Page 29 of A Favor Owed

As I look at the picture again with her lying next to me, I see real fear in her eyes. It reminds me that as much as she owes me, she might truly be in danger. I assumed she was just taking a break from princess-ville until things blew over with her father, but maybe there’s more there. Maybe I’m putting her in danger.

I delete the texts, set the picture as my phone background—more shit that girls love—and turn back to Angie’s warmth and citrus smell. Damn, I love her perfume. And her coconut shampoo. And the way her ass is pressed against me.

I think about the possibility of her dad or some meathead cousin showing up here and dragging her back to New York, all because of the information I’m feeding Lou. Am I okay with that?

I grab the FDNY sweatshirt she’d been wearing and look at the name scrawled in permanent marker twenty-some years earlier:B. McDaniels. The old sadness briefly engulfs me before fading away. I lie down and slide a lock of silvery purple hair between my fingers.

Yeah, I’m okay with that. I have to be.

Chapter Eleven

Angela

I wake up the next morning with Brady’s warm, heavy arm wrapped around my waist—that and the memory of his mouth on mine and the desire to feel it all over me. But underlying the craving and the comfort and the desire to stretch my limbs against his and fall back to sleep for the rest of the day is a feeling of dread.

This has all the trappings of a meteoric romance that will crash and burn in a matter of weeks. I’ll be the first to confess that my experience with men is sorely lacking. When they made that mafia movieThe Untouchables, they weren’t talking about the guys’ daughters, but they might as well have been. And yet my admittedly unsophisticated instincts are telling me that no one falls this hard this fast and has it end well.

It’s still dark in his west-facing bedroom, and I see his phone on the night table light up with a text from his mom:Don’t forget to go to mass.I stifle a snort of laughter. But the laughter quickly dies when the text fades and I see his phone’s home screen: a selfie of him and me from the party yesterday. What in the ever-loving fuck is that all about?

No. No way. We arenota thing. I can’thavea thing. I wouldn’t wish my issues on my worst enemy, let alone sweet, sunny Brady with his adoring mom and sister who picked out his furniture for him. I don’t know what his fascination with me is, but this can’t go beyond a few dates and maybe some make-out sessions.

Definitely some make-out sessions.

I gently disentangle myself from Brady and slide out of bed. I grab my tote and purse and quietly pad out to his living room. It’s eleven o’clock, and I have a study group meeting in half an hour. Fortunately, it’s just a fifteen-minute walk from Brady’s place to our usual coffee shop. I brush my teeth and exchange my camisole for a bra and T-shirt. I send Brady a text, keeping it deliberately short, maybe even curt.

Going to study group. TTYL.

Then I head out into the hot, dusty day. I meet with the three other first-year law students in my study group. They’re part-time students like me, juggling kids and jobs to go to law school. We work through some of the questions at the end of the chapters. I have a few hypothetical situations based on the reading I want to discuss, but everyone looks at me kind of blankly when I bring them up, so we stick to the text.

After a couple of hours drinking coffee and getting caught up on our classes, we say goodbye. I pack up my things and head out into the bright, hot day. It takes me forty minutes to walk home. By the time I arrive, I’m so hot and sweaty that I can’t wait to get into my gross shower.

Lizette is just sending off her lank-haired, money-bumming son when I walk up the drive. She shakes her head and takes an exasperated drag of her cigarette when he peels out in his battered Corolla. “Just like his father,” she mutters as she exhales. She walks with me toward my apartment. “Your tomatoes are looking good,” she says, eyeing my garden.

“Take some!” I offer. “I’ll never use them all.”

“Never could grow a thing,” she says, heading toward the garden and plucking a ripe tomato. “Not even a kid. Don’t know why Travis couldn’t have turned out like you, law student, responsible.”

“I’m sure you raised him just fine,” I say as she walks back toward her house with some tomatoes, not sure of anything of the kind. Lizette is a nice enough, albeit rough-around-the-edges lady, but who knows how she’s been as a mother?

My own mom did her best, I suppose. Raquelle isn’t really the mothering type. She’s the quintessential trophy wife, living for nothing but running her and my dad’s social life and looking good doing it. I had tried to keep up with her as best I could, having gone on shopping sprees and attended society events that didn’t interest me, just so I could be in her Dolce-and-Gabbana-accented presence for a few hours. She never showed much interest in her weird, bookish daughter.

It was my mom who first learned I’d gone away. I left her a note where I knew she’d find it—on the Peloton bike that she uses religiously. It’s her first stop every morning, before she even has coffee.

Dear Mom and Dad, it read.I’m having some second thoughts about law school, and I need to do some soul-searching. To that end, I’ve booked a year-long yoga tour through India, Nepal, and Tibet with a stop in the Maldives on the way home. When I come back, I’m sure I’ll be an entirely new person. I’ll be off the grid for some time, but I promise to email when I can. Please don’t worry about me and don’t send anyone after me. I’m sorry to disappoint you.

I laugh to myself as I stand in the shower being pelted by hot and cold water. Every word of that letter had been complete bullshit. Disappoint them? Please. Any normal parents would have killed for a kid like me. I was a straight-A honors student from kindergarten through twelfth grade. I graduated college summa cum laude. I’d gotten into the best law schools in the country. I never got in trouble, mostly because I was a pariah among the business kids and the outsider kids alike and never really had the opportunity. But it would seem that because I didn’t want to be a Gucci-toting, spa-frequenting, traditional business wife, I had transgressed every norm known to humanity.

Neither of them would have a problem believing I’ve gone on some crazy trek through the Himalayas drinking yak milk and contorting my body. The fact that I give a damn about school and don’t eat meat is the equivalent of being a drum-beating Hare Krishna in their eyes.

They would, however, have a hard time wrapping their head around the reasonwhyI left. And that reason is why I must be careful. It would be dangerous to underestimate my dad. One word in the wrong ear and he would know what I’ve done. I would never be able to hide from him then.

I get out of the shower and dress for work. I had wanted to study for a couple of hours, but my eyes are closing in protest of my barely five hours of sleep last night. I set an alarm so I won’t be late for work and let myself drift into sleep.

As soon as I slip into unconsciousness, the nightmare surfaces. It’s a heavy, oppressive, amorphous dream that I started having a couple of months ago. It weighs down my limbs and compresses my lungs in a way that leaves me terrified. Instead of a series of images, it’s an increasingly intense feeling of dread: I have bills to pay, but I have no money; I have an exam to take, but I’ve forgotten the law; my house is on fire, and I can’t get out.

My phone is ringing, but it’s out of reach.

Wait. My phone? It’s on the sofa next to me, isn’t it?

---