“But – ”
“The news don’t cover us much and the ones that do like to make a certain kind of story. We’re all one kind of people to them here. They don’t care about the truth.”
The million realizations were crushing down on my skull, my shoulders. I grasped at my thoughts. “God, I let them take me here and just…” I couldn’t believe myself. I’d given away the year of my life I’d been looking forward to most. I was going to graduate. Callum and I were together, finally. We never made it official with words but it was enough that we were starting to talk about how to tell Caroline.
Fifteen months taken from people I loved, who needed me – and all to live in misery for a lie.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Dean rose halfway out his chair and spat. “You ain’t my family, girl. I got enough problems and you ain’t my business. I didn’t like the sound of you the second they started talking about you. I didn’t want you here. I don’t want your money. You ain’t my kind of people and I don’t have to do shit for you. All you are, girl, is a stranger who turned my wife and son into two monsters. I ain’t never spoke to you or even seen you before I knew I didn’t like you.”
I stared at the broken vinyl siding hanging outside his window like a dangling arm. I almost wanted to laugh through my tears. I was a curse to every family I went to. “You never…” I squinted, recalling everything I thought I knew about Dean. “You never spoke to me before I came here?”
“What did I just say? Do you remember me speaking to you?”
My gaze drifted back to him. I was numb now. “No,” I murmured, realizing it hadn’t been Dean threatening me on the phone that night. It was Hunt. It was him and Trish all along. It was him telling me he would kill me and Caroline with a smile on his face, posing as his father, playing the main role in the fictional story Trish had spent years writing me online. When I thought about it, I realized that I’d heard Dean yell before and it didn’t quite sound like the voice I heard on the phone. On top of that, the man on the phone called me “little girl.” The only person who ever did that was Hunt.
I felt like it was finally happening.
I was breaking completely. I was finally ready to just give up.
But for all the callous things Dean said to me, he did a lot to keep me from just throwing the towel in. I had to leave. He said I did and he said he would help.
So I got it together and we readied things over the course of three days. I emptied what little I had in my bank account and he fixed up the beat up Ford Fiesta he drove before buying his truck. We spoke maybe two words in the time it took. I got his phone number more than a year after meeting him and he texted any vital communication we needed to have, to avoid arousing suspicion. A day after walking in on Trish and Hunt, they were all there again and I wasn’t sure if they remembered seeing me, but they were certainly acting different around me. Trish was saccharine sweet. It made me nervous. Hunt didn’t say a word to me at all. That made me even more nervous. I couldn’t imagine that they’d somehow be onto me because I acted as I always did and didn’t even let them see when I was merely texting Dean. But they, Hunt especially, seemed to be harboring some sort of hunch.
“Y’alright?”
It was the first word Hunt spoke to me in three days, since I saw him in bed with my mother. He spoke it not with concern but amusement and, I could’ve sworn, a hint of accusation. I had plans to leave that night once he slept. Maybe I showed my nerves by eating breakfast standing up. Hunt was smirking at me like he knew something and I shook hair in my face because I was afraid I looked pale or green.
“I’m fine. Yourself?”
He watched me eat till I was done with my plate. It had to be a good five minutes. I was sure he was just going to ignore my question at that point but as I washed the dishes, he finally said, “I’m dandy.”
I didn’t leave that night as planned.
Hunt didn’t go to sleep. He sat in the kitchen all night, drinking beer and being loud with a friend, even after I got in my pajamas and under the sheets on the couch. It was aggressive behavior for him. He never did things to deliberately piss me off but I could tell he was on a mission to that night. It had me thoroughly rattled and I considered just running out without a bag packed and booking it to the Fiesta parked outside the management office. Dean said the door was unlocked and the keys were inside. I could technically do it.
But it wouldn’t give me the slightest head start and Hunt’s truck would catch up to me in no time so I just waited, pretending to be asleep every time he ambled out of the kitchen and circled my couch like a shark.
A week went by with Hunt staying sober and up all night in the next room. I was losing hope as fast as I was losing nerve. My every interaction with Hunt during the daytime stripped me of another piece of confidence. I wasn’t sure what advantage I had on him if he wouldn’t stop watching me and most likely knew I had something up my sleeve. He teased me with everything he said. I knew I wasn’t being paranoid. Every word out of his mouth was spoken with a smirk and a threat that was never there before.
“What’chu up to?” he asked one morning as I walked out the kitchen and straight into his chest.
“Huh?”
“What’re you doing today?”
“I don’t have any plans.”
“Oh, I doubt that’s true. You have all sorts of plans,” he leered. When I tried to pass, he blocked my path. Every way I went, he stood in front. “Oh. Oh. Oh.” He grinned wider each time. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere, little girl. I won’t let you.”
Only once did Dean text to express any sort of interest in my failure to launch. Tick tock. That was all his message said but it was all I needed to feel the fire again. It might not have been a full sentence but it reminded me that time was everything and I couldn’t afford to lose another minute and give Hunt more traction. So the next day at work, where Trish had suddenly begun visiting me, I took away more cash than usual. In reality, most of it was plucked from the stash from my bank account, but I said I got some nice tips and gave the thick wad to Trish with a smile.
By the next afternoon, she had scored. By night, she and Hunt were zombies.
They were technically awake when I drove away in the beat up Fiesta. I gassed the pedal so hard I smelled rubber but I kept my speed till I was far enough from Sunstone to scream through the roof with what felt like the greatest victory of my life. “Bless your heart,” was what Shanna would say to the fact that I actually thought it was over.
* * *
Charlotte, Savannah and Daytona Beach.
Those were the three stops in my twenty-month getaway – that bittersweet year-and-a-half before Hunt dragged me by the hair back to Sunstone. He got me there with the threat of death and Trish kept me there with the news of life.
But it would all end in blood, anyway.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Callum
Ana followed me into my room. I told her to go to her own, she refused and I didn’t give enough of a shit to stop her after that. She came up behind me and slid her hands up the back of my shirt, tracing her fingers down the line of my rigid muscles as I stared at Lake’s open suitcase. Ana circled her arms to my front and undid my belt.
“Don’t look,” she whispered, turning me around, slapping my hands onto her tits. “Don’t think. Just breathe. Relax.” She made me squeeze. “Enjoy me. You deserve it, Callum.” I looked into her eyes but I didn’t see them. She was moaning, rubbing my hands all over her front. She pushed them south. I barely registered it. I’d just remembered something.
Bluebells.
That was the name of Lake’s favorite flower. Fucking bluebells.