I tilted my chin. “That’s what I’m fucking saying.”
Harris heaved a sigh. “You’re just making this harder on yourself, Wentz. This case is cut and dry. Confess and maybe they’ll cut you a deal. If your victim survives, that is.”
My aching hands made fists under the table. I was allowed a lawyer. A phone call. But what good would it do? I was guilty before they sat my ass in the chair.
Harris cocked his head. “You want to know what I think, Ronan?”
I already knew what he thought.
End of the road.
Like father, like son.
Shiloh, I’m sorry. I tried…
The detective leaned over me, his tone cold and final. Like a door slamming shut. “I think you’re going to prison for a very long time.”
Chapter One
One year ago…
“Time to head out,” I said, dragging my rolling suitcase into the lush family room of my aunt and uncle’s house. “Got a plane to catch.”
I hated stating the obvious, but if I didn’t announce my departure, my mother—sitting in the kitchen—might ignore it altogether. Maybe reminding her that it’d be a full year before she saw her only daughter again would break down her cold walls and she’d show me some warmth.
No dice.
New Orleans bustled on the other side of the glass under a thick summer morning while Mama sat bent over the card table near the window, smoking her cigarette and doing the Sunday crossword. Aloof and distant. No different than how she’d been at the start of this visit six weeks ago—and every summer visit I could remember since I was four years old, when she gave me up to live with my great-grandmother, Bibi, in California.
Aunt Bertie—round and colorful in her purple blouse and matching slacks—made a pitying sound from her spot on the couch where she sat wedged between my Uncle Rudy and their twenty-five-year-old daughter, Letitia. A Saints preseason game blared on the flatscreen.
“Already?” Aunt Bertie said and clucked her tongue. “Seems like you just got here.”
For my summer visits, I always stayed at my aunt and uncle’s Victorian in the Garden District. It was historically old and beautiful and richly decorated with Aunt Bertie’s taste for jewel tones and velvet tasseled pillows. The front door’s stained glass cast rainbows over the carpet.
I loved the house and the people in it, but I’d have traded it all to be with Mama at her little shotgun on Old Prieur Street in the Seventh Ward. She said it was too small, but I didn’t care. I’d have taken the couch. The floor…
“The summer flew by, sugar pie,” Aunt Bertie said. “The next time we see you, you’ll be a high school graduate.” She regarded me in my loose-flowing pants and tight white T-shirt that showed my midriff. “So beautiful, Shiloh. And growing up so fast. Isn’t she, Marie?”
Mama made a noncommittal sound and didn’t look up from her crossword.
Stay tough, I told myself, burying the pang of pain that tried to find its way to my heart. You know better than to expect more.
And yet my stupid heart never stopped trying to reach Mama no matter how badly it hurt.
“Before I go, I have something for all of you.” I set my bag on the coffee table and pulled out four smaller giftbags stuffed with tissue paper.
“You sweet thing. You didn’t have to.” A grin grew over Bertie’s lips as she poked a finger inside one bag. “Are these, by any chance, Shiloh Barrera originals?”
I smiled. “Maybe.”
“Hot dang,” Uncle Rudy said, peeling his gaze from the football game. “Christmas come early.”
I handed out the bags, one to my aunt, uncle, and cousin, and one left over. For Mama.
Cousin Letitia took hers eagerly in her lap. Even on a Sunday, she was pure style in designer jeans, yellow heels, and a cropped top that showed off her toned abs. She’d expertly piled her braids on her head, a few trailing down around gold drop earrings.
“I already love it,” she said.
I laughed. “You don’t know what it is.”
“You made it, so it’s going to be beautiful.”
I swallowed hard and risked another glance at Mama, unmoved from her spot in the kitchen.
Aunt Bertie pulled a turquoise broach from her giftbag. I’d oxidized the silver filigree to make it look antique. She rested a hand on the shelf of her bosom. “Oh my stars, baby. This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. But why wait until the last minute to give us these treasures?”
I grinned. “So you only have to pretend to like it until I’m out the door.”
“Pfft, it’s gorgeous.” Aunt Bertie pinned the broach to her blouse and held her arms out for me to hug her. I bent over the table and was enveloped in her soft, perfumed embrace. “Such a talented girl. You’re going to have that shop you keep dreaming about. I can feel it in my bones.”
“Thanks, Auntie,” I said, basking in her faith in me. Her love that she gave so easily.
“Ain’t this something.” Uncle Rudy turned over the pewter keychain pendant of the Saints’ fleur-de-lis logo. “You made this? Wait till the fellas see. Thank you, baby girl.”
His pride made the back of my throat tighten. I nodded with a faint smile and looked away. It was so much easier selling my jewelry online to strangers who didn’t bring soft, uncomfortable emotions to the surface.
“Girl, no way,” Letitia said, pulling from her bag a set of earrings, intricate silver twined around lapis stones in bright blue. She immediately took out the earrings she’d been wearing and exchanged them for mine. “Are you kidding? You got mad skills, Shi. My mama’s right. You’re going to take this all the way.”
“Thanks, Teesh,” I said, my fingers trailing over the handles of the last gift bag.
While Letitia and Rudy compared and crowed over their gifts, Aunt Bertie smiled gently at me. Pityingly. “Marie,” she called to the kitchen. “Shiloh has something for you.”
Mama couldn’t ignore that.
She got up from her seat at the kitchen window and slowly made her way to me. My heart ached at the reluctance inhabiting her every movement.
Marie Barrera was young—only nineteen years older than me—and beautiful but heavy with sadness. Everyone said I was her spitting image, but my unknown father’s DNA lightened my skin and muted our resemblance.
“At least that’s no mystery,” Jalen Jackson—my Louisiana friend-with-benefits—had bluntly stated in his bed the night before. “Someone put cream in your mama’s coffee.”
But the obvious fact that my father was white didn’t fill the huge hole in my life where he belonged. He was a ghost, haunting the family through me. No one would speak of him. Least of all Mama. From what little I’d gleaned in seventeen years, I was the product of a one-night stand. Unexpected and unwanted. Marie had been on full scholarship to LSU with a bright future stretching in front of her until the pregnancy. Now, she worked part-time in a bank, her dreams of a job in marketing sidelined forever. Whoever my father was, she’d cut him out of her life and refused to speak of him ever again.
It made no sense. With a big family willing to help, why did Mama drop out of college? Why not put me up for adoption?