Sweet Water(100)

“Just his trust. The kids can’t touch it until they’re eighteen.” I shut the journal and then gasp.

“What now?” Josh ask.

“Finn is eighteen.” He turned eighteen this past August. There isn’t a million in there, but he does have six figures.

“Maybe that didn’t suffice for Cash if he was stuck on the million-dollar price tag,” Josh says solemnly.

Alisha mentioned that she was trying to protect Cash, and she was right to worry about the journal entries. There was the entry about the sunglasses. I remember the fight over the Instagram picture, and now I know why Yazmin was adamant about taking the post down. Her sunglasses had been stolen. And now this.

“Has Finn called you back?” Josh asks.

I check my phone, even though I’m gripping it so hard, there’s not a chance I missed anything. “No. I haven’t heard anything from either one of my sons. It’s not unusual for them to dodge my calls when they’re out with friends,” I say, but I’m just creating excuses to make myself feel better. “They wanted a million dollars from us. But it’s as if they think we owed it to them.” I scratch my head. “Do you know anything about this, Josh?”

“They never mentioned anything like this in front of me,” he says.

There are too many journal entries to read and not enough time. Clearly, I missed something in an earlier entry. “Yazmin mentioned that Cash waged war with the upper class. But why did he target us?”

Josh is biting his lip, and I think there’s more he’s not telling me. He stretches his arms uncomfortably, revealing the scar I noticed earlier. He never did answer my question about it directly.

“Where did that scar come from?”

He glances down at it. “There was a building that collapsed while I was playing in France. A woman was trapped; I pulled her out,” he says matter-of-factly.

“Wow.”

“I almost got her clean out without a scratch. A piece of glass got me.”

The contrast to what my own son might have done to a woman makes me feel ill.

“You’re not telling me something,” I say.

“Look, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you that Cash was the one who bought the drugs from Jay. I didn’t think it mattered, and at the time, I didn’t want to bring any more hardship to that family. I was afraid you’d pay one of your heavy hands to go in and shake him down. He seemed like a nice kid.”

“Heavy hands?” I ask.

He glares at me out of his peripheral vision, and he’s not letting me play innocent anymore. I think of Alton and the Ellsworths and their dirty money and the cleaners, and I cringe, because I do have more heavy hands than I can count, some of which I’ve never even met.

“The Veltris didn’t have a chance even if they would’ve found evidence against Finn, and you know it,” Josh says.

I sigh too, because it’s true. “But what does that have to do with Finn? Did he make them promises he couldn’t keep to please Yazmin?”

Josh shrugs. I think about how young we were when we got together. Finn still seems so young to me, but he’s about the same age we were. Josh is flying down Route 65 toward home, even though we have no real destination. If we don’t get pegged for breaking and entering, we might get nailed for speeding, but I don’t care because I still have a foreboding feeling that time is short.

Finn’s time.

“What about your husband? Did the kids text him? I know you’re mad at him, but maybe you can just—”

“I texted him asking if he’s heard from the boys, and he said that he hasn’t. He also begged me to go to my mother-in-law’s, but I can’t . . .” I grapple with the words. As if I’d ever step a foot in Mary Alice’s home again. She probably viewed me as someone she’d had to endure all these years for the sake of her family—her little pawn girl who kept her pampered son and privileged husband from seeing the wrong side of a jail cell.

Well, she’s free and clear now.

Josh seems flustered, continually checking his rearview.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Did you really leave Yazmin in the woods? Please tell me Alisha was mistaken. I heard wrong, please,” he whispers. He wants to believe better of me, but I can’t lie anymore. I open my mouth to tell him, and my words break apart at the unspeakable.

“Finn called us the night Yazmin died. He was there, in the woods with her, and we followed his iPhone pin because he couldn’t walk.”

“Why?” Josh asks.

“We both thought maybe he drank too much, because he sounded out of it. Then he said he couldn’t find Yazmin, didn’t know what happened to her, so we drove straight there to investigate.”

“And?” he asks, but he sounds like he doesn’t really want to hear the rest. That if he could turn back time and not get in the car with me when I picked him up in front of the music store, he would.

“And . . .” I’m crying now and fighting to get it out. It’s so hard to say it out loud, what we’ve done. “When we got there Yazmin was lying on a rock with a head wound, and when I examined her, she had no pulse. We found Finn some distance away, and he was in a bad state, a little beaten up and half–passed out, drugged. Martin said we had to leave Yazmin and take him home. That they would blame Finn immediately and he wouldn’t have a chance to explain himself, but if the police couldn’t place Finn at the scene of the crime, he’d be okay.”