Prologue
“It’s like Star Wars, Mom. All the little white flecks flying toward the window are like stars. This is what it looks like when you’re traveling through space, y’know.”
The woman sitting in the driver’s seat of the people carrier smiles affectionately at the young boy sitting in the back seat. Her back hurts from all the driving, but they’re on the homestretch now. Well…not the homestretch. Home’s an hour in the other direction, where the roads are a decent size, people are civilized, and you can buy a cup of coffee that doesn’t taste like piss. Raleigh is the worst kind of backwater, podunk, nowhere town there is, and if the woman had her way, she’d never visit the damn place again.
Soon, perhaps. The wheels are in motion. One day not too far from now, she’ll gain custody of the little boy in the backseat and it’ll become official: she’ll be his mother. Legally. She won’t have to flinch every time someone overhears him calling her that. It was wrong to ask him to use that title before everything’s been ironed out in court. If things don’t go according to plan and the boy’s brother does somehow manage to gain custody of the kid, then it’ll end up being very disruptive for the boy. He needed a mother, though. He’s never had anyone solid and stable in his life to call Mom. She wants to be that maternal figure to him. Hell, the first time he called her by that title, she locked herself in the downstairs bathroom by the utility room, the washing machine midway through its loud spin cycle, and she squealed like a giddy teenager into the new Ray Dunn hand towels she’d just bought from Target. She could have corrected him. If she’d had more self-control, she could have told him it wasn’t a good idea to use names like ‘Mom’ just yet, but it had felt far too good for that. The precious little boy, small for his eleven years, with his mop of black, wavy hair, and his dark, expressive eyes wanted her to be his mother, and there was no way she was going to turn down the role.
She’d immediately started planning the trip to Hawaii for the holidays, knowing that the time away together would drive a wedge between the boy and his brother. An escape from all the cold, the rain and the snow. And surfing? Sunshine? Christmas Day dinner on the beach, with a colorful lei around his neck, and the sound of the ocean waves crashing on the shore to rock him to sleep each night? It was a trip that would stay with him forever. Something only she could give him. Something that useless piece of shit brother of his would never be able to give him.
Everything had been going so well. The woman knew it in her bones; each evening, when she kissed the boy goodnight, pressing her lips to the crown of his head, smelling the salt in his thick confusion of hair, she felt it working. He was forgetting about his brother, talking about him less, thinking about him less, growing closer and closer to her instead.
And then it had all come crashing down. Surprise, surprise, the brother had found a way to interfere with her plans. He always did. The phone call came in just after dinner, when she and the boy had been cleaning up in the kitchen of the Airbnb she’d rented. She’d let the old-school answering machine catch the call, which had been her biggest mistake. If the boy hadn’t heard the social worker’s voice projecting from those shitty speakers, she could have hidden the news from him until they’d returned to Washington.
“Hello, Jackie, it’s Maeve Rogers from CPS. Sorry to be calling so late and I’m sorry to leave this kind of information in a message for you, but it’s kind of urgent. Alex has been arrested…for shooting a boy from his school. I know. I know that sounds bad, but believe me…it’s not what you’re thinking. He’s being held at Stafford Creek. He could really use a friendly face right now. Is there any way you can bring Ben back to Raleigh to see him? I’m confident this is all going to blow over quickly, but still. Stafford Creek’s no walk in the park. Even a short stay in a place like that can change a person, and Alex has been doing so well. He needs Ben right now. If he knows his brother’s close by, I know he’ll do his best to stay out of trouble. You know I wouldn’t suggest it unless—”
The message had ended there, the machine cutting the social worker off, but it was already too late. The damage had been done. Ben had heard those magical words—his brother needed him—and that was it. Final. There was no way she could have kept him in Hawaii without alienating him. She’d tried, even knowing that would probably be the outcome. For another week, she’d delayed traveling back to the mainland. Put it off. Told the boy that his brother would call himself if he wanted Ben to come back. In the end, there was nothing else she could do, though. Reluctantly, she’d purchased the tickets back to Seattle, viciously stabbing at the keyboard keys as she’d entered the digits of her credit card into the booking form. And now here they were, eleven o’clock at night, driving through a godforsaken blizzard on their way to Raleigh, when they should be tucked up, sound asleep in their own small little Hawaiian paradise.
The woman sets her jaw, staring straight ahead, trying to breathe around her anger. “Prisons are pretty scary places, y’know, Benny. Even for adults. You sure you wanna go there tomorrow?”
The woman knows it’s a low blow, but she has to try. The boy blinks owlishly at her from the dark recesses of the backseat. “I’m not afraid,” he says. “I’m excited. I’ve only seen prison on TV. And I get to see Alex, too. He’s been waiting for me.”
“He doesn’t know you’re coming, remember? We kept it a secret, so it would be a surprise.” The woman convinced the boy that it’d be fun, a sort of game to show up at the prison unexpectedly. The dirty truth is that she’s still hoping to persuade him that the visit is a bad idea.
The boy nods thoughtfully in the rearview. “I know. But he’ll be excited when I get there. I bet he’s missed me. Now we can all spend Christmas together, can’t we. We’ll be able to take him home with us from the prison, and everything will be okay.”
“It doesn’t work like that, buddy. Your brother did something really, really bad. That’s why they’re keeping him at the prison. He’ll have to stay there until they can decide what they want to do with him. We’ve talked about this, remember? There’s a chance Alex’ll have to stay in prison for very long time. Maybe even years.”
Wouldn’t that just be fan-fucking-tastic?
Where has that sour taste in her mouth suddenly come from, though? Tastes like lies and deceit. The woman swallows it down, doing her best to ignore the rotten tang. She didn’t lie to the child. His brother shot someone, for crying out loud. Shot somebody, a good boy from a wealthy, well-to-do family. She’s done her research. She’s read the news reports online. There are plenty of rumors and mistruths flying around, but the woman’s been dealing with the boy’s brother for years now. She knows him inside out. He’s a liar and a thief. He breaks everything he touches. There’s no way he shot an ivy-league candidate because he was trying to murder that ditzy little girlfriend of his. She probably came to her senses and cheated on the brother with the Weaving boy. That was more likely. The brother had probably found them in bed together, fucking like the horny teenaged morons that they were, and he’d lost his temper. Pulled the gun and shot Weaving in a fit of rage.