Until the one that sent me my own dorm address.

It was Dean’s work.  He had found out I was in college.  He had found out that I’d been sending more money than he had been seeing.  He was ready to kill, Trish said.  He was bitter about the life I was living while I let my family toil in poverty.  He was furious that Trish was hiding money from him because he was entitled to that money.

He was threatening to come to New York and get me.

I tried my best to do damage control.  I called.  I sent money and I scrambled to get everything they asked of me like I was on a high stakes scavenger hunt playing for my life.  But in the end, they weren’t satisfied.  They said I didn’t deserve to live the way I did.  I was one of them and if I wasn’t going to take care of them, I didn’t deserve what I had.  I was bad and dirty.  An evil, selfish person.  I was going to be the reason the Pikes got their nice things taken away.

The demand for me to go to Virginia went on for months and as terrified as I was, I still refused.

But then Dean called one night.  It was summer by then and I was spending time with Callum at the townhouse, so we could be near Caroline.  Trish had been the one to call at first.  She was in hysterics, pleading, crying things I couldn’t understand before she screamed and got the phone ripped from her.  And that was when I heard the voice of the man she’s been telling me such awful things about for so long.  It was throaty, gravelly and it warbled out at me with such fire that half of what I heard was spit hitting the receiver.  “You’re going to come back here, little girl, and you’re going to stay here or I swear to God, I’m going to kill you and that fairy godmother of yours.  I promise.  I will do it with a smile on my face unless you get your ass back here with everything I asked for, you ungrateful little bitch.”

I was shaking so hard the phone just trembled out of my hand when the line went dead.  I don’t think I even hung up.  I sat there with no air in my lungs and my jaw rattling in my head.  I didn’t have any coherent thoughts for what felt like hours but when I finally did, they were of no relief.

I imagined what I’d do if Caroline or Callum were ever hurt.  I felt my soul shatter to pieces when those four men attacked Callum in the park and that was already my fault.  If I let him get hurt again, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.  I let my dark mind imagine the worst of what Dean could do and when I saw images of Caroline and Callum in pools of their own blood in their bedrooms, I thought about killing myself.

I brought this upon them.  I was born from trash and I was, piece at a time, flinging that trash into their lives without them even knowing.  I should’ve never spoken to Trish.  I should’ve never entertained her demands.  I was an idiot sixteen-year-old when it started and I’d let it go on for so long because I couldn’t bear to tell anyone about the colossal mistake and massive web of lies I’d been caught in from the day I started living in the Pike townhouse.  They didn’t deserve any of it.  Because of me, they were going to be punished for being good.  I couldn’t let that happen.

So after they fell asleep that night, I left.  I collapsed to my knees twice as I walked away from my childhood bedroom and with my tear-streaked hand, stifled the sound of my hysterics down that hall of once-perfect memories.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Lake

Trish didn’t look the way she did in her pictures.  Her brown hair was dry and reddish now.  She’d done the dye job herself and I couldn’t unsee it after Hunt whispered in my ear one morning that it looked like bacon.  She was only forty-one but her skin hung loose off her bones and her eyes sagged, like the bags under it were adamantly pulling them down.  The fact that you could still tell that she was once completely stunning just made her appearance all the more startling.  But over time, I got used to her.  And sometimes, depending on how she acted that day, I thought she looked pretty.  Or maybe I just really wanted to think she looked pretty.

I quickly started to crave the days that she’d plop onto where I slept on the couch and ask me to tell her a story from New York.  Her laugh was grating on my ears but I still wanted it because it was better than what she was like most of the time.  All she ever talked about was money.  The first thing she asked me when she first saw me was how much the cab was from the airport.  She couldn’t believe I took a cab.  She wanted to know how much money I even carried around in my wallet on a day-to-day basis and when I wouldn’t answer right away, she asked if she’d just been offensive, and if I found her offensive.

That first day together, she took a bit of time to admire my hair and my clothes and the shiny ballerina flats on my feet but after that, it was nonstop interrogation.  She asked if I had money for her and I said I had Caroline’s necklaces and rings, which pissed her off because she said I’d have probably gotten more money hocking it in New York than where we were and we’d just waste gas money on driving to one of the bigger cities to pawn the jewelry, so it wouldn’t be as good a profit.  “You screwed up on that one, baby girl,” she said, trying to sound like she was joking but I knew that she wasn’t.

She never stopped talking.  She talked more than Hunt and Dean combined.  Then again, Hunt didn’t talk much and Dean rarely ever said a word.

The first time I met him, my muscles were clenched so tight that it felt like I was going to give myself a six-pack.  He was the manager of the park and he sometimes slept in his office next to the moldy-looking community center where the little kids played.  Sometimes he didn’t come out of it for days.  That was what happened when I first arrived.  I was grateful that I didn’t see him for the first few days at Sunstone but at the same time, his absence only heightened my stress and fear for the moment we actually met.

His appearance alone had me trembling when I first laid eyes on him.  I was sitting on the bright red stool in the kitchen.  It had a ripped cushion that scratched my thighs.  Hunt had apparently stolen it from a diner.  I was eating a waffle that was still half frozen at the center and hurting my teeth when Dean walked in.  He was a tall, gruff-looking man in his mid to late-forties.  Most of his face was covered by the same straw-like hair that stuck up straight and at the sides of Hunt’s head when it wasn’t peeking out from under a dirty Marlins cap.  He muttered everything he said under his breath and what he didn’t, he barked suddenly, like you’d just asked him to repeat it for the tenth time.

He said not a word to me the first time we met.  Or the second, or third, or fourth or fifth.  He glared at me, grunted, shook his head and walked out of the room.  I froze over like a statue whenever he passed by or came near because I couldn’t predict what he was about to do.  I didn’t know what he was thinking or anything about him aside from the fact that he threatened to kill me and the people I loved.  I could hardly fathom that I was living most days under the same roof as him.  The day after he finished an argument with Trish by screaming, “You’ll fucking burn in Hell!” and flipping the kitchen table over with a swipe of his hand, I went and got a second job.  I was five months in at the point and I needed to get out faster than I was moving.  I’d already been waitressing at what was technically a strip club along the highway and averaging a sad eighty dollars per shift, but I lost a good fraction of it to gas money, so I also got a job at the liquor store next to the place.  That way, I could go from one shift straight to the other, in just a matter of steps.