by Callie Rose
To come back and finish the job.
That’s what this feels like. Like I’m waiting for Mr. Black to return, to dart back into the room and find us all.
We creep slowly across the empty space, and when Dax leans out to look into the hallway, my body goes rigid with fear.
He waves, gesturing us forward, and we pour out into the corridor. If Mr. Black comes out of his room right now, he’ll see us—the hallway stretches all the way to the master bedroom. But I ignore the screaming impulse to look behind me as we dart quickly and quietly toward my old room.
Before we even reach it, the door opens, revealing Lincoln and River on the other side. Both of their faces are stark, and they practically haul us inside, closing the door behind us.
It finally hits me that I haven’t taken a breath in way too long, and I suck in oxygen like I just ran a marathon.
“Did you—hear?”
Linc nods. “A lot of it. Not all. I texted River as soon as I heard them come in.”
Dax and Chase fill the other two in on the parts they missed, and I watch Lincoln’s face settle into a hard expression as River shakes his head.
“We need to go to Dunagan with this shit. Soon,” Dax adds once the twins finish laying everything out. “We need hard evidence. We’re so fucking close.”
“Yeah.” Linc runs a hand through his dark hair, looking slightly sick. “Yeah.” His gaze shifts to me, and I see pain burning in his amber eyes. “Just give me a few days, all right? It’ll be harder with them back, but let me keep looking for a few days. I’ll… I’ll find something. I’ll make him say something.”
Swallowing the lump in my throat, I nod.
I can’t even imagine what Linc’s going through right now—what he’s feeling. We’re all still nervous to jump the gun and report anything before we have irrefutable proof, but I think there’s also a part of Lincoln that needs a little bit more time to accept that this could really be possible. That his father, a man he might not always like but certainly loves, could be capable of something as vicious and heartless as what we witnessed.
“Yeah. A few days,” I murmur. “Get something tangible, and we can go to Dunagan after Christmas.”
He closes his eyes for a second, breathing shallowly. Then he steps forward and kisses me once.
Before I can draw all the comfort I need from that kiss, he pulls away, turning to face the other boys.
“You should all go. If my dad noticed the extra car in the garage, I’ll tell him Dax and Chase crashed here last night.” His gaze bounces between me and River. “I won’t tell him either of you were here. The fewer people he thinks might’ve heard them, the better.”
The others all nod solemnly.
“Go. Now. Take the service stairs and walk around to the garage. I’ll keep an eye out up here and text if there’s any movement.”
I pick up my bag and shove my scattered clothes back inside as the others disappear to grab their shit. As soon as the boys come back, the four of us make a break for it, hustling to the end of the hallway and down the stairs before slipping out through the service entrance. We’re all still dressed in our sleep clothes; nobody bothered to change.
We make it to Dax’s car and pile inside, then he pulls down the driveway and out the gate.
No text comes from Lincoln.
We’re safe.
But that doesn’t stop every muscle in my body from shaking the entire drive back to River’s house.
26
The next few days feel like being trapped in purgatory.
Lincoln won’t let any of us back over to his house—not even the other guys—and although I know why he wants to keep us away, I can’t stand the thought of him locked up there alone with Audrey and Samuel. Searching, all by himself, for evidence that his father is a murderer.
Jesus, how much more fucked up could this shit get?
We text every day, but despite the frequent check-ins, Linc has no news.
It makes sense. Mr. Black isn’t an idiot. He’s a sharp, cunning businessman—of course he knows how to cover his tracks. I’m half-tempted to take what we know to Dunagan now, to move on this before it’s too late.
But what if Mr. Black has Dunagan in his pocket too? What if the whole arrest at the Black cocktail party was a show, purposefully orchestrated so that the largest possible crowd could witness my mom being hauled away?
To anyone in the ballroom that night, Samuel Black probably looked like a hero, a concerned employer standing up for his employee. But he didn’t fight that hard. He let them take her. And his innocence was affirmed by her supposed guilt.
And what about that lawyer he recommended?
Was Leda Koffman even working to get my mom out of jail, or was she just bleeding her bank account dry while sabotaging the case from the inside?
I have too many questions and still not enough answers, and with every day that goes by, I feel anger ratcheting up inside me like a roller coaster climbing slowly up the tracks. When it hits the peak, I don’t know what’s going to happen.
River and I hole up in his little downstairs apartment for the most part, and Dax and Chase come over often—but we’re missing a piece, and we all feel it.
On Christmas morning, I throw on a thick sweater and a pair of leggings. River’s parents have grudgingly put up with my presence, but I’m not exactly invited to join their holiday festivities—which is fine by me. I can sense the tension between River and his dad every time they’re in a room together, and I don’t want to add to it or be the source of conflict. Besides, I want to see my own mom. That’s who I should be spending the holiday with.
“You sure you don’t mind?” I ask for the third time, jiggling the car keys as they dangle from one finger.
“Positive.” River’s smile is soft. “My dad bought it for me since he couldn’t handle the thought of his son not having one. Didn’t look right. But I’ve only driven it twice. Take it.”
I chew my lip. “You know I’m not taking it forever, right? I’m just borrowing it.”
“I know.”
He tugs me back down onto the couch beside him, dragging me halfway onto his lap and kissing me. I kiss him back, enjoying how easy it feels. Ever since that night at Linc’s house, something has shifted, has cracked open between us. I like it.
Part of me wonders if we’re moving too fast, but it’s hard to tell what too fast is when time doesn’t mean anything anymore.
And it doesn’t.
My mom was arrested just under two months ago, and that’s too damn long and barely the blink of an eye all at once.
River’s phone buzzes in his pocket, and I feel the vibrations since I’m practically sitting on him. He breaks our kiss as he tugs it out, glancing down at the screen and grimacing.
“It’s my mom. The Bettencourt family Christmas is about to start.” His gray-blue eyes narrow as he looks at me again. “You’re sure you’ll be okay?”
“Yeah.” I snatch one more kiss and then stand, twirling his keys around my finger. “There’s not even that much snow on the ground. I’ll just do a few donuts in a parking lot and then head to the prison.”
It just goes to show how little River cares about the car that no alarm shows on his face at my mention of doing donuts. He chuckles softly, then says, “I’ll walk you out.”
He knows I hate being alone around his parents, so he does what he can to be a buffer between them and me. I still don’t know quite why they’re allowing me to stay here when they clearly don’t like me much, but I think maybe it’s because they don’t want to be the family that kicked out the homeless, fatherless daughter of a suspected felon. It’s bad optics either way, but between kicking me out and letting me stay? Kicking me out is worse.
There’s a twenty-foot tall Christmas tree in the living room, and River’s parents are standing in front of it as we walk past. I try to give them a friendly smile when they glance up, but I don’t know why I bother. It never changes how they look at me a
t all.
It snowed two days ago, so there are fluffy white piles of the stuff everywhere. The walkway is clear though, and so is the driveway. I don’t tell River, but I’m a little nervous about driving in winter weather. I’ve never done it before. At least, not someplace that actually had a winter.
I’m sure I can handle it though. And it feels good to have the autonomy of a car again after the cops took Mom’s away.
River waits outside the front door until I drive off, and the GPS on my phone tells me how to get to Fox Hill Correctional Center. I know the bus route by heart, but not how to get there directly.
More snow starts to fall as I drive—big, fat flakes that swirl around in front of the windshield. I flick on the windshield wipers even though I don’t really need them yet, and I’m about halfway to the prison when the directions on my phone are interrupted by the sound of the ringtone. I glance down at it on the seat next to me, and my heart jumps.
Lincoln.
We’ve been mostly texting the past few days, so I don’t know what a call means. Maybe he’s just calling to wish me a merry Christmas.
Or maybe he’s finally found something.
I pull over to the side of the road and put my hazards on. There’s no way I’m talking on the phone and driving in the snow in someone else’s car. River might not subscribe to the “you break it, you buy it” principle, but I bet his dad does. And I definitely can’t afford this car.
My fingertips shake slightly as I pick up the phone, swiping the screen to answer before it can go to voicemail.
“Linc? What’s up?”
There’s silence on the other end of the line.
“Lincoln?”
I pull the phone away from my ear to make sure it’s still connected. It took me a while to answer. Maybe I just missed the call.
But no. His name is on the screen. The call went through.
“Linc?” My heart thuds in my chest. “Are you—”
“It wasn’t her.”
His voice is thick, full of emotions I can’t even begin to guess at.
“What? What are you talking about? Who wasn’t her?”
“The woman my dad knocked up. It wasn’t Iris. It was Paige. Our… last housekeeper. He got her pregnant and then tried to buy her off. But her rate kept going up. She showed up at our fucking house this morning demanding more money, saying if he didn’t cough up, she’d slander his name all over town.”
My mouth works, but no sounds come out. I’m trying to process everything I just heard, and now I know why Linc’s voice sounded so strange. I don’t know how to feel about any of this.
If his dad isn’t a murderer, that’s good.
But it doesn’t change the fact that he’s a liar and a cheater.
And if Samuel Black is innocent, if everything we thought tied him to Iris tied him to Paige instead, it means… we have nothing.
No lead on the man in the ski mask at all.
“Linc,” I rasp, my voice strained, “just because he knocked up that woman doesn’t mean he didn’t—with Iris too—”
“He was with Paige that night. Negotiating. It couldn’t have been him who killed Iris.”
The line goes silent again.
I think maybe I want to cry, but I’m too numb for any tears to fall.
We lost.
We’ve been playing the wrong game for weeks, focusing on the wrong thing, and in the meantime, my mom’s case has been advancing toward trial, the evidence against her piling up like the snow on the side of the road outside.
Fuck.
“Low.” Lincoln’s voice softens, and I know that even though his own family life just devolved into a shit-show, he’s worried about me. He knows that, on some very fucked up level, I was counting on the fact that his dad was guilty. “We’ll keep looking. We’ll go back to our list and start digging deeper. We will not let your mom stay in jail. We’ll fix this. I promise.”
A flash of white-hot anger flares inside me, making my stomach clench. But this time, it’s not directed at Lincoln or any of the kings of Linwood. I’m furious at the man who did this to my mom, who put the boys in an impossible situation with no good answers.
I hate that motherfucker.
“Okay,” I whisper.
A thin dusting of white has appeared on the road outside, and as my car idles by the curb, a snow plow trundles by in the opposite direction.
I swallow, forcing myself to sit up straighter. “Sorry about your dad. Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” He huffs a breath. “He might not be a murderer, but he’s still in a world of shit. She’s been blackmailing him for months. I don’t know what’s gonna happen.”
“We’ll figure it out.”
Even as I say it, I don’t know quite what that means. It’s not like I can do much to help his dad unmake that bed. But I can help Lincoln get through it; and I think hearing the words does something, because his next breath is softer, more like a sigh.
“Thanks, Low. You going to see your mom?”
“Yeah. I’m on my way there now.”
“Okay. I’ll call you later.”
We say our goodbyes and hang up, and I restart the GPS directions to the prison.
When I get there, I sit in the car for a few minutes until I’m sure I have my shit together. I still kind of feel like crying, but it’s Christmas, for fuck’s sake. My mom needs some happiness and normalcy today, not to spend our entire visit comforting her distraught daughter.
But when I walk inside the visitation room with the series of glass partitions, I realize I’m not the one who needs comforting.
My mom is.
She’s a wreck.
I practically hurl myself into the chair in front of her, fumbling with the phone in my haste to grab it.
“Mom? What’s going on? Are you okay? What happened?”
Her face is streaked with tears, and she reaches up to brush them away roughly as she picks up the phone on her side of the glass. “It’s—it’s fine, sweet—”
She can’t even finish the words. She breaks off, pressing her lips together and shaking her head.
“Mom. What?”
Her soft brown eyes well with tears again as she looks at me. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing. I don’t think he has any idea.”
“Who?”
“Scott Parsons. You were right. I shouldn’t have switched to the public defender. But I couldn’t afford to keep Leda on, and I thought…” She makes a noise in the back of her throat. “I thought it was enough that I was innocent. It’s not, Low. It won’t be.”
Oh, God.
My heart shatters in my chest as my mom—the most optimistic, trusting, pure-hearted person I know—shakes her head, her expression hardening.
She lasted months. Months before her hope broke.
And I don’t have any of my own to give her.
Our visit is quiet, filled with muffled words and long silences. It’s as comforting as it always is to be near her, but that doesn’t stave off the black cloud of despair that hovers over us.
When I finally stand up to leave and press my hand against the glass, she holds hers there for several beats longer than usual. It feels like a real goodbye somehow, a forever goodbye, and I hate that.
“I love you, Mom.”
“Love you more, Low.”
The world blurs in my vision as I make my way back out to the parking lot. The falling snow isn’t heavy, but it’s persistent, and it’s left a thin dusting on River’s car. I brush it off, then plop into the front seat, shivering and crying.
No.
No, goddammit. This isn’t fair.
My mom is innocent, and I’m not gonna let her be tried and convicted while I search for the real murderer. There has to be some way to defend her without revealing what the guys and I know.
Fuck Scott Parsons. If he won’t help my mom, I will.
I pull my phone out of my bag, but instead of pulling up the directions back to River’s house, I scroll
through my previous calls. When I find the number I want, I press the little icon to dial the number.
It rings a few times, and I drum my fingers on the steering wheel, staring out through the windshield.
Finally, a gruff voice answers.
“Hello?”
“Judge Hollowell? Please, don’t hang up.”
27
There’s a beat of silence, but I don’t wait for it to stretch out. He probably doesn’t know who this is, didn’t recognize the number—and maybe that’s a good thing. It’ll give me more time before he decides to hang up.
“Judge Hollowell, I really, really need your help. I know it’s Christmas, and I know you said you couldn’t get involved, but my mom needs help.”
Those words seem to click it into place for him. When he speaks again, there’s recognition in his tone. “I can’t do anything for you, Ms. Thomas. I’m sorry. And as you said, it’s Christmas. I’m trying to enjoy a relaxing day at home, and I don’t have time to—”
“Just a few minutes. Please!”
I hear him take a deep breath, as if summoning patience. I rush on, anxious to get everything out before he speaks again.
“That thing you said about Scott Parsons? It’s totally true. My mom said he keeps changing his strategy, keeps promising her he knows what he’s doing, but he doesn’t even seem like he knows all the facts of her case. Please, you’re the only person I know in Fox Hill who understands law—the only person I could think of to call. Can you please help? Even just a little, to go over the case and see what her lawyer is missing, what he’s not doing.”
Judge Hollowell grunts softly, an annoyed sound. “Jesus. That man should be disbarred.”
“Yes! He should!” I blurt, my voice too loud in the small confines of the car. “But he hasn’t been. Instead, he’s representing my mom on a murder charge. He holds her whole life in his hands, and I just want to—to—”
The things that are about to come out of my mouth are not as polite and dignified as I’m trying to make myself seem, so I clamp my lips shut. When I’m a little more under control, I start again.