“I’m actually being super fair,” I replied. “And you better deal with that.”
He laughed, then his expression sobered. “Seriously, though,” he said. “It’s not as simple as just walking away. Trust me, I have tried.”
“Is that what happened the second time?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “No, it… it was a little more complicated than that,” he said. “After the little tiff—”
“You mean after he stabbed you,” I said.
“Right,” he said, blinking. “After he stabbed me, it was clear that I needed to work for him for longer, and I decided I was just going to keep my head down and do it.”
I waited. Our fingers were threaded now and he was holding my hand tightly.
“Listen,” he said. “I don’t really want to—”
“I know,” I replied. “But the thing is, you did bring me into it. You brought me into it when the cops showed up at my house, didn’t you? So you need to tell me.”
“Fine. So what happened was, he told me to do another job with him. It wasn’t like I could say no, so I didn’t. I did my job. I staked out a house, after picking it, and we were going to rob it on Saturday. The plan was for the family to be out because they usually went camping in the spring, on the weekends, so would’ve made perfect sense.”
“Okay.”
“But what actually happened was different. We normally don’t go into houses that are occupied, because that’s super dangerous,” he said. “For the occupants, of course, but also for us. When they left, I noticed that the girl, the older teenager, wasn't with them. I told my boss to call it off. I told them she might be at home, but they said there was no way. They said it might be that she was going to spend time with her boyfriend, her friends, but they didn’t think that she was going to be there that night. They told me that the job would be called off if there was a party. I didn’t think I was good enough, but I had recently been stabbed, and I didn’t want to get in trouble again. As stupid as that sounds…”
“It doesn’t sound stupid.”
“Nevertheless. They decided to push through the job. Something about it made me feel really uncomfortable, so I called the police.”
“What?”
He shook his head, looking away from me. “When I went to the bathroom, I called the police,” he said. “I told them there had been a suspicious car in the neighborhood, and I gave them the address next door to the one we were about to hit. I was using a burner phone, so I knew they wouldn’t find me. I did delete the incriminating entries, but I was gone for long enough that they were suspicious.”
“Why did you do that?” I asked after a beat.
“I just couldn’t face it. I didn’t want them to hit this house, with this young, defenseless girl. I knew that things were going to get hairy, and that wasn’t what I wanted. I wouldn’t have been able to stop them,” he said, his voice so quiet it was practically a whisper. He took a deep breath before he spoke again. “So, I called them. As soon as I saw the squad car pulling up, I drove away.”
“Is that when you got into the accident?”
“Yes. It is,” he said. “We were arguing about it in the car, one of them pulled out a gun, and I just didn’t know what else I was supposed to do.”
“So you put yourself in danger.”
“I guess. It was more like I did what I needed to do,” he said. “Everyone felt like they were in danger in that situation, but they wanted me to turn back, and I wasn’t willing to do that. I wasn’t willing to put that poor girl in danger.”
“Why didn’t you go to the police?”
He laughed. “What do you expect me to say? I am afraid of my criminal counterparts?”
“No. I don’t know. I just…”
He smiled at me. “It’s never that simple. You can never just get away from it."
“So what are you going to do?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I have to do something, and I can’t exactly go to the police.”
I put my head on his shoulder, closed my eyes, and took a deep breath. He was right, but I also had no idea what to do, and I didn’t know what it meant for us.
But right then, sitting there next to him, I made the decision that I was going to stick by him. Whatever that meant, whatever happened next, I was going to stick by him.
Because I believed him.
I believed every pained word he had said to me after each trembling breath. And regardless of how tempting it was to judge him, I knew that he needed my support.
“For now,” he said, brightening up a little. “How about we dig into these cupcakes?”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
2019
Things didn’t end on a sour note. He kissed me deeply before he left, thanking me for sticking by him. Still, the uncertainty felt like a hanging cloud over us, and I didn’t know how I was going to get over it. Jody was right. Whether I liked it or not, he was a criminal, and I needed to decide if it was okay to be dating a criminal.
I didn’t know that it meant being this involved with him, but worse than that, I had no idea that it meant being this worried about him. And I was really worried about
