His SUV slowly rolls out of the lot before disappearing around the corner, and it makes my blood run cold. Cedric Ramirez was always calm and calculating, a brutal force to face when he set his mind to something. This situation won’t be any different. He’s trouble that isn’t going away anytime soon.
“So, I guess Mom didn’t lie about everything,” Alex says a few moments later. “You were a drug dealer and a gangbanger.”
I take a moment to formulate my answer but decide that the truth is better than another lie told to this kid.
“I made choices I felt like I had to, to survive around here. Getting away from here was hard, but it’s possible.”
He grunts instead of asking more questions and he doesn’t speak again in the hours we stand out in front of the store. When the sun starts to go down, I ask if I can give him a ride home, but he refuses. At dusk, he gives up and turns back in the direction of his house, and although I keep my distance, I follow him all the way back until I see him disappear through his front door.
I don’t know that any progress was made today, but I’m one determined motherfucker. After giving up on my relationship with Tinley, I haven’t given up on much of anything else, and my son will never be one of them.
But as I drive back to my own shitty house, I can’t figure out a way to convince him to be better when he won’t even talk to me. Fuck, do I have my work cut out for me.
Chapter 10
Tinley
Grateful isn’t a word I’d normally associate with Ignacio Torres, but today I am. He didn’t have to text me and let me know that he was with Alex, assuring me in a second text that he’d never let anything bad happen to the boy. But he did. Within thirty minutes of Ignacio leaving my house, that text came through, and it is the only thing that keeps me sane until Alex walks back in the door several long hours later.
My kid doesn’t rush past me to his room the second he steps inside which is what I was expecting. He lingers in the kitchen, making himself something to eat before bringing a bowl of leftover spaghetti into the living room. In an effort to show he’s still pissed, he sits on the opposite end of the couch from me rather than his normal position in the middle.
“I want to know the truth,” he says before shoveling spaghetti into his mouth. “All of it.”
“I—” I focus on my hands, twisting my fingers around each other. “I don’t know where to start.”
“From the beginning,” he mumbles around a mouth full of food.
“The beginning,” I whisper, a small smile playing on my lips, because no matter how much I ended up hating Ignacio in the end, everything up to that point was incredible. “Ignacio Torres was a troubled teen. Before we moved here with my nanny, he did all sorts of bad things. He ran with the wrong crowd.”
“He dealt drugs,” Alex adds.
“Yes. He associated with the wrong people, but I never saw much of that. I mean, I knew people respected him. I knew people would walk away and keep their distance when he walked into a room, but I didn’t know the extent of his troubles for a very long time. Even when I heard things from people, girls whispering in the locker room or kids at school saying things about how he was, he wouldn’t confirm if they were spreading rumors or speaking the truth.
“He tried to get me to notice him for weeks, but those whispers were always swirling around me, and it was like the atmosphere changed whenever he was near. It took me a while before I gave him a chance, and once I did, I knew I was in love. I gave him—” I clear my throat, uneasy with having this conversation with my son, even though I know he’s grown up way too fast not to know about sex. “Everything. Two days before graduation, Pop told us that he got a new job in Dallas. It had the ability to change everything for our family. We wouldn’t have to live in this neighborhood. He would have insurance for the entire family. It was the break he’d been waiting for, for over two years, but I didn’t want to go. If I did go, I wanted Ignacio to go with us, but I knew asking was out of the question. Pop hated that man.”
“He didn’t.” I look at Alex. “He didn’t. I asked him once how he felt about my dad, and he told me that he was grateful for a man that gave him such a wonderful grandson.”
Tears well in my eyes. “Really?”
“Yeah.” He chews another bite of spaghetti. “I was like five or six. We were at the park kicking the soccer ball around. I noticed another family there, a dad with three sons. I came home later that day and asked you about my father. I wanted to know if he was the type of man who would play at the park with me if he were still alive.”
His voice cracks on the last word and it multiplies my pain and regret.
“Keep going,” he urges.
“I didn’t want to tell Ignacio about us leaving. By that point, I figured I could convince Pop to let me stay behind and help take care of Nanny. I was graduating soon, and I didn’t think he could really stop me, but the idea of leaving south Houston for something better was nagging at me. When I told Igna—your dad—about the new job, he didn’t take it the way I thought he would. He didn’t feel for me that same way I felt for him. He said some mean things, and even though I knew about you that
