The room falls silent behind me.
A warm draft of wind skitters across my face as I corner the side of the wood-paneled home. I haul open the door of Rusty’s truck and lean in.
“You alright, son?”
Rusty’s voice comes from behind me. I keep my back to him though and reach further across the center console, snatching up the one thing I took with me from the house last night, laying at the dash.
My quivering fingers brush the metal of the binding, drifting along the fake leather as I slam the door closed and start back the same way I came.
Rusty’s wary eyes trail me as I draw closer, landing on the notebook now clasped in the palm of my hand, and when I step up beside him, he grabs the back of my neck and shakes me a little.
It’s his way of showing me that he’s here for me, without telling me. I stand there for a moment in silence, feeling my stomach knot again, then when he lets go, clears his throat, I start back inside, toward the room they dragged me out of earlier, only to pause when Harlen calls out to me. Spinning around, I see him snatch the keys to Rusty’s truck from the kitchen counter.
“Nanna June called, said that the doc has discharged Laik.” He pauses when Rusty steps into the room and rests the weight of himself against the wall.
Harlen spins the keys around his pointer finger, catching the metal in the palm of his hand, jerking his chin at me. “You comin?”
My next words feel like a bruise, the colorless ones. The ones that were still yet to surface, and I knew Laiken would feel them the minute Harlen turned up without me.
“I’ll be back tomorrow, okay?”
Her eyes fill with tears again when she nods. “Please.”
Broken promises hurt especially when they came from someone you thought would never break their word.
The truth was, I couldn’t be there for her when I couldn’t be there for myself.
My voice is empty when I tell Harlen, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
I swallow the leftover poison on the tip of my tongue and turn around, walking back to my room, slamming the door shut behind me.
The hospital gown falls to my feet. I kick it to the side and reach for the pair of cut-off denim shorts Nanna June had brought in early this morning.
She had been to the trailer—after it had been professionally cleaned—to collect some of my things when detectives ruled my mother’s death what we already knew it was…a suicide.
And that word permanently suspended itself above me, like a dark cloud.
Because first, it was Dad. Then, it was Mom.
A shiver racks my body, forcing my heart to shake against my ribcage.
The tote bag she’d stuffed a few of my meager belongings into had once been my mother’s, which had then become Jade’s when hers had broken, and her dip-shit father refused to buy her a replacement.
Now, it sat on the floor at my feet, becoming mine, because both my mother and my best friend were gone.
One, murdered. The other killed herself.
Hot tears glaze my eyes, sweat collecting in my palms.
When Chief Wynston and the detective assigned to my case, a middle-aged man with short sandy-blond hair and a roundface, came to see me early this morning, I had told them everything I could.What he had done tous,what I ran from.
They had sat in front of me, banking on me being brave enough to share with them every detail that came with my best friend’s murder. Holding out hope that I could find the strength to live through it all again.
And I did, for Jade.
There was a certain disconnect as I spoke, forging ahead to provide details of a night I wished nothing but to forget. It was as if I had flicked a switch, speaking only from the nightmares I refused to give a fresh set of teeth.
Dipping my hand into the pink tote bag at my feet, I drag out the top my grandmother had packed for me, clasping my quivering fingers around the bubblegum pink tank I knew wasn’t mine. I could still smellher. The scent of lingering apples and jasmine that clung to the fibers of everything Jade touched.
