Gone (Deadly Secrets #2)(73)

That memory sliced to the center of her heart, but she swallowed against the pain and told herself John Gilbert wouldn’t be here. From what Alec had told Raegan, the cops had already questioned her. Hunt had already questioned her. Gilbert wasn’t stupid enough to hide in plain sight.

Raegan squeezed Alec’s hand and tried for a smile, hoping to reassure him—and herself—that everything was going to be okay. “Maybe she won’t be here now.”

He huffed. “She’s here. She’s got nowhere else to go.”

Raegan continued to hold his hand tightly against hers, but her back tingled as they rounded a corner and four rows of trailers came into view. Most were old, with run-down, peeling metal siding. The cars parked in front of them weren’t much better. Clunkers from the seventies and maybe eighties, most beat-up and dented, a few jacked up on blocks. Everywhere, garbage littered the ground.

“Oh my,” she muttered before she could stop herself.

Alec’s pulse jumped against hers, but when she glanced up he wasn’t looking at her; he was staring at the trailers with a mixture of disgust and rage that told her he was absolutely remembering growing up in a place very similar to this. “She’ll try to hit you up for money. It’s what addicts do. Don’t give her anything.”

Addict . . . The word circled in Raegan’s head as they continued walking, but her heart beat faster because it made her remember his words in the truck. He wanted them to move in together, and, oh, she wanted that with the same desperation he did, but she was scared. Scared of what their search for Emma might do to him. Scared of the things Hunt had told her at the hospital. Scared of his spiraling out of control once more and this time losing him forever.

He’d told her he wouldn’t let that happen again, but he couldn’t guarantee it. He’d even admitted as much when he’d said he’d always be an addict. Letting him go now, before either of them were too invested, would be better than wondering if and when it was all going to come crashing down, wouldn’t it?

Her heart screamed no. She was already invested. She loved him more than she ever had, and she knew a big reason for that was because of everything he’d lived through to get back to her. She couldn’t walk away from him now, knew if she even tried she’d regret it forever. All she could do was exactly what Hunt had told her to do at the hospital—talk to him, not let him sink into the darkness, and love him. Every single day, so he knew he was never alone. Then hope and pray that would be enough.

She squeezed his hand, wanting to reassure him, trying to reassure herself at the same time. His gaze was fixed ahead as he led her between two dilapidated trailers, on a mud path that sank beneath her black ankle boots. Her heart beat hard and fast as they sidestepped a metal garbage can lying on its side, then moved out from between the trailers into what she guessed could be considered a backyard.

It was mostly a flat muddy area bordered by trees. Cigarette smoke drifted Raegan’s way, followed by a cough and a gruff voice muttering, “Holy shit. Thought you said you wasn’t ever comin’ out here again, boy.”

Raegan stepped out from behind Alec and looked toward the back of the trailer where a bony woman with stringy hair and a pockmarked face sat in a plastic chair puffing on a cigarette.

“Charlene.” Alec’s voice was as strained and deep as Raegan had ever heard it. She swallowed hard, hoping this moment wouldn’t be the trigger to send him spiraling.

The woman exhaled a long breath and eyed him with both disgust and superiority. “Still tryin’ to class me up, I see. Name’s Charlie, and ya know it.” She lifted her angular chin Raegan’s way. “Who’s that?”

Raegan stood still as she tried not to be shocked by the woman who’d raised Alec, though “raised” was a subjective term. Not his biological mother—his biological mother had abandoned him when he was just a baby—but the woman his father had lived with from the time Alec was very young until she’d disappeared when he was arrested at thirteen.

Raegan swallowed hard, trying not to pass judgment, knowing instinctively this was no kind of mother for any child. “I’m—”

“Just a friend,” Alec cut in, never looking away from Charlene . . . or Charlie.

Charlie reached for the blue beer can on the plastic table to her left, her fingers as wrinkled and bony as her face, making her look eighty rather than the fifty she probably was. “Just a friend,” she muttered. “You bring your friend all the way out here to meet your mama?”

“You’re not my mother.”

She stabbed her cigarette into an already full ashtray. “I was more a mother to you than that woman you call Mommy now, but you don’t give a shit. Just let me rot out here like the ungrateful child you always was. I got health issues, ya know.” She coughed for effect. “Children ’r’ supposed to take care of their parents. But no, just ’cause I don’t got a whole bunch a letters behind my name, you just forget all about me.”

It both angered and frustrated Raegan that this woman—that these people from Alec’s past—kept tabs on him, always waiting for the moment to sink their claws in and drag him back when he was nearly free.

Alec stepped toward Charlie. “I’m not here to talk about me. I want to know about Gilbert.”

“John?” Her thin lips turned down, and she shook her head as she tapped another cigarette out of the pack. “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout John.”