“One word,” Archie said and the smugness didn’t seem to belong, but Coop suddenly snorted a laugh. The illness in his expression erased as he shook his head.
“We won’t have to do anything,” Coop said. “Rachel will eviscerate her.”
“Fuck my life,” I said with a groan and the other three just stared at me. “We have to be grateful for Manning.”
Not that they could say much to that. Rachel Manning was a shark, always on the move and much better to leave alone. She could be vicious.
“She’s on Frankie’s side,” Bubba said with a bump of his fist to my shoulder. “I’ll always be grateful for that.”
“Anyone heard from her?” Archie asked and no one had to clarify whichherhe was asking about. One by one we shook our heads before climbing into the car to head back. No word. No texts. Nothing.
Later that night, I did push-ups in my bedroom. At one hundred, with my arms and lungs burning, I rolled over and started on sit-ups. As soon as the sun was down, I’d go for a run. Mom just looked at me as I headed out.
“I have my phone,” I told her. “Running the loop.”
She nodded once, and I shoved in my earbuds. Music cranked, I ran. An hour later, I threw myself in a shower andturned on the cold water. It stung, bracing as hell, but it also felt good. I turned it up slowly after rinsing off the sweat in some ritual of absolution that didn’t fix anything.
Archie had given us an answer. Law. Money. Containment. It was pragmatic and ugly and probably the right call. If I told myself that enough, I might believe it. As I lay awake that night, the fantasies kept visiting—the small cruelties I could enact quietly, the slow dismantling of Sharon’s life. They were hot and useless, a private sewage of thought that I couldn’t dump anywhere but inside myself.
The lawyer had given us steps, time had been bought. But behind the legal strategy, behind the gratefulness for Archie’s money and the resentment of owing it, there was a different reckoning forming. Some things could be fought, scrubbed, and negotiated.
Some things, like the look in my mother’s eyes and the question from Becca, would require a different kind of work. Frankie’s hurt kept swimming up to the top. I was still awake at midnight when my phone buzzed. I reached for it even as I knew exactly who had messaged.
Dad’s contact flashed on the screen. The shit had officially hit the fan.
It was late, the coward’s way out was an option. A brief respite, but still an option. Instead, I hit answer. “Sir.”
Chapter
Six
FRANKIE
Isat in my car long enough for the heat to make the steering wheel too hot to touch. My hands shook anyway, so it didn’t matter. I wasn’t crying—I’d done that already, the whole drive past the lake and beyond to where the addresses grew farther apart and people had cattle or horses instead of front yards and sidewalk.
Despite the suffocating heat, I’d kept the windows down and the radio turned all the way out. I needed something to drown out the mangled version of Katy Perry that went more,I kissed my brother and I liked it…
I probably would have kept driving clear out of the state if the fuel light hadn’t dinged to warn me I was dangerously close to empty. If only it knew. The little gas station had a tinny speaker blasting out a country song about all the things the country singer’s man had done wrong.
Having ignored my phone for most of the past couple of hours—or however long it had been—I groaned at the sheer volume of messages on the screen. The tags from social media were blowing up my phone too. It was all kind of nauseating. I just swiped all of them clear.
I thought about calling Mathieu. God, I wanted to. His voice had that soft, low steadiness that could make chaos sound like something manageable. But I couldn’t do it. Not now. Not with my life suddenly turned into a soap opera even bad TV writers would have cut for being “too much.” He’d ask what was wrong, I’d tell him, and then what? Would he try to fix it? Then I’d have to explain thatthiswasn’t fixable.
Or worse, would he tell me this wasn’t the issue I was making it out to be? Yeah, no I couldn’t even begin to entertain that idea. I scrolled to his name twice. Hovered my thumb over the call button. Didn’t press it.
I didn’t want to be comforted or confronted. I wanted toscream.
So I called Rachel instead.
Rachel had become something of a personal smoke detector over the past couple of years—the one who always smelled trouble before it caught flame. She’d been the one to tell me last spring, flat out, that the guys weren’t protecting me because they cared. They were protecting me because they’d already decided I was a prize no one else was allowed to touch.
She said it over coffee like she was commenting on the weather, then tipped her cup toward me and said, “Wake up, Frankie. You’re a person, not property.”
As much as I’d hated hearing it, she’d been right. Now, she was my only neutral territory left.
She picked up on the third ring, her voice thick with what sounded like sleep and irritation. “If this isn’t about a dead body or free concert tickets, I’m hanging up.”
“It’s worse,” I said.
