I took one last look at Sins & Needles and got in the car, not even feeling the heat that only an old car can hold.
I’d only been driving for twenty minutes before the depraved finality of everything settled in. Beneath my hands was the wheel of a car that wasn’t mine and wasn’t his and wasn’t hers but it was all I had left. I had lived too fast and too hard and now I was just supposed to accept it, accept that it was a parting gift, like the briefcase in Sophia’s hands, my reward for giving up my love.
I wasn’t giving up, was I? Every bone in my body ached to turn the GTO around, to go back for Ellie, to take her from something she didn’t need to do, from a life she didn’t need to return to. From a love that never was, that could never be what she needed.
“We’re about to run out of gas,” Sophia spoke up, her voice hoarse and emotionless. My eyes drifted sideways to Ben sleeping on her lap and my lungs burned like I’d swallowed a pint of sand. I couldn’t give up on Ellie. But I couldn’t give up on Ben either. My choice had been made when I drove away from Palm Valley, I just didn’t know if I’d get my second chance one more time.
I pulled the car over to the next gas station and filled up as quickly as possible. I needed to keep it together, I needed to keep control. I needed, needed, needed.
The passenger door opened and Sophia got out, Ben still in her arms, still asleep. “I’m going to get some food,” she said, nodding at the convenience mart with the garish lights that wouldn’t hide a thing.
I put the pump back in the receiver. “Why don’t you leave Ben with me? You don’t need to take him with you.”
She shook her head. “I don’t want to wake him. He’ll sleep as long as I’m holding him.”
Things I should know about my own kid. Things that I didn’t.
“Don’t you trust me with him?” I asked coming around the car.
She raised her brows. “No, Camden. I don’t. You might be his father by birth but that’s the only father you’ve been.”
“I wrote letters …” I trailed off.
“No, you didn’t,” she snapped.
It fucking figured. My heart began to pump loudly in my ears, my fingers twitched. “I did, Sophia. I wrote him. I sent you money too, but I’m guessing you never saw any of that.”
Her eyes darted to the store and back. She licked her lips and looked back at me. “No. I haven’t gotten a dime from you.”
“Fuck,” I muttered, trying hard to keep myself from pounding my fist on the back of the car.
“If it makes you feel better, I believe you.”
I raised a brow and unclenched my fist. “Just like that?”
“Just like that.” Still, she walked off toward the store, Ben’s head on her shoulder.
I sat back in the car and rested my head on the steering wheel. I needed to think and think fast.
I had two problems. Sophia and Ellie. Both seemed impossible to fix, to make right, but it didn’t matter. I had Sophia in my hands and that was the one I’d have to fix first.
Sophia was turned over to Javier by her brothers in exchange for the money I stole from them. It didn’t really surprise me, not really. They’d always been the types to throw each other under a bus if it meant coming out on top. Her whole family was fucked up that way, rotten to the core. Ellie had theories that they were tied to the Mafia but they weren’t Sicilian, just Italian. They were tied to something big and bad, that’s all I knew.
Now, obviously Sophia couldn’t go back to them. She wasn’t living with her brothers. Last I knew they were at least in LA, near her in Silverlake. They were too close for comfort and I was pretty sure if they ever saw my head popping up in their neighborhood, they’d shoot it clean off. I had to convince Sophia to leave LA with Ben. I had to get them somewhere far away and safe. At the depth of mud I was sunk in, I couldn’t take things to the police, not without going to jail myself. Fuck, if I really thought about it, there was a grocery list of felonies I’d committed in the last week alone.
Once I got Sophia away, maybe even in another state, Oregon, who knows where, I’d contact Gus, the guy Ellie vouched for. We could get Sophia a new name. We had money. We could start again.
It sounded all too familiar.
What about Ellie?
What about Ellie?
What about Ellie?
What happened to her? Every day I was apart from her was a day she was farther and farther away. Three lives were at stake here and I couldn’t save all of them at the same time.
I exhaled loudly feeling nothing but hopeless and my eyes fell to the passenger side. The briefcase was gone. I sat up and craned my neck to look at the store. I couldn’t see Sophia inside. No …
Panic rose inside me. She wouldn’t take the money and leave me here? She didn’t hate me that much. She couldn’t …
I didn’t know her at all, did I?