She finished the wine in her glass. “And?”
“And now I have to deal with visits from that dickhead Nesbit and pee in a cup on demand. When my parole ends, my debt is paid, and life goes on, such as it is. But I’ll never outlive the conviction. To most people, I’ll never be just another person, I’ll always be an ex-con. There’s a difference. It makes me subhuman.”
“I didn’t like him.”
“Who, Nesbit?”
“Yeah. He was on a power trip. I mean, he wanted you to pee in the middle of the room.”
“You saw him on a good day. Look, parole sucks. Most parolees can’t leave the state, but because of my business, I get to drive to DC or Maryland. I have to log all the trips so he can monitor where I’m going, and he used to check on where I went, but that’s stopped now. Too much effort for him, I guess.”
“Oh,” was all she said.
“It is what it is. I can’t have a weapon, and I can’t just hop on a plane somewhere. I have to show up for any meeting Nesbit schedules, and I have to snitch for his brother.”
“Why?”
“Nesbit’s older brother is a detective on the force. The two of them make parolees like me feed the older one information so he can make busts. The threat is always there that if we don’t cooperate, we’ll get sent back up on a parole violation. And the kicker is, he tells the department he’s paying us for the information, but he pockets the cash himself.”
“That’s not fair!” she protested.
I shook my head. “Fairness has nothing to do with it. They have leverage, and I don’t. Until my parole is up, I go along or get sent back in. It doesn’t get any simpler than that.”
“Isn’t there someone you can complain to?”
She really did live in a bubble, detached from the harshness of the real world. I took another swig from my glass. “I’m an ex-con. My word against theirs carries zero weight, and the last guy who threatened to turn them in got sent back up a day later. That’s the reality of my world.”
“Did you do it?” She’d finally asked the question she really wanted answered.
I nodded slowly. “I did. I pled guilty. He was a bad man, and he deserved it.” I lifted my glass and finished it before pouring more wine for both of us. “I would do it again in the same circumstances.”
She tried to hide her cringe and looked down. “Why?”
Chapter 33
Debbie
He seemed more resigned than bitter about having gone to prison.
He leaned back. “I did it. The why can wait for another time. Now you know my past. What about yours?”
“Not so fast,” I countered. “What’s the story behind your first aid bag?”
“That’s from my life before prison,” he said, looking down. When he looked up, a smile grew over his face. “I always wanted to be a firefighter. I worked my ass off and made it through the academy. I’m a certified paramedic and firefighter—at least I was.”
“You can go back to it, though.” It only seemed reasonable.
He rubbed the tattoos on his forearm. “Not with these.”
“Then why did you get them?” What kind of self-sabotage was that?
“Just marking the change in my life, I guess. It’s the conviction that means they won’t take me back. These are just who I am now.”
I shook my head. “I don’t buy that you’re any different. The guy who patched me up is still that man.” I’d learned enough about him since that day to know that underneath the rough exterior was my hero—the hero paramedic, the man who aspired to be both of the eagles on his shoulders, the independent one and the protective one. He was the rush-into-a-burning-building type; I could feel it.
He looked up with a hint of dampness in his eyes. “Enough about me. That life is over.” He tilted his glass at me. “Your turn, Red.”
Instead of arguing, I drank some more of my wine as I figured out where to start. “I told you, I’m trying to get away from home because I don’t feel safe there.”
He leaned forward to add wine to both our glasses. “And what’s the real reason for that?”
The answer to that question would hurt. “Remember that first day you told me you saw a girl with trust issues?”
He nodded.
“You were right. I didn’t trust you when I should have. I realize now how unfair that was, given what I’m about to tell you.” I was just adding words to delay the inevitable at this point.
He drank another sip of wine and waited patiently.
“My stepdad forced me…” I looked for a way to sugarcoat it.
Luke stood quickly, and the chair fell backward. “If he laid a hand on you, I’ll—”
“It’s not what you think,” I said quickly. “Please sit down. This is hard for me.”
He picked up the chair and sat across from me. His veins still throbbed with anger, anger at Dom for the one sin he hadn’t committed.
“He forced me to join him robbing a bank.” There, I’d gotten it out.
Luke’s eyes narrowed. “Rob a bank?”
“Yup. He threatened me with a gun. That’s why I had to get out of town and start over somewhere else.”
“That is definitely a rock and a hard place. But running was not your best option.”
“It felt like it.”
He emptied the last of the bottle into our glasses. “Tell me everything. Start at the beginning, and don’t leave anything out.”
I started with explaining my family’s history with evictions and the way the latest one turned around in a day. I told him how I’d found the money in the cookie tin, and how it couldn’t be explained by Dom winning Powerball because of the day of the week.
“Very observant of you,” Luke said.
The warmth of his compliment pulled a smile out of me. “Thank you.”
I went on to explain how Mom’s spending habits changed and finally ended with me threatening to leave and Dom grounding me by taking my car keys away.
“Maybe that’s when you should have run out in the middle of the night to stay with a friend,” Luke pointed out.
“A lot of good that does me now.”
He nodded. “Sorry. I was just thinking out loud.”
“That’s okay. There were a dozen times in the past that I almost left, but I never felt like I had enough money. Still, I should have.” I ran my hand gingerly over the cut on my head. “I realize that now.”
Luke reached across the table to put his hand over mine.
The warmth of his touch sent a tingle of hope through me.
“Go on. I shouldn’t have stopped you,” he said, rubbing his thumb over my hand.
Next I described the afternoon of the bank robbery—how Dom had pulled out a gun to threaten me, how Mom hadn’t intervened. That part was hard to talk about, because the reason she hadn’t was obvious now.
Luke didn’t ask about that, though. Instead he asked me to go back over the details of entering the bank and getting the money. “He was wearing a mask and you weren’t?”