by Aly Martinez
“No. You agreed to that.” She dug into the pocket of her entirely-too-short cut-off jeans—the severed legs more than likely sitting on the floor in my guest bedroom—and slapped a wadded ball of cash and coins onto my hand. “I told you I don’t need a program. I’ve been clean for months.”
I arched an eyebrow. “Truth?”
Her lips thinned before she turned away from me to peer out the window, muttering, “Not including the shit Dante gave me.”
“I’m not talking about that. Once you got out of the hospital, you haven’t touched anything. No weed. No coke. No nothing. Truth, Savannah?” The light turned green and I dumped the cash into a cup holder before easing on the gas.
“You don’t know what it’s like out there,” she whispered.
I forced my hands to stay on the steering wheel. It didn’t feel right to touch her, not when she was trusting me enough to drop her guard. It was rare she showed any kind of vulnerability, and I personally hadn’t seen any since the day she’d flipped out on Cora for not sleeping with me yet.
Annnnd we were back to Cora.
Shit. I had to focus.
“No,” I replied. “I don’t know what it’s like. And I’m not claiming I do. But I do know how incredible you are when you’re clean. You’re smart, Savannah. And funny. And bright. And beautiful in ways that have nothing to do with your clothes or makeup. But none of that matters if you’re letting drugs ruin the kind of perfect you already are. You’ve dealt with some shit, kid. I do not fault you one bit for anything you’ve done in the past. But, now, it’s time to change. And I told you I’d help with that, and I don’t particularly care if you agreed or not. Because I see something in you, whether you see it in yourself or not.”
Her face got tight, but as I divided my attention between her and the road, I saw the tears sliding down her cheeks.
She hurried to dry them—just like someone else I knew. And couldn’t stop thinking about.
“Jeez. What is this, an after school special?”
I smiled. “What do you know about after school specials? Isn’t that, like, thirty years before your time?”
“Public school education, Penn. Kids twenty years from now will still be watching those things in health class.”
I chuckled, and then we both fell quiet again. I’d spent so much of the last four years praying for the silence and hoping people would leave me alone. But right then, with no clue as to what was going through her head, it bothered me.
“You know I’m only trying to help, right?”
“Yeah, I know,” she told the window.
The trip back to my apartment was a short one. The first time we’d pulled into the underground parking garage, Savannah had had another vocal seizure, exclaiming, “Holy shit! You live here?” This time, though, she didn’t say anything as we rode the elevator up to my three-bedroom, four-thousand-square-foot, sixth-floor apartment.
It was overkill. Completely and totally. I’d had no reason to buy a place that big, or nice, or permanent. I didn’t need it. Deep down, I really just wanted to go back to that shitty building and crawl into Cora’s bed again. Maybe lie there for the rest of my life, alternating between playing Truth or Lie tit-for-tat, listening to her laugh, and making love to her.
Yet, when I’d seen pictures of that apartment online, all I could see was Cora.
Her bare feet padding against the dark wood floor—not a speck of carpet anywhere in sight—as she meandered from the bedroom wearing nothing but one of my button-downs.
Her sleepy smile as she navigated around the large marble island to get to me.
Her arms wrapping around my hips and her face nuzzling against my chest, making me feel more corporeal than I had in my entire life.
Her soft lips brushing mine when she pressed up onto her toes for an all-too-brief kiss before snagging the coffee cup from my hand.
Her sigh as she tipped it back like the caffeine had touched her soul.
Peaceful. Content. Blissed out beyond all explanation.
Cora would never even see that apartment, but with that scenario playing in my head as I’d scrolled through pictures, I’d cleared out another hefty portion of my retirement and bought it—fully furnished—on the spot.
And it was that exact scene that assaulted me when Savannah and I walked inside, the beeping of the security alarm acting as our welcoming committee.
Only, like a rainstorm of razorblades, Cora was nowhere to be found.
And the constant reminder that she never would be was suffocating.
Savannah stepped out of her tall wedges in the middle of the foyer, never breaking her gait as she kept walking.
“Um, hello. Shoes,” I scolded, tapping in a series of numbers into the security panel.
I listened for her huff, maybe an exaggerated groan. She didn’t even acknowledge that I’d spoken.
“Hey!” I called as she disappeared down the hall.
Christ. Teenage girls were a breed of their own.
Kicking her shoes out of the way, I continued into the expansive living room and promptly collapsed onto the chocolate leather sofa. It was not even noon, but I felt like it was midnight. Not surprisingly, I hadn’t been sleeping well. My mind was a jumbled mess of guilt, resentment, and revenge.
But I had shit to do. I couldn’t lie there all day and lose myself the way I so desperately wanted.
Sucking in, I angled up only to stop when Savannah reappeared with a bowl of water and a white grocery sack dangling from her fingers. She’d changed into pink-polka-dot pajama pants and a matching oversized T-shirt I’d picked out for her. Just the day before, she’d told me that they belonged on a six-year-old and threatened to burn them.
“Sit,” she ordered, perching on the edge of the coffee table. She set the bowl beside her and started tearing open gauze, prepping it with antibiotic cream.
In the last ten minutes, she’d cried, cracked a joke, and ignored me.
She’d never apologize. But this, wearing clothes she hated while offering to take care of the wound on my leg, was her olive branch.
I still needed to figure out how to get her a new birth certificate so I could check her into a treatment program. I’d highly underestimated the documentation needed to get a minor medical help. Hell, I had no idea how Cora had registered her in school. According to my research online, I needed everything including a vial of blood and a sacrificial goat to get her enrolled again.
But all of that shit could wait one more day.
And for that reason alone, I folded up the leg of my jeans and propped my boot on the table beside her.
Cora
“No,” I snapped.
“What do you mean no? You gave five grand to Jennifer. And I get two hundred bucks?” Meredith asked, thoroughly insulted.
“You got two hundred bucks and a trip to rehab,” I corrected. “When you finish there and stay clean for another thirty days of outpatient, I’ll pay for a plane ticket for you to go to your sister’s house in Virginia. And when you get a job that actually requires you to pay taxes and stay clean for another thirty days, I’ll pay your first and last months’ rent on an apartment of your own.”
“That’s not fair!” she shouted, looking around the room for someone to back her up.
Jennifer was not surprisingly silent. Tears were still streaming down her cheeks after hearing the news that I—or, really, Penn—was going to pay for her first year of college, and I’d given her five grand to buy a car and a wardrobe with slightly more fabric.
“Meredith, I’m gonna tell you this one more time and then, if you keep this shit up, you are walking out of here with nothing. I am not here to fund your life. I am here to make sure you live long enough to actually have one. So take the damn money. Go buy a toothbrush and some body wash, and I’ll text you the details on the rehab program I find for you. It’s your choice if you want to show up or not. But if you don’t, then this will be the last money you ever get off me. Do you understand?�
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She was so pissed that her face was turning red.
I couldn’t have cared less.
Penn had died to get them that money. If they didn’t want it, I’d give it to someone who did. Cut and dry. End of story.
I waved the two hundred bucks in her direction. “Last chance.”
“This is bullshit,” she muttered, but she plucked the money from between my fingers and stomped out.
I wasn’t sure if she’d take me up on my rehab offer, but she needed it. Desperately. She’d been using drugs and alcohol to numb the pain for too long.
And with absolute agony burning my soul, I understood her more than ever. But I didn’t have the ability to fall into the pits of despair like so many of the girls had over the years.
I had to keep going.
Keep moving.
Keep…living.
Even when I couldn’t breathe.
One in. One out.
“Thanks, Cora,” Jennifer said softly before giving me a hug.
“No problem. Get those applications in as soon as possible, and let me know where you get accepted.”
She nodded, more tears falling from her chin.
“And stop crying. You deserve this. You’re smart, Jenn. Just keep your head up, and I know you’ll kick some major college ass.”
“I promise. I will.”
“Now, get out of here. You have some shopping to do.”
She nodded again and started out, but Drew stopped her short of the door.
“You find a car you’re interested in, you call me and I’ll come take a look at it before you buy it. Used-car salesmen love nothing more than to rip off an unsuspecting woman.”
She smiled up at him. “Thanks, Drew.”
He offered her a wink, but there was nothing flirty about it. It was sweet.
With the exception of going back and forth to the storage unit to grab me more cash and the occasional dinner, he hadn’t left our sides since the fire. I wasn’t sure if he was using us as a distraction to escape the reality that he’d really lost his brother. Or maybe he was genuinely worried about me and stayed to keep his finger on the pulse. Either way, it was nice having him around.
At first.
For the last week, we’d all been in a holding pattern. The sun rose every morning and set every night, but that was the only thing that seemed normal anymore. Everything else was foreign territory.
Life without the chaos of running the building.
Life without the fear of Marcos and Dante.
Life without the warmth of Penn’s arms.
I was still confused on what had actually happened that night. I’d asked Drew a million different questions, but he didn’t seem to have any answers. Or at least none that he was telling me.
He’d sworn that he didn’t know where the money had come from.
And promised me that he had no idea why Penn had been at the apartment.
He’d looked me right in the eyes and vehemently told me he was just as confused as I was.
But he wasn’t, because he hadn’t spent the last week asking me the exact same questions.
People by nature seek the answers to what we don’t understand. Especially when it comes to our loved ones. When Nic had been murdered, I’d been there and still sought an explanation from the Guerreros for the events that had led up to his death.
While Drew definitely seemed affected by having lost Penn, he wasn’t consumed with grief.
The police had been by the hotel multiple times to talk to Drew. He’d always step out into the hall or meet them down in the lobby. At first, I’d thought it was because he was shielding me from more pain.
But, more recently, I was getting suspicious that maybe he was actually shielding me from the truth.
I’d had my fair share of conversations with the cops too, but they didn’t seem to have any more answers than I did.
After Manuel had gone to jail on a laundry list of convictions, the police had been eyeing Marcos and Dante for years. They were suspects one and two when the city’s famed district attorney, Thomas Lyons, had reported his wife and his child as missing—this bullshit including a tear-filled press conference that made primetime news. Back then, I’d figured that had been the equivalent of declaring World War III. And while I would have loved nothing more than for Thomas to finish what he’d started and take down the rest of the Guerrero family, surprisingly, he’d never followed through. He had the power, but I suspected he enjoyed the national attention, and the mystery of it all definitely hadn’t hurt his career. The label of “grieving victim” had only made his parade of justice that much more impressive while he’d single-handedly plowed through the city’s criminal population.
The cops had never let Catalina’s disappearance go, and watching Thomas, who they considered one of their own, lose his family had only painted a bigger target on the Guerreros’ backs. But they’d never gotten anything to stick on either one of them. Now though, with a video of Marcos and Dante chasing a man into an apartment, that man being my boyfriend and me being their dead brother’s wife, it wasn’t like they were spending a lot of time trying to prove the Guerreros’ innocence.
Especially not after a search of their houses revealed a fresh body buried in Marcos’s backyard and over a million dollars’ worth of drugs in Dante’s house. As far as the police were concerned, everything was tied up in a pretty red bow for them. Case closed.
As for me, I was more concerned with the how this had happened.
Dante and Marcos’s official cause of death had come back as smoke inhalation, but they’d suffered significant trauma to their faces and their bodies before that. The cops had concluded that it was from fighting with Penn inside the apartment before the fire had broken out.
Meanwhile, Penn’s official cause of death had been ruled a homicide thanks to a bullet in his chest.
I’d thrown up for over an hour after Detective Morris had informed us of this.
Even in a state of total emotional upheaval, I kept a close eye on Drew.
He was Penn’s brother, after all. His only response had been to let out a loud curse, thank the detective, and then sit on the floor in the bathroom with me, alternating between rubbing my back and staring at his shoes. It was strange. But everyone handled emotions differently.
Then it got weirder. Drew was still waiting on the city to release Penn’s body, and over the last few days, I’d started planning a small memorial ceremony. I’d never seen Drew so mad as when I’d told him about it. He’d stormed out of the room and sat in the hall with his forearms propped on his knees and his head hanging between his arms for over two hours. I may have (read: definitely) watched him through the peephole for at least half of that time. He didn’t speak as he crawled into bed that night. And the next day, he didn’t mention it at all.
Yeah. It was safe to say something was definitely not right. And while I hadn’t yet been able to figure it out, I wasn’t about to give up.
As the days passed, my patience was slipping with Drew. But if there was one thing I’d learned in the thirteen years since Nic died, it was that anger got me nowhere. However, an unassuming smile and a well-thought-out plan? Yeah. I was in business.
“Anyone else coming today?” Drew asked, flipping the lock on the top of the door after Jennifer left.
I sat beside River on the bed. She moved the laptop to her other side to allow me space.
I shot him an appreciative grin. “No, it was just those two today. How much are we down to?”
He pulled his phone out, his fingers swiping across the screen on what I assumed was the calculator. “I guess depending on how much college costs these days, a little over six hundred left.”
I groaned. I had so much to do. I wasn’t eager to give any of the girls a ton of cash. It’d be all too easy for them to get robbed or blow it twenty dollars at a time until they had nothing left. Instead, I was paying as much as I could to businesses, apartment complexes, colleges, doctors, and
, soon, a few different rehab facilities. Seeing as to how this all had to be done via cash transaction, it was incredibly time consuming.
But staying busy was far better than the stabbing pain I felt each time I thought about everything we’d lost.
River looked up at me. “You’re really just going to give away all this money?”
“You got a better idea?”
She turned the computer to face me. “Yeah. We find an apartment that costs more than seven hundred bucks a month. These places aren’t much better than the last one.”
“Baby, we have over a million dollars in cash and I have a record and no job. If we get anything that costs more than seven hundred dollars a month, we might as well hang a red flag on the door ourselves. Besides, you just gonna forget about everybody else? What do you think will happen to them next? Dante is gone, but that doesn’t mean that someone else isn’t waiting to take his place. And who knows? Maybe that guy is worse. We take care of each other. That means me and you. And us and them.”
She shifted uncomfortably and flicked her gaze back to the screen. “Okay. I’ll keep looking.”
I tossed my arm around her shoulders. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll bump it up to seven fifty. Does that make it any easier?”
She started scrolling through apartment listings again. “Nah, seven hundred’s good. We’ll be fine.”
God, she was a good kid.
Drew settled on the bed beside us, grabbed the remote, and aimed it at the TV. “So what are we doing tonight, ladies? You want to rent a movie or something?”
“Why don’t you go out?” I suggested.
His head snapped my way. “You trying to get rid of me?”
Yes, I thought.
“Maybe,” I teased.
His jaw slacked open with mock injury, but before he had the chance to reply, a loud knock sounded at the door.
The humor in his face disappeared as he asked, “You expecting anyone?”
I shook my head, panic erupting inside me. River must have felt it, because she set the computer aside and sat up.
He knifed up off the bed and walked to the door, breathing a curse before pulling it open. “Detective Morris, how can I—”
