Page 47 of Love Me Boldly

“Engaged?”

“Not really the point, Care.”

“What’d you say to him?”

“Nothing. I bolted, and he’s been on a trip with his team.”

“Damn. That’s tough.” Her shoulders heaved. She lifted her head. “He seemed like a really good guy…”

“He is.” Which made this all harder, because for the first time since I could remember, I’d starteddreaming. Not chasing practicality and safety, but I’d started collecting hopes and dreams of the images he’d planted in my mind. I’d started wanting things, believing I could have something more than survival and a comfortable income.

But luck had never shined my way, and I never should have gotten my hopes up.

“Maybe he won’t?—”

“Don’t.” I shook my head. “Tracey already tried that. No one can be close to someone and then date the killer’s daughter. That crap only happens in movies.”

While my life definitely could have been a made-for-TV special on the dangers of drug addictions and alcoholism, this story wasn’t that kind of movie. And there was no happy ending here.

“Okay, no platitudes, but I’ll still hope. In the meantime, if you can handle it, I have other news that isn’t so great.”

“My dad called you.”

“No.” She shook her head. “Lydia did.”

I stared at my lap and then closed my eyes. Caroline quit calling her my mom years ago, before I was a teenager. I hadn’t heard from her since I was eighteen years old. She’d showed up a week after my birthday, which was a day after my high school graduation. For the briefest moment I’d hoped she came to congratulate me.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. Her teeth were yellow, her hair stringy and greasy. Her clothes were two sizes too big, but that was more due to the fact that she was all skin and bones and scarred cheeks. Dad hadn’t been home then. He’d still managed to hold down jobs, and that was the only thing I was thankful for. He hadn’t seen how horrifically ruined she’d become. She’d stumbled into the trailer, saw me, and instantly went to the kitchen cupboard where they’d always kept spare cash in a coffee can. When she found the can gone,thenshe’d remembered I was there.

“Where’s my money?”

“Gone. You took it when you left, a decade ago.” She didn’t notice her daughter standing right in front of her. I wasn’t sure she knew who I was. If a grenade went off nearby, threw me thirty feet into a pile of lumber, would that hurt more than my mom standing in front of me, treating me like I was nothing?

“There’s always money here.”

“We don’t have any.”

“You probably do. Probably working at that restaurant, doing the right thing, being the good girl you always were.”

Good girl. So she did know who I was. She just didn’t care. I imagined a mom calling me that for years, and now I wanted to vomit. Her eyes were glassy, and she couldn’t stand straight. I should probably give her coffee to sober up or a bed to sleep it off, but there was no way I could let Dad see her like this. He’d go on a bender, and I’d have to hunt him down. Or he’d beg her to return and based on the way she kept looking to the door, she had no intention of that.

I went to my room, closed and locked the door, and rummaged through a small hole I’d made in my closet wall. When I opened my door, she was standing in the same spot, now leaning against the cupboard like the effort to stand was too much for her.

“One hundred dollars. It’s all I have.”

I said a quick prayer that she didn’t go looking for more. She was right. I did have plenty. I worked long hours, every second I could, but I had college to pay for and a car I wanted to buy to get me there.

She took it from my hand and left the trailer Dad and I had to move to the last time he went months without working.

She never once looked back. Or said thank you. Or said goodbye…just like the first time she left.

“So sheisalive.”

“Seems that way.” Caroline nodded and then swiped her hands over her mouth as she sighed.

“What’d she want?” I asked, as the memory washed through me, making my pulse race, my fingertips shake, and my voice tremble.

“She asked where your dad was working.”

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