“To what?”
“To everybody messing everything up, all the time. Everybody.” He tapped her glass with his. “Now, go on. You’re sixteen.”
“I was sixteen . . . My parents were talking about sending me away to a boarding school or maybe even this Christian place, a religious mental ward basically, because I hadn’t stopped crying in days. I heard them talking about it. I’d just gotten my first car that summer, and I packed a load of clothes in the middle of the night, and I drove away. I had some money I’d saved from babysitting. I got the ID in Fort Worth, and I stayed there for a little while . . . I won’t lie, the next few years weren’t good.”
“How so?”
“I had a tenth-grade education, and I didn’t want to use my real name, since I didn’t know if my parents were looking for me. I sort of doubted they were. There was never an Amber Alert or anything.”
Casey frowned, heart twisting. “Really?”
She shook her head. “Knowing my dad, he would’ve been relieved to have me gone. When I say he was tough, and hard, I don’t just mean strict. I mean, like, after that, I was dead to him. I’d humiliated them. I looked myself up once, a few months after I left. There were local news stories. They said that I’d gone to live with relatives, but nothing about where. There was even a quote of my mom saying how, like, their daughter felt terrible for what had happened and needed a chance at a fresh start, in a new community. Like they were respecting my privacy or something.”
“That’s so incredibly shitty.”
She made a tell me about it face and sipped her drink, wincing at the sting. She hadn’t tasted liquor in ages. Not since before she’d met James. Not since Lime. She set the glass on the edge of the dresser, done with it.
“So what was really happening?” Casey prompted.
“I was all over, crashing on people’s couches. Working menial jobs sometimes. But . . .” She took a deep breath. “But it was easier for me to rely on men. And I don’t mean I was selling my body. I mean I’d date older guys, the types who’d take care of me, let me stay with them, lend me money.” Sugar daddies was the term, but she refused to speak it aloud.
“Some of them treated me fine. Maybe they were a little creepy, with me being so young, but they didn’t exploit me any more than I was expecting or willing to be exploited, you know? Others weren’t so good. I got smacked around a little.”
Heat flared in Casey’s eyes.
“I left those guys as quick as I could. I’d spent so much time feeling controlled by my father, I only wanted that stuff on my terms. With guys I felt like I had some control over.”
“Sure,” he said, looking a touch nauseous. “So how did you wind up in Nevada? And with Ware?”
“Things took a bad turn when I moved to Arizona with a guy. We fell apart, and I wound up dating a friend of his. That was a bad scene, and I was in a bad way. I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere. Like there was no home for me to run back to. I even wrote to my mother one time, about two years after I’d left, and asked if I could come and see her—just her. She told me no. That my dad was having heart issues and he couldn’t handle it if he found out. She also told me my grandma had passed away. I loved my grandma, so much. I took her last name—my mom’s maiden name—when I ran away.”
“Price.”
She nodded. “And she lived in Abilene.”
“Gotcha.”
“It broke my heart, hearing she’d passed. And worrying maybe the stress I’d caused everyone might’ve had something to do with it. After that letter, I just had to accept, I had no home to go back to. Nobody. This was about three years ago. I went into a really dark place, and I started to just . . . drift. I worked on and off, and I . . . I tried heroin, then. For the first time. And not the last.”
Casey’s fist squeezed his glass—she could tell from the way his knuckles blanched. He’d not expected drugs, she thought. The possibility had never crossed his mind, and she wasn’t surprised. Junkies weren’t meant to be shy, or liable to blush at cuss words, or indeed chubby. She didn’t fit the bill.
All he said was, “Jesus.”
“It was bad. It was really bad. It started slow. I worked and used and mostly functioned for a year and a half. I wound up in Lime, through somebody who knew somebody, who knew somebody.”
“That’s where you met Ware?”
She nodded. “But not how you might be picturing. He saved me, actually. He was probably the only man who ever saved me, without wanting anything out of it for himself—sex or some hero complex or any other thing.”
“Oh.”
“He was tough. He got me sober, and we did wind up sleeping together, obviously, but it was different from before. I wanted him—out of gratitude, I think. For what he’d done for me, not for what I could get from him, going forward. He wanted me back, even if he was never truly comfortable with it. He broke it off before I knew I was pregnant, and I took it real bad. I made it ugly, and he made it ugly right back. I tossed out some real low blows, and he dealt a few of his own. I’d never seen him that angry before, and it scared me. Enough to be too afraid to tell him about the baby. The way we left it, and the way he’d met me . . . I was afraid he’d try to get her taken away, or take her himself. And once I was involved with all of you guys, I was terrified he’d tell you about me. About the kind of person I was.” She looked to the car seat and her daughter.
“So it was more than just fearing for your safety.”
She nodded, gaze falling to her hands. “It was self-preservation. Which makes me feel all the more awful. I’m . . .” She looked up, met his eyes with tears stinging her own. “I’m so sorry. I let you get so close, to me and to her. I never should have, not with so many secrets. You deserved to know who you were getting involved with, but I was too scared of losing you to say.”
“You deserved to know things about me, as well.”
After a pause, she said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about what you told me, these past couple days. About who you used to be.” She paused when the baby fussed, and rose to free her from the seat in the hopes of settling her. She sat back down, bouncing her gently.
“After everything I’ve just said, it might sound ridiculous, me saying that I’m trying to do good now. That since I found out I was pregnant, the worst thing I’ve done is lie—which for me is an improvement, sadly. But I really am trying. I just want to work, and make enough to support myself and the baby. No more secrets, no more dependence. I want a fresh start, more than anything. To believe that whatever new life I make for myself is an honest one. A genuine one . . .” Thoughts were forming. Solidifying, and she spoke them as they came. “And I think you want that, too. To put your old life behind you.”
“I do want that,” he said softly. “A fresh start. A respectable life. It took me way too long to regret what I’ve done. It took what you said for it to register . . . and it took the fire at the ranch, and losing Don, for it to really hit home. Now that it has, I . . . Christ, I feel sick. I think about what I used to do and I feel like I could throw up.”
She believed him. There was pain on his face, so real and so sharp it stabbed her in the heart.
“We want the same thing,” she said, realizing it as she heard herself speak. “But when you were honest with me, I turned my back on you.”
“Not without good cause.”
She shook her head. Something had come loose in her chest, like a clog finally washing free, letting things flow. She could breathe for the first time in days. She could feel air in her lungs, and blood moving through her body, as though her decision had shut her system down, protested by every cell in her body.
“Neither of us can fix what we’ve done in our pasts,” she said. “But neither of us gets to move on, either, not until somebody knows what we’ve done and chooses to forgive us. Chooses to believe we’re capable of doing better, going forward.”