I whirled on him, my hair whipping my face. “There are no sides, Kash! You’re out here acting like the whole world is out to get you, well guess what, it’s not. Breaker’s doing his job. Your foreman is doing his job. The city is doing its job. Leroy was a lost cause before you even lost all your baby teeth. This isn’t about taking sides, Kash. This is about doing the best you can with what you have even if the situation isn’t perfect!”
He tensed and narrowed his eyes, then raised his hands in sarcastic surrender. “All right then, since you know everything, why don’t you tell me how to make the best of this situation? Oh, what’s that? You can’t, because you can’t even tell your own daddy that you’re a grown woman and you do what you want?”
I clenched my fists, trembling with fury. “Nice deflection,” I choked out. “But here’s the thing, Kash. You won’t make enough money to get away even if you do go back to selling, you know why? Because you never made any to begin with. That’s why everybody wants you to go back to dealing, so they can get their shit for free. Fool yourself all you want, but I know that you and Hunter never saw a dime.”
I didn’t cry until I was alone in my room with the window shut and locked.
Chapter 19
It would have been real easy to prove her wrong. I knew exactly where the cash was buried. I could have brought it to her that night. Somehow, though, I didn’t think that would change anything. Daisy wasn’t pissed at me for not making enough money. She was pissed at me for—hell, I didn’t know. From where I stood, it seemed like she was pissed at me for being in the situation that I was in. Like it was my fault.
I wondered for a while if she did think I killed Hunter, somewhere way down deep in her mind that she wasn’t even allowing herself to reach. A sick urge to force a confession out of her nearly strangled me. I would have walked her back home just to make sure she made it, but I knew I couldn’t hold my tongue if I did.
I watched her from the top of the hill until the light went out in her bedroom, fighting the urge to follow her. The argument reminded me of all the fights Hunter and I got into before he died—arguments which had been unfortunately public, and which had sealed my fate as the police were already under the impression that a falling out between us was the cause of Hunter’s death.
“Maybe I’m just too restless for their whole damn family,” I muttered to myself.
I took off into the woods in the opposite direction from Daisy’s room, making for a spot that Hunter and I had never taken Daisy. We had both agreed—in one of the rare moments when we both agreed on everything—that she would be safer and more content if she didn’t know about the spot, or what it contained.
A layered fury overtook me no matter how quickly I moved. Fury at Daisy for not seeing that escape was my only option, and fury at Hunter for not listening to me when I told him the same thing six years before. We had the money, enough to get away and set up in a comfortable house in some other town. It hadn’t been enough for Hunter. He thought his only skills were cooking and dealing—completely discounting his ability to sell and sweet-talk people—and he didn’t want to start a drug ring in an unfamiliar city.
At the same time, though, he hadn’t wanted a short-term comfortable solution. No, Hunter was set on living large for a long time. When I’d done the math and shown him that we could buy a decent house in cash, on land, in a town big enough to offer opportunities, he’d laughed in my face. He wasn’t going to move out of one crappy house just to move into another, he’d said. No, he wanted a three-story mansion and flashy sport cars. He wanted to wear his wealth on his sleeve.
I would have been happy just to get away and own a piece of something. That was what I wanted, and I knew Daisy wanted the same. At least I thought she did. I was beginning to realize that I might not know her as well as I thought I did. Mexico seemed to be the only practical solution to our current problem. It would give her everything she wanted—dates in public, sex between the sheets, my freedom—a future. I couldn’t fathom why she was so against it, and it made me furious.
I let my feet wander wherever they pleased. I was too pissed off to make a plan, I just wanted to burn through the current and remembered frustration without taking it home with me. I took savage, immature pleasure in stomping fallen branches to pieces as I stormed through the underbrush.
I wasn’t a superstitious person, but I was as afraid as anyone to speak ill of the dead. Regardless, my fury roiled in my brain, and Hunter was at the eye of the storm. If he’d only let us leave when I said so, he’d still be alive and Daisy wouldn’t be trapped under their dad’s drunken, smelly thumb. If he hadn’t been so insistent upon hiding our fortune from his sister, she would have a little more faith in my ability to do what I said I could do.
My feet took me to a slight swell on the forest floor which overlooked a hollow filled with the charred remains of a massive spruce. The trunk curved protectively over a soft, green patch of earth. A ring of carefully placed stones circled that patch, nearly invisible after six years of undisturbed growth. We’d chosen the right place to hide our treasure, Hunter
