“Sadie, honey,” Tom said, I turned to him and saw he had his hand held out to me. “Come and sit.”
Not wanting to be a bitch because Pretend Sadie was not a bitch and anyway, he’d called me “honey” and that was so nice, the weird, happy glow I was trying to ignore came back against my will, I walked to him, put my hand in his and we both sat, facing each other.
“I need to tell you something,” Tom informed me, keeping hold of my hand.
The weird, happy glow vanished.
Oh no.
I didn’t like the look on his face and I didn’t like that he felt he needed to keep holding my hand.
Furthermore, Pretend Sadie didn’t like the vibe in the room at all and she wanted to run.
However, Ice Princess Sadie never ran. Ice Princess locked firm hands on Pretend Sadie’s arms and held her in place.
With Ice Princess in control, I felt it safe to say to Tom, “Okay.”
He squeezed my hand then he took a deep breath and launched in.
“Eighteen years ago, your Mom came to me,” Tom started.
I blinked and then stilled, knowing intuitively (from years of practice) that this innocuous statement was going to get worse.
Way worse.
I wasn’t wrong.
Tom continued, “Lizzie knew what your father did and she didn’t like it. She didn’t want you growing up in that life. She also saw your future and she didn’t like that either. She wanted to get you, and herself, out. She told me the only way to do that was to put your father in jail. She told me that she couldn’t run, taking you with her because he’d never let either of you go. She knew this because she tried on several occasions but he always found you both and brought you back.”
I pulled in my lips and I felt myself starting to breathe heavier, my heart beginning to hammer in my chest, something hot and hard forming there.
My Mom had tried to escape.
She’d tried to escape!
And she wanted to take me with her!
Oh my God!
I couldn’t believe it!
Tom went on, cutting into my fevered thoughts, “She wanted to inform on your Dad, to give me what I needed to take him down. I tried to talk her out of it. Your father wasn’t as powerful then as he was when Hector got him. But he’d done well, he was top man for Luther Diggs and what she wanted to do was dangerous.”
I couldn’t believe this either.
My sweet, quiet Mom an informant?
Impossible!
And I remembered Luther; he’d been around a lot back then. I also remembered never liking Luther, as in never. Luther was my first lesson in how to spot bad people because, in Luther’s case, he was very bad people. He reeked of it. Luther had always scared me.
I was glad when Luther went away about a year after my Mom disappeared. What I wasn’t glad about was knowing, even at twelve, that my father had assumed Luther’s elevated place in the crime world.
Tom kept talking, “She wouldn’t be swayed, even Kitty Sue tried to talk her out of it but Lizzie was determined. She said if she didn’t work with me, she’d go to someone else. I thought, if she had to do it, it was better if she worked with me. I thought that I could keep her safe –”
He stopped talking, his eyes closed tight and he looked away but not before I caught the pain that slashed through his gaze.
My heart was in my throat, clogging it, that hot, hard thing in my chest started burning.
I knew where this was going and I didn’t like it.
Not one bit.
But, for some reason, I still squeezed his hand and kept squeezing it until his eyes opened and came to me again.
“Go on,” I encouraged softly.
He stared at me a second then took in another deep breath. “At first, she couldn’t get me anything I could use. When she saw it wasn’t working, she started taking risks.”
I felt the tears hit the backs of my eyes at the thought of my Mom doing the same thing I did with Hector. I knew how scary it was and I knew the consequences and knowing now that she took the same risks, felt the same fear, all of it for me, made the burning in my chest intensify.
I found I was still squeezing Tom’s hand, this time not to encourage him to go on but because I had to.
Tom reached out and took my other hand, holding both of our hands between us.
“She started to get some good stuff, found someone in Diggs’s network that didn’t like your father, didn’t like Diggs. They started to work together not just to take down your father but also to take down Diggs. She never told me who it was, I asked but she wouldn’t give. Then, one day, she was supposed to meet me, she said she had something for me, something she thought was big, important, but she never showed.” He hesitated, I clenched my teeth, waiting for it, knowing it was coming then he went on, “I never saw her again.”
There it was.
“Please, no,” I whispered before I could stop myself.