He looked dubious, or maybe embarrassed. He took a sip of water. “OK, I’m just gonna say it.”
She looked at him, trying to make her face impassive while at the same time desperate to know what it was that he was so nervous to ask her. She nodded once, as if to say it was OK, whatever it was. Inside she wanted to scream, Just say it already!
“Well, you know about your mom, right?”
She refrained from saying duh and just nodded her head.
He shook his head and closed his eyes. “Of course you know about your mom. What I meant is do you know that part of the reason they won’t let her out of jail is because they want her client list and she won’t tell them where it is?”
Though the adults in her life had told her nothing, she’d read whatever she could online. She nodded once, feeling the shame of being Norah Ramsey’s daughter like a scarf around her neck. Sometimes the scarf tightened, and this was one of those times. She could barely breathe as she waited for him to speak.
He took another long pull of the water, a different kind of liquid courage from whatever Devin Ames had been drinking. “I think my dad’s name might be on that list,” he blurted out.
She looked at him, waited for him to meet her eyes. As he did, the scarf loosened and she could breathe again. Shame, it seemed, was best when shared. It didn’t even have to be the same kind of shame.
“Why?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper. She took another sip of water. “I mean why would you think that?”
“I overheard him on the phone. He was talking about it. It sounded like he might . . . know something.” He shook his head. “I could be wrong. I might be. But”—he put the water bottle on the table and studied it—“this family can’t go through one more thing,” he said. “If he were exposed . . .” He looked back at her. “It’ll be the end of us.”
She felt the prickle of awareness dawning. He was getting at something. Something that involved her. “I don’t—”
He held up his hand before she could say, “Know anything.”
“I don’t expect you to have any magic answers. But I just wanted to say that if you know anything, if you have the faintest clue where she could’ve hidden that client list, well . . .” He shrugged, looked down at the table, inhaled and exhaled loudly before looking up again. “You owe me nothing. I know that. But just, please, tell me. If he is on it, then I want to destroy it.”
“But—”
“I know what you’re going to say: He deserves it. If he did that, he’s a bad guy, my mom should know. Believe me, I’ve thought about all of that. But the truth is, I don’t care about that. If he made a mistake, he made a mistake.” He pressed his palms on the table. “So have I.”
She nodded once, an acknowledgment. She wanted to tell him what she knew about his mistake. She almost did, right then, but decided now was not the time. Later. She would tell him; she would offer to tell others. She would help him fix that if she couldn’t help him fix this. The police had searched their house and found nothing. Violet hadn’t even known what her mother was up to. She’d believed she owned a marketing company. She’d just never known exactly what her mother was marketing.
“My dad stood by me,” Micah continued. “He never doubted my story. He’s a good man, and his name on some list from the past doesn’t change that.”
She nodded again, thinking as she did. Spinning back through times with her mother, wondering if there could be something she had missed, something that seemed innocuous at the time.
“He’s my best friend,” Micah said. “Really, my only friend anymore. I just thought if I could help him out, however possible, I should at least try. After everything he’s done for me.” He drank the last of the water and crushed the bottle, twisting it as the loud crackling noise reverberated through the room, waking Chipper, who sat up and glared in their direction. “Besides, I honestly don’t think my mother could handle it. I think it would be the end of her. Or at the very least, the end of them.”
Violet did not say that maybe it should be the end of them. That if his father had done something like that, maybe he wasn’t the man Micah thought he was. She did not say any of that, because she suspected that was the last thing Micah wanted to hear. All he wanted to hear right now was that Violet had some secret knowledge she’d never told anyone. So she spoke up.
“There is a storage unit,” she said, the words spilling out of her, even as she wondered if she should be saying what she was saying. She recalled the times her mother had taken her there to put something in or take something out. She knew some of her father’s things were there but hadn’t bothered to consider the rest of it, till now. “I don’t think anyone knows about it. I’ve not seen it mentioned in any of the reports I’ve read. I’m pretty sure they didn’t search it.”
He looked eager. “But maybe we could?”
“I don’t see why not,” she said, feeling slightly sick as she said it, hoping she was doing the right thing. Right or not, she’d said it now. There was no taking it back.
Polly
She sat in the front room, in a dining table chair she’d pulled over to the window, and watched for her granddaughter to come out of the house across the street. There’d been a moment when Violet had walked back to the house like she was going to come inside, and Polly had breathed a sigh of relief. Crisis avoided. But then the boy had run after her, had caught up to her and said something. Whatever it was had worked, and Violet walked back over to his house and went inside with him, leaving her to wait, to watch, and to wonder what exactly was going on with those two.
That afternoon in the yard, they’d seemed to barely know each other. Now they were chummy. It didn’t make sense. But, of course, they were teenagers. They didn’t always make sense. They ran hot. They ran cold. They were rarely lukewarm. Polly thought about the handsome boy across the street with his disarming grin and sculpted arms. She doubted Violet ran cold when she was around him.
She wondered if she should march across the street and demand that Violet come out of that house, make a scene if she had to, for Violet’s own good. She wondered if that boy was calculating enough to use what was happening with Norah as some sort of emotional bait for her poor, unsuspecting granddaughter. Polly got the sense that Violet wasn’t exactly experienced with boys. She wasn’t aware yet of what she had, of what awaited her. Polly had been the same way at that age.
Polly stared hard at the dark shape of the house across the street, debating what to do. This boy could lure Violet in and take advantage of her. And if that happened on her watch, Norah would never forgive her. Not that Norah had a position to judge anyone right now. But if Polly knew her daughter, Norah would still find a way. She tried to choose which of them to alienate: Violet now or Norah later. She thought about Norah at fifteen, with her anger and her rebellion and her quiet seething regard for Polly. She didn’t want Violet to feel that way about Polly. But she also didn’t want Violet to be taken advantage of, forever changed by some boy who didn’t know what he held in his hands. Polly stood up and went to the bedroom to put on a sweater and shoes. Better to cause a scene more properly attired.