Harder (Caroline & West #2)(26)

I come in my hand in the shower, inside her, inside my own memories.

It’s almost a month since she left Silt, and I need to quit Caroline worse than I need to quit smoking.

“So listen,” Joan says. “Your uncle Jack is talking to a lawyer.”

He put my name down on the paperwork at the hospital, told them I’d pay for breaking his nose. Some f*cking nerve. “I’m gonna pay the bill.”

“This isn’t about what you did to his face—it’s about your dad. The ambulance-chaser Jack’s hooked up with thinks he can make a case against Bo. Emotional distress or whatever—like what what’s-her-name’s family got against OJ.”

A civil trial, she means. Since the authorities aren’t pursuing a criminal case, my uncle’s going to take justice into his own hands. “What kind of case has Jack got? He’s a deadbeat alcoholic dickbag. What’s he going to say, Dad’s death made him more of one?”

“Watch your mouth. That’s my son you’re talking about.”

“Sorry.”

She sighs. “These guys only make their money if they win,” she says. “The lawyer must think it’s worth his time. I’m telling you because of Frankie.”

“What about her?”

But I have a sinking feeling I know exactly what.

Frankie wakes up thrashing in the sheets, shouting. Sometimes “Daddy.” Sometimes “Bo.”

Always, “Don’t!”

I stand in the doorway of her room and say her name, Franks, Franks, Franks, until she stills because she’s heard me, and that’s usually when she starts to cry.

I wish I knew if I was f*cking her up.

I sit in the living room after she’s asleep and think about how if Frankie ends up depressed, ends up cutting herself, ends up dead, ends up pregnant at fourteen—it’ll be because of me.

Something I did or didn’t do, some sign I missed that it was my job to see.

“They could make her testify if there’s a trial,” Joan says.

“No f*cking way. Even Jack isn’t that big of an *. He’s got to know I’d kill him for even trying it.”

“I think that’s the idea. He’s got it in for you since the funeral.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“But if he gets at her—”

“She was at a f*cking sleepover!”

Joan sucks at her cigarette so hard I can hear it. Exhales. “Day before the funeral, Frankie talked to Stephanie.”

Jack’s wife. Shit.

Shit.

“Stephanie’s telling everybody Frankie was there at the trailer when Wyatt got shot. Frankie will get dragged into this thing if it happens—it’s not going to do any good to pretend she won’t.”

She’s right. Fucking Leavitts—there’s a reason I stayed away from them so long, and the reason’s that it’s always like this. Drama after drama, fighting and feuding, arguing over money and sex and drugs and whatever the hell else they can think of. They feed on it. They love it.

Jack’s going to put Frankie right in the goddamn middle of it.

“Can’t you talk him out of this suit? Bo hasn’t got much money. Whatever went down in that trailer, I guarantee you Wyatt deserved it.”

“When have I ever been able to talk a Leavitt man out of anything?”

I laugh. Don’t mean to.

I don’t have any control over myself.

I don’t have control over anything.

Six years ago, Frankie was too young to be hurt by this kind of Leavitt bullshit, but I wasn’t. I cut ties to the Leavitts because they wouldn’t take my side, wouldn’t protect me and my sister from my father.

They won’t protect us from this, either. I have to.

“Thanks for the warning,” I say.

“Let me know when you decide what to do.”

I disconnect and drop the phone on the seat next to me.

The morning is cool, the sun bright over the mountains. The wind’s blowing through the cab of the truck, rattling the paper bag with my lunch in it.

I’m young and healthy, alive. Free of my father. I should feel good.

I should be able to find a way to feel good about the giant f*cking palm smacking into my back, shoving me toward Iowa.

Take your sister and go. That’s what Dr. T is trying to get me to do.

That’s what Caroline said to me, in no uncertain terms.

But all I can think, looking at the green on the hills, at the black ribbon of asphalt, at the blue sky, is this is one more f*cking thing in my life I don’t get to decide about.

I see Iowa in my mind’s eye. Summertime in Putnam. Green lawns and brick buildings, marigolds and window boxes, students everywhere.

The hope spikes right into me, spikes my pulse, makes me breathe too shallow so I start to get dizzy and I have to pull over by the side of the road and slam my hand into the steering wheel and tell myself, No way, no way, no f*cking way.

I think, Take Frankie somewhere else.

Mexico. Oklahoma.

Anywhere would do—anywhere that’s far enough away from Jack and lawyers and courtrooms to keep her safe from all the traumatic *ry heading our way.

We could live by a river in an adobe hut. I could learn to train horses. We could eat frijoles and tortillas and I’d be inside that f*cking Cormac McCarthy novel I read in my first-year seminar, but it would be better than letting the hope back in.