“Ten years old?” The threads of her story had stayed in his mind over the years, but no real tapestry had emerged. She’d been in trouble, run away, found safety with Pasha, and—that was all he knew. “How did it happen?”
She didn’t answer for a while, drinking instead.
He gave her leg a nudge.
“Okay, okay. I’m getting fortified.” One more luscious sip, this one with her eyes closed and head tilted back. It took everything in him not to dip his head and kiss her exposed throat. “I have never spoken this story out loud,” she announced as she set the drink down next to her. “Not once, not even to myself. So bear with me.”
“I have all night and an eight-pack of Juicy Juice. Talk to me.”
She exhaled a soft whistle and looked out over the water, gathering her thoughts. “I was raised in foster homes. I think I mentioned that on our balloon ride.”
He nodded his head, but she didn’t even look at him. “Yes, you did. But when we were dating, you told me your parents died in a car accident, and that Pasha was your father’s aunt and your only living relative and she was appointed as your legal guardian. But…” His voice trailed off as it hit him then—really hit him like a brick to the brain.
Zoe had lied to him from day one. She’d never told him the truth.
She glanced at him, no doubt reading his expression. “And I only knew you a month. Can you imagine how my lifelong friends are going to feel?”
Yes, actually, he could. They’d feel betrayed and hurt and cheated. Those emotions strangled enough that he couldn’t talk.
“Sometimes,” Zoe said, “you tell a lie for so long it becomes the truth.”
“No,” he managed to reply. “It never becomes the truth.”
“I’m sorry, Oliver.” She angled her head toward him. “I wasn’t happy about lying to you. That’s why I took you on that balloon ride. I wanted to tell you the real truth up there. I did, I tried, anyway.”
“Tell me now, down here.”
“Okay. I might have to go back to, you know, the beginning.” She took another drink, then continued. “I have no idea who my father is. I doubt my mother did, either, but she overdosed when I was four, I think. I really don’t know. I was truly an orphan—she was a runaway, too, and…” Her voice cracked.
“Shhh. Zoe, don’t cry.” He put his hand on her shoulder, but she wiggled out of his touch.
“I’m not crying. My voice always cracks when I’m nervous.”
“Why are you nervous? This is me.”
She looked at him and, for a woman who said she wasn’t crying, her eyes were pretty bright. “I’m nervous because it’s you. And you matter.”
Which might have been the nicest thing she’d said since she’d shown up in his office. “Zoe, it’s not your fault who or what your mother was.”
“It’s my legacy. A long line of runaways. Not exactly the bloodline you married into.”
“Adele isn’t here, and she won’t ever be. You are. Please.” He managed to settle his hand on her bare thigh. “I’m not judging you.”
“All right.” She reached for the drink, then shook her head and put it down. “Anyway, they put me in foster care and from there the State of Texas pretty much forgot I existed until whatever family had me got sick of me.”
“How could anyone get sick of you?”
She gave a dry laugh. “I was mouthy, sarcastic, irreverent, impolite, and never met a rule I couldn’t break.”
“All the things I love about you.”
She startled a little, making him realize what he’d said. He opened his mouth to correct himself, but closed it again.
For a long, heavy moment, neither said a word, but when he looked down at the water, her toes were curled into tight little balls.
“Anyway,” she continued, “I was in Corpus Christi last, with a family who had three foster kids. I really don’t know why they took fosters, probably for the subsidy money and free labor. And free…” She shook off the thought. “Anyway, about two doors away, this incredibly sweet lady moved in. Her name was Patricia Hobarth.”
“Pasha?”
She nodded. “She lived alone and we became friends that summer. I’d visit her almost every day. She taught me how to play cards and do crafts and”—she laughed softly—“read tea leaves. She was…sad. Lonely and lost, like I was, and we formed an unlikely friendship.”
She was quiet for a moment, maybe holding on to an old memory, but he let her go, waiting for her to finish.
“So I spent a lot of time there because…the father at the house where I lived…” She fought for a breath and his heart fell down somewhere into his gut.
“God, tell me he didn’t hurt you.” White-hot rage blasted through him, and she hadn’t even told him anything yet.
She swallowed hard and shook her head. “Not me. At least, well, no. He had sex with one of the other girls. She was fourteen.”
“Fuck.”
She closed her eyes and stayed quiet a really long time. “Every night. In the next bed.”
“Oh, shit, Zoe. How do you handle something like that?”
“Run, Zoe, run.” The words were no more than the breath of a sad sigh, hardly discernable.
“Excuse me?”
“That’s when the voice started.” At his look, she gave a dry laugh. “No, I don’t hear voices. Well, one. And it’s mine, but it’s…loud. Usually telling me to do something that goes against common sense. But it started in that room, on those nights, when I’d stick my head under the pillow and try to drown it all out. The voice…helped.”
He reached for her, putting his arm around her back, pulling her closer, trying to warm the chill that probably started deep inside her. “This voice told you to run.”
“Fast and far. I wanted to get…away.”
“So it’s not your life on the lam with Aunt Pasha that makes you so impossible to hold.”
“I have to have an escape route,” she admitted. “In fact, I kind of freak out if I don’t have a way out of…anything.”
Anything like a relationship, a permanent hometown, even her friendships. Very slowly, threads of that tapestry that was Zoe started to form a picture.
“Life with Pasha just magnified that trait,” she said. “First, Pasha was my escape hatch, then that lifestyle felt normal. I know anyone hearing this, even close friends, will have a hard time understanding that, but it’s true.”
He tried to imagine that life but couldn’t. Not that he couldn’t imagine how she had lived that way, but why? “Why not try to change the situation? Why run? Why not fix it?”
“I’m not the fixer you are, Oliver. I’m the runner, remember?”
“But why didn’t you report the guy to the social service people who checked on you?”
She shook her head as if the question was crazy. “You don’t understand. The other girl threatened me.”
“She threatened you?”
She lost the battle not to drink, picking up the glass and gulping. “It wasn’t rape. She wanted to have sex with him, and in return she got stuff: clothes, money, drugs. She was his favorite, and it worked for her. I had to shut up and cover my ears, always, always under that pillow.”
He tried to imagine the suffocating feel of the bedding, the sounds, the horror for a little girl, and it turned his stomach.
“But I listened to that voice,” she said quickly, as if she were more concerned about how he felt right then than the memories. “The voice would soothe me. The voice told me what it would be like when I ran, when I was safe, when I could roll around beautiful green hills or even fly.” She smiled wistfully. “I wanted to fly so much. And not a plane, although I had to take those flying lessons, too, but I wanted to float.” She closed her eyes and sighed the word. “Just go up and away and hear silence. That was my greatest fantasy. A quiet, far away balloon has always been my happy place.”
“So Pasha helped you?” he asked.
“That summer, foster asshole
guy lost his job and he was home all the time with that girl.” She closed her eyes. “They…did stuff all the time. So during the day I spent every possible moment with Pasha.”
“Did you tell her what was going on at your house?”
“No, I was too scared. But she knew something was wrong, because she read my palm.”
“And figured it out?” He couldn’t keep the incredulity out of his voice.
“She saw the fingernail gouges from me digging into my own hands.” She gave a wry smile. “Say what you will about her fortune-telling skills, the woman is intuitive as hell, and she recognized a kid who was getting progressively more fucked up as the days went by.”
“Is that why she took you?”
Zoe shook her head, kicking her feet in the water to make waves again. “That girl, the fostertute, as I liked to call her, got taken away. There was some trouble or something. The state services person was on the take, I think. I don’t know. I was too young to understand it, but when she was gone, I knew I’d be next.”
More unholy heat blasted through him. “What happened?”
She turned, her eyes dark with pain. “He managed to corner me and…try. Got his hand down my pants and his tongue down my throat.”
He buckled a little like he’d been shot. “You were ten?”
“He liked ’em young, doc.”
Bile rose in his throat. “What did you do?”
She almost smiled. “What do you think?”
“Ran?”
“After I bit his fucking tongue until it bled and slammed my knee in his nuts, yeah. I ran like hell to Pash—Mrs. Hobarth’s.” She nearly drained her glass before finishing. “And Pasha, it turned out, has a superpower. That woman can pack and disappear in less time than it takes most people to take a shower. She knew it was no use reporting that guy, and it was only a matter of time until I was his next…” She shook her head. “The voice screamed ‘Run, Zoe, run,’ and, this time, I did. With her.”
“She saved you, Zoe.”
She turned to him, her eyes wide. “Duh. Why do you think I’m so determined to do the same for her?”
“You’re covering for her by running and hiding,” he shot back. “That’s not saving her.”
She didn’t answer, turning away.
“You could argue that to any judge,” he insisted. “Or police or FBI or sheriff—”
“Stop. I would never talk to those people.”
“Or a lawyer,” he continued, undeterred. “She doesn’t have to live with this sword hanging over her head anymore. Hell, you could find that foster father and—”
“He’s dead. I’ve kept tabs on him and he died in a house fire. I hope he’s still burning.” She shuddered a little. “You have to know what Pasha did is illegal, by any stretch. She broke every law there is by using fake IDs and dead people’s Social Security numbers. She had this whole underground network of people who are all up to their asses in criminal shit.”
He thought about Pasha for a moment, about how little he knew about a woman whose life he wanted so much to save. “How’d she do it? Didn’t anyone check up on you? How did you get into schools or rent apartments or make money?”
“Pasha has money, thousands in cash, she keeps stashed in places like the freezer or—God, this is so cliché but true—under the mattress.”
“Where does it come from?”
“I really don’t know, but we never were destitute. She always found odd jobs, and then I did. Waitress, sales clerk, cleaning lady, seamstress. Whatever, until people started asking questions and then, sometimes for no reason I could figure, we’d blow out of town and move to the next place.”
“How did you get into college?” he asked.
“Miracles. Strings pulled. Pasha’s relentless determination that I get a degree. She homeschooled me and made sure I passed every test. She managed to find people who make fake IDs and create real people out of thin air. I even have a birth certificate and I do have a Social Security card. I got into the University of Florida, for crying out loud. She made that happen—it was so, so important to her that I go to college.”
She kicked her legs a few more times, the soft splash punctuating the pride in her voice. “But that’s just the story of what happened, Oliver. That’s not the story.”
He gave her a questioning look, not following.
“What I mean is, that’s not who or what my Aunt Pasha is made of. She saved me, yes, and maybe what she did was illegal and wrong in the eyes of the law, but she sacrificed her entire life for me, too. She’s my friend, my confidante, my mother, my sister, my soul mate. She would die for…” She dropped her head into her hands. “But I don’t want her to.”
He settled her against him the way her pain settled on his heart. “We’ll do everything possible and more,” he promised.
“Can you save her life?”
He inched her around to look at him. “Zoe, I will do everything in my power and in the power of my team to save this woman who saved you. You have my word.”
She inched back. “There’s a ‘but’ coming.”
“There is,” he acknowledged. “I’ll save her if I can, but what will you do with that life if we save her?”
She didn’t answer.
“Zoe, I can see the agony in your eyes and practically hear that voice in your head.”
“Yeah? What’s it saying?”
“Take the easy way. Run, hide, and avoid the trouble. Protect yourself and Pasha and don’t take any chances.”
She gave him a slow smile. “You can hear that voice in my head?”
“Loud and clear.”
“Then why don’t you do what it’s screaming at you to do?”
He leaned closer, wrapping both arms around her. “This?”
“You must be stone deaf.” She put her hands on his face and brought his mouth to hers. “Kiss me, kiss me, kiss me. Hear that now?”
He did, and it was music to his ears.
Chapter Twelve
Heat like she’d never felt before rose up from deep, deep inside her, burning a hole in her chest and making her want to scream with the need to relieve it. And yet Pasha’s whole body was chilled.
She had a fever.
The kind that made her eyeballs ache and her arms numb.
She turned again to place the cool cotton pillowcase against her inflamed cheek, but almost instantly the material was as warm as she was.
At least Pasha hadn’t lied to Zoe. Not tonight, anyway. She really did feel so punk that she’d had to rest all afternoon and into the evening. She really had felt the urge to nod off every time Zoe tried to have a conversation with her—as if she hadn’t known where that was going—and she really had been too tired to sit at the table and eat dinner.
And as the evening wore on, Pasha felt worse, trying harder to hide it with each of Zoe’s efforts to make things better. She’d come in and brought Pasha food, even put a little vase of flowers on the tray, but Pasha couldn’t eat.
Zoe had sat on the edge of the bed and tried again to explain about an experimental treatment that involved putting viruses in her body, making it sound like that was a good thing, but Pasha had nodded off.
And, even when Zoe had attempted small talk and asked Pasha questions about the little boy and how sweet he was, it had been nearly impossible to stay in that conversation. But Pasha had told Zoe how much she loved her. And that was the truth; the only thing that burned hotter in her cancer-filled chest than pain was her love for Zoe Tamarin.
Little Bridget, the desperate, terrified, talkative child who’d come into Pasha’s life when they were both at rock bottom, had given Pasha a reason to go on. Now that little girl was all grown up, and she deserved more than this. She deserved better than a life with Pasha.
She deserved him.
With each hour the fever got a little more intense, like it was burning the common sense right out of her. Because an idea had planted itself and it wouldn’t let go. If only she could hav
e a sign so she could know if that idea was right or not.
She needed a sign.
She’d been waiting for one since Zoe had left, around ten o’clock. Maybe she’d gone to Lacey’s house, but Pasha would put her money on Zoe choosing a different soft place to fall tonight. Pasha knew exactly where that girl had gone. Right to his arms. Right to where she belonged.
It was quite possible she’d be gone all night.
Very slowly she pushed back the covers, sending a cascade of goose bumps over her exposed skin.
Time to get into action, Tricia.
It had been a while since she’d thought of herself as Tricia. Maybe that was the sign that it was time to go.
In her closet, she pulled out a small duffel bag that had never been unpacked. The essentials were always there: cash, toiletries, clothes. Lifting it was a challenge, despite how light it was, but she got it to the bed and looked around for what she should take with her.
She always left room in her panic bag for the most important things. A picture of Zoe. Her favorite earrings. Hair gel. Some aspirin and Tums. She stood in front of the bureau deciding what else to take, her gaze landing on the vase Zoe had brought in with Pasha’s dinner. The pink flower was unusual, more like a ball of fuschia-colored needles.
The mimosa flower, Zoe had said, the official flower of Mimosa Key.
She reached to touch the silky needles that stuck straight out like Pasha’s hair when she managed to get it perfect. As she brushed the bloom, her finger started to shake. With a sudden spasm, she toppled the vase, the water spilling, the flower fluttering to the ground.
She let out a cry, but that made her cough, then choke, igniting more fire in her windpipe and making her lungs feel like someone was pressing a steam iron on them.
The flower lay on the floor in a little mess, water dripping down the side of the bureau like tears. What was nature’s message in that mess? She dug through everything she knew, every possible interpretation.
Pink. Pink. Pink always represented innocence, youthfulness, the indefatigable spirit of a child.