Sweet Water(86)

“Like a good pharmacist.” I wipe my mouth where we kissed, but there’s no shame attached to it. And if I questioned it before, this brief betrayal only confirms my lost feelings for Martin.

Our marriage is over. My time here in this twisted fairy tale is up.

“He doesn’t generally like to handle high school kids, but I told him they were okay.”

“Why would you do that?” I ask.

We’re at the front of the store now, both still unsettled from our encounter, but I think we’ve bridged a gap too. Josh can see now that I care about this girl. He likely suspects Martin wanted to cover it up just like the scandal in college, but I hope he understands that I don’t agree with Martin’s decision to do the same thing here.

Maybe we can find common ground. I promised myself I wouldn’t fall into Josh again, but I needed him to know it’s still me. Josh is the only one who really knows me, all my secrets, especially the unspoken one we share. Our ideals were one and the same, our hearts melded together years ago, the kind of joining that’s never matched once you leave adolescence.

Whereas Martin and I were always opposed on the basic ideologies that are fundamental to a relationship. It hadn’t mattered because we were strong enough without them, but it sure matters now.

“That girl was really suffering.” Josh grabs the side of his neck again to expose his scars. “I know you think you understand her world because of your work at the shelter, but you can’t. Especially tucked away, safe at night in my pretty mansion in the woods.”

He said “my pretty mansion in the woods,” and he doesn’t even realize it, and I sort of love and hate it at the same time.

“Josh, I know she’s been through a lot. It sounds awful, being trapped in a car with her dad like that.” I shake the image away—blood dripping on her head, Yazmin crying. It’s all I can see when I close my eyes. Her journal entry will haunt me until I make this right. I open my eyes. “But I need to know why she tried to hurt Finn, because if those drugs were laced, Martin thinks she had bad intentions.”

“Martin thinks . . .” Josh looks at me like I’ve just let him down. “What is it you really want?”

I suck in a deep breath. “I want to know how she died and if Finn had anything to do with it.” The last part is the hardest to say, but I need Josh’s help. Maybe if I tell him about the journal but preface it with saying I’m afraid the Ellsworths will botch the investigation again, I’ll regain his trust.

Josh narrows his eyes. “Just let the police do their jobs.”

I sigh. He doesn’t know all the special measures we’ve put into place to make sure that the police can’t do their jobs, and I certainly can’t tell him now, not when I think he’s beginning to trust me again. I’m the only one who can bring justice to Yazmin now, but if I try to step above or around Alton, he’ll squash my efforts.

Or—I shudder at the thought—he’ll squash me. As in, have me killed.

If I’m the one who could potentially bring them all down, I wouldn’t be taking a pot from William’s well; I’d be draining the whole damn thing. I bet they have cleaners to handle those kinds of problems too. I need concrete proof if I’m going to turn us in, not just a hunch. The journal isn’t enough. It doesn’t have any tangible evidence in it.

“How did you get those?” I point to his scars, still a little dazed as I stare at his lips, swollen from our kisses.

“We all have scars, Sarah. Some of us are just better at hiding them.”

I cock my head to the side. “Right.” I wonder if Josh is talking about him and me, and then I think of the odd marks on Finn’s body too, the nail marks, their origin still unresolved.

Nothing about life or humanity makes sense lately. Josh never did talk in direct sentences, though. None of the men in my life did, it seems, with Martin and my father lying to me about life-altering events.

“Did you find the journal?” Josh asks. It’s the second time he’s mentioned it, and I know why. He doesn’t want me to find out he smoked with the kids. I wipe my mouth on my sleeve again, this time swiping away his kisses.

“No,” I lie. I want to trust him, but no one can know I have it, not until I figure everything out. “I’d like to find it for Alisha, but it would be interesting to see how Finn and she . . . came to be.” I try to say it tactfully, that beyond my son’s interest in politics and her running for student government, he and Yazmin seemed to have nothing in common.

Except for the drugs, of course.

Every time I think of my conversation with Alton, I lose my train of thought and try to think of any past clues that Finn was a user. He’d been an anxious kid and had mellowed out after his sixteenth birthday. I thought he’d just outgrown it, but I was wrong. Could that anxiety lead to violence?

“Maybe she saw something in him that she found safe.” When Josh says this to me, I feel like it’s one of our old conversations again, where he’s trying to say more than he lets on, our secret language. He’s trying to say that’s what I did with Martin. He was rich and stable—the safe choice but not the better man.

He’s probably right about that.

“He’s a kindhearted kid,” I say.

“She wouldn’t have picked him if he wasn’t,” Josh says, and I’m confused again by how well he seems to have known Yazmin. It’s clear he bonded with her beyond the student-teacher relationship. The journal entry about the near kiss makes me queasy, and I wonder if they ever got close like that again.