Casey’s face fell. “Jesus.”
She nodded, tears welling anew. “I’d felt awful after she told everyone—like everybody was either looking at me as a slut or a child-abuse victim. With pity or contempt. But after she committed suicide, I realized, in this massive, suffocating rush, how selfish I’d been. And reckless.” She paused then, registering what she’d just said. Selfish. Reckless. Those unforgivable crimes she’d been holding against Casey. “I realized how blind I’d been, when all that time it had felt like some big romantic drama. She’d never been a real person to me. A real person trapped in the same oppressive community I’d grown up in, with a real life I was destroying.” Her voice broke, shoulders beginning to shake.
“Hey.” Casey touched her arm, rubbing it softly, up and down. “It’s okay. You were fifteen. We’re all sociopaths at that age.”
She shook her head. “Yes, but my actions killed somebody, Casey.”
“If you want to blame yourself, you have to blame the whole goddamn town, too—the sort of culture you guys all lived in. People don’t just end their lives because their marriages fall apart. She had problems of her own, I promise you.”
“It’s hard to see it that way.”
“You can argue it all you want, but I could just as easily argue that your preacher seduced you. You have to cut yourself some slack. You were a kid, wrapped up with what sounds like some seriously messed-up adults. He was the one who should have known better. He was the authority figure, and three times your age, too.”
She heaved a sigh, the noise catching on sobs.
“Anyhow, we could argue about it all afternoon, but I don’t want to. Just tell me how you got from fifteen to twenty-two, and here.”
“I was sixteen by then,” she corrected, and blew her nose.
“Hey, you want a beer?”
She glanced up with raw eyes, frowning, unsure. Alcohol had never given her trouble like heroin had. She’d always hated the taste of it.
Casey didn’t wait for her answer. He disappeared and she heard the noises in the kitchen, and when he returned, he had the necks of two bottles pinched between his fingers. But he stopped on the threshold, frowning, and promptly turned around like he’d changed his mind. When he next appeared he held two clinking glasses, whiskey on ice to judge by the amber color.
“Cheers,” he said, forcing a tumbler into Abilene’s hand.
“To what?”
“To everybody messing everything up, all the time. Everybody.” He tapped her glass with his. “Now, go on. You’re sixteen.”
“I was sixteen . . . My parents were talking about sending me away to a boarding school or maybe even this Christian place, a religious mental ward basically, because I hadn’t stopped crying in days. I heard them talking about it. I’d just gotten my first car that summer, and I packed a load of clothes in the middle of the night, and I drove away. I had some money I’d saved from babysitting. I got the ID in Fort Worth, and I stayed there for a little while . . . I won’t lie, the next few years weren’t good.”
“How so?”
“I had a tenth-grade education, and I didn’t want to use my real name, since I didn’t know if my parents were looking for me. I sort of doubted they were. There was never an Amber Alert or anything.”
Casey frowned, heart twisting. “Really?”
She shook her head. “Knowing my dad, he would’ve been relieved to have me gone. When I say he was tough, and hard, I don’t just mean strict. I mean, like, after that, I was dead to him. I’d humiliated them. I looked myself up once, a few months after I left. There were local news stories. They said that I’d gone to live with relatives, but nothing about where. There was even a quote of my mom saying how, like, their daughter felt terrible for what had happened and needed a chance at a fresh start, in a new community. Like they were respecting my privacy or something.”