friends carry out his casket. No one has heard anything. And Shayne is gone.
My fault. I hear it in my head. Is Randy Conner’s death my fault?
I wait for the church to empty, and then I head home.
Chapter 22
Reunion
My mom is home. The second I walk through the door, a giant burden lifts from my shoulders. She’s not dead. I can voice this concern in my mind now that I know she’s okay. The cold feeling in my gut I’ve been carrying around since the day she was supposed to come back dissipates. I didn’t even realize it was there, weighing on me.
She moves around in the Botanical Haven, cutting dead leaves off plants all over the place. And she’s taken the calla lilies Reese gave me and set them on a table at the front of the store. The glass vase shimmers from the sunlight coming through the windows. I’ll have to explain why I have illegal flowers. Maybe I can lie and say I cut them myself.
“Hi, Mom.”
She gives me a sideways glance and then looks away. Snip. Snip. More leaves fall. Some aren’t even dead.
I walk in and decide to go ahead upstairs. Let my mom have her time and then come talk to me when she’s done. After all, if either of us should be angry about something, it’s me. My mom should have been home on Monday. She didn’t call. Didn’t give an explanation. Didn’t do anything except not show up. Yet, even with all that, my stomach is clenched in fists of guilt.
“Did you miss me?” she says.
I turn, halfway up the steps. She’s at the bottom looking up at me, scissors in hand.
“You said you’d be back on Monday.”
My mom sighs and pulls off her gardening gloves, tossing them onto the counter by the cash register. “Things got complicated.”
My heart skips a beat. “With my father?”
She nods, and I notice her eyes glance to my tattoo. I look down at it and focus on the bumps faded from redness into just the black of the ink.
“Who is he?” I haven’t asked in years. A lifetime. Not since I got over the dream of living a normal life with a normal family.
My mom turns away and walks to the door, locking it from the inside. It’s early. No one who went to Randy Conner’s funeral went back to school afterward, but if my mom knows about the funeral, she doesn’t say anything.
“Who is he?” I repeat my question, wondering if I’ll ever know.
“It doesn’t matter, Piper.”
I throw my backpack to the ground, watching it tumble down the five steps I’ve already gone up. “Yes. It does. You spin me some story about how he’s some escaped terrorist and then you spend almost a week with him? And then you come back here and tell me it doesn’t even matter who he is. It doesn’t add up, Mom. If he’s so bad, why have you been gone so long? What’s complicated anyway? What complications could there possibly be?”
My mom’s eyes meet my own, and it’s like she’s begging me to drop the subject. To stop asking my questions. I don’t want to stop. I’m sick of living a life filled with her mysteries. Or lies. They seem to blend together.
I start up the steps again, leaving my backpack lying at the bottom.
“It’s about custody, Piper.”
Her words freeze my feet in place. “Custody?”
“I can’t lose you, Piper. Not now. Not ever.”
“He wants custody?” How could a father I’ve never known want custody of me? I’m eighteen now. Custody shouldn’t even be a concern. Not to mention an escaped criminal could never even take the case to court.
“He wants to take you away from me.” My mom’s voice is coarse as sandpaper. “And I’ll never let that happen. I won’t share you.”
Share me? It seems such an odd thing for her to say. Sharing her adult child with an estranged father. The father who’d left me a note in my room. The father who’d said we’d have all the time we need to get to know each other.
“Why did he do it?” I ask. “Why did he leave?”
My mom laughs. “He never wanted to be a part of your life from the very start. We were nothing to him. So he left and got himself in trouble and escaped from the burdens of a family.”
My father never wanted me?
“So why now?” I whisper the question, but she still hears it.
“Why now indeed?” My mom walks toward the counter, shuffling through the dead leaves on the ground. More drop off around her as she walks. I glance at them in passing but then move past them in my mind. “Because we haven’t been careful enough.” She laughs. “I haven’t been careful enough.”
“Careful? How much more careful could we have been?” I suppose if we completely removed ourselves from the grid that would have been more careful. But even my mom hasn’t been that extreme. At least not yet.
“We’ll have to move again.” She pulls out some junk from a drawer and begins shuffling through it.
“No.”
She ignores me. “Yes, that’s the only answer.”
“No, Mom.”
My mom swivels her head and stares through me. “No what?”
I look to her eyes, but she won’t meet mine. “No, I won’t move again.”
She turns back to the stuff from the drawer and flips thought it like she’s looking for something. “Yes, you will.”
I won’t. I tell myself this over and over in my head. I have a life here. I have Chloe. And now there’s Shayne. I don’t have to live with my mom forever.
The bell rings. Someone’s trying to come in. The knob shifts, but it won’t open since my mom’s locked the door. I look through the glass to see who’s visiting.
Reese.
I look at my mom, and she’s staring right at him. He’s looking right back at her.
“I wondered where the flowers came from.” My mom’s voice is so calm it sounds crazy. Each word drawn with perfect precision.
“Open the door,” he says. It’s a command. And I know this is so very bad that my worlds are about to collide.
My mom faces me again, and I am compelled to walk down the steps until I’m at the bottom, near the counter.
“Think we should have a little fun?” She uses her crazy calm voice again. And more leaves drop from plants.
I only want her to get rid of Reese, not kill him. “Mom, it’s no big deal.”
She thrusts her finger out and points at the door. “He is a big deal. How dare you try to tell me he’s not?”
Reese knocks again and twists the knob. I hear the metal crunching inside it.
I throw up my hands. “He’s nothing. I swear it.” I tell this to my mom and myself at the same time. Reese is nothing. It’s Shayne my mom should worry about.
Or am I lying to myself? Should my mom be concerned with Reese, also?
“He gave you these.” And in a single move, she grabs the pink flowers from the vase and throws them down
