that I knew, but there was nothing I could do about it because I couldn’t prove anything. I still can’t, and if I know anything about this business, it got buried so deep that it’s the devil’s reading material.
“I didn’t know the business took – I thought they stole their um . . . belongings.”
I shake my head. “Not all the time. Some of their ‘belongings’ come with the promise of greater things. Sometimes people sell their loved ones. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.”
She searches the table as she comes to grips with this. “Every time I think I have some kind of understanding, it’s ripped out from underneath me.”
“It’s bigger than you think it is,” I whisper as I sweep a few crumbs onto the floor.
She returns her gaze to mine. “How did you get so lost in it? How did it all of a sudden become okay to be your mother?”
I run my hands along my jeans, uncomfortable with her question and with myself. “After walking in thedarkness for a while, you become nothing but a mirror shadow of it.”
It takes her a few seconds, but eventually, she nods in tentative understanding. “And then I came along.”
“A beacon of light,” I mutter.
She leans forward and puts her chin into her hand. The sorrow is still on her face – for me, for my past, for my present – but she tries hard to hide it. “Am I to assume that you and your mother never got along?”
“No, we never did.”
“Why?”
I try like hell not to sigh. I was hoping we’d be done talking about the woman who birthed me, but she wants to discover more about that bitch. “She spent all her money, which means there was hardly any money to put food on the table.”
“That’s horrible,” she breathes. “What did you do?”
“My aunt made sure I ate.”
Her eyes soften a little. “Do you still talk to your aunt?”
I shake my head. “Breast cancer. Died a year after Megan was taken.”
She curses under her breath. “So you have no one.”
“Except you and Noll.”
The slight blush that she gives off is just as innocent as she is, and she smiles just a little. It’s then I know I said the right thing. I meant it, too, but I just hadn’t expected it to be a big deal to her.
