Last Breath (The Good Daughter 0.5)(35)

“I don’t understand,” Flora said. “What happened?”

“You were never under arrest. There’s no way a judge would’ve signed off on their flimsy evidence, so they swooped down and gave you a twenty-person escort to the police station. They were hoping you would be scared enough to confess.”

“Confess to what?” Flora put on her innocent babe-in-the-woods look. “Miss Quinn, I didn’t do anything.”

Charlie punched the buzzer again. “Shut your lying mouth.”

The door buzzed back before it slowly swung open.

Maude Faulkner was in the waiting room. She jumped up from one of the hard plastic chairs. “What the hell is going on?”

Charlie banged open the exit door. She was done talking to anyone connected to these vile people. It was one thing to be lied to by a client. That happened on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis. Flora Faulkner had not just lied. She had manipulated Charlie. She had played off the memory of Charlie’s dead mother—a wound that was still so raw that Charlie felt tears in her eyes whenever she remembered that last day, that last breath her mother had taken. Charlie had been sitting inches away from the shotgun. If she thought about it hard enough, she could still feel the hot splash of blood from the buckshot ripping her mother in two.

And Flora had used that tragedy not as a lever, but as a crude weapon. A cudgel. A baseball bat. A Molotov cocktail thrown straight into Charlie’s heart.

She spotted her Subaru at the back of the parking lot. Her hands shook as she searched for her keys. The hot and cold was back, the ringing in her ears. She didn’t care about the why of it all. She just wanted to extricate herself from this awful situation. She had wasted enough time on their crazy bullshit. She had more important things to worry about, like that her entire life was about to change and she had to go to the drugstore to get the test and then she had to tell her husband and he might not be as excited about the news as she was.



Charlie stopped five feet away from the parking lot.

Her burning desire to leave fizzled at the sight of a sapphire blue Porsche Boxter parked in one of the handicapped slots.

The car had to cost at least fifty grand, roughly half of Charlie’s student loans. Black interior. Navy blue top. Sparkling in the overhead parking lot lights. And the overhead lights were on because it was dark outside and instead of being home with Ben, telling him how enormously wonderful their life was going to be in nine months, Charlie was outside the police station fighting the urge to strangle a fifteen-year-old monster.

She turned around.

Flora was right behind her.

Maude knew enough to keep her distance.

Charlie said, “Nice car.”

“It is, isn’t it?” She had the beatific smile of a Chuckie doll. “Am I allowed to open my mouth now?”

“Is there something you want to say?”

“It’s privileged, right? Strictly between you and me?”

Charlie crossed her arms. “Sure.”

“First,” Flora said, “thanks for getting me out of there.”

“Good luck keeping it that way, you stupid child.” Charlie saw the familiar flash of anger in the girl’s eyes. “You heard the man in there. They’re coming after you, Flora. You’ll be forty before you get out of prison. Your life will be over.”

Maude grunted. “Shit, wait ’till you’re fifty!”

“This isn’t a joke,” Charlie said. “Flora is in serious trouble. They found over five hundred grams of meth in the trunk of the Porsche.”

Maude pursed her lips. “That’s some weight.”

Charlie wanted to slap the woman. “The district attorney and the police are not going to drop this case. They’re coming after her for trafficking.” She jammed her finger into Flora’s face. “And you’re not smart enough to get yourself out of this mess.”

“Good thing I’ve got a lawyer who can be smart for me.”



“Not this lawyer,” Charlie countered. “I’m done with you.”

“Miss Quinn, you can’t abandon me.” There was a lilting tone in the girl’s voice that had worked like a charm a few hours ago. “I need your help.”

“Help with what?” Charlie remembered the way Flora had crossed her arms in the interrogation room. The girl’s fingers had laid across the three bruised dots on her bicep almost exactly. “You did that to yourself, didn’t you? The bruises on your arm?”

Flora looked down at her bicep. She answered the question by pressing her fingers deep into the bruises. They matched exactly. “I thought you might need a visual aid to push you off the fence. Sometimes the sad I-Lost-My-Mama stories only get half the work done.”

Charlie thought about what the girl had said about putting her head in her mother’s lap and tasted bile in the back of her mouth. “How’d you get the bruise on your hip?”

Flora said nothing, but Maude provided, “She snagged her hip on one of the tables at the diner. What’d she tell you?”

“She told me you were abusing her.”

Maude recoiled. “I ain’t never fucked a girl in my life.”

Charlie wondered at a woman more concerned with being called a homosexual than a pedophile. “She told me you were beating her. She blamed you for the bruises.”