Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
Leah
I cannot believe my eyes right now.
Angelica is waiting for me at Ruby Memorial.
Not inside. In the parking lot, leaning against a car that's seen better days—a rental, probably, the kind you get from the budget counter at the airport when your credit cards are maxed and your life is held together with dental floss and bad decisions.
She's wearing sunglasses even though it's overcast, and her arms are crossed over a jacket that used to be expensive and now just looks like it's trying too hard.
I know it's her before I even get close.
The blonde hair, the thin frame, the way she holds herself like she's posing for a photograph nobody's taking.
I saw her across a kitchen table two nights ago and the image hasn't left me.
She pushes off the car when she sees me coming across the lot.
I'm in my scrubs, badge on the lanyard, travel mug of coffee in one hand and my bag in the other.
I just finished a twelve-hour shift.
I saved two lives, lost zero, and managed not to think about Coin for almost forty consecutive minutes, which is a personal record.
That record just ended.
"Leah." She says my name like she's been practicing it. Like she looked me up, learned the syllables, prepared for this moment the way a lawyer prepares for cross-examination. "Can we talk?"
I should keep walking.
I should walk past her, get in my car, drive to Coin's house ,or the clubhouse, or literally anywhere else.
I should not engage with the woman who abandoned her children and then handed their names to loan sharks and then showed up in my boyfriend's kitchen crying designer tears.
Boyfriend.
We haven't even had an official discussion, but I know we're not going anywhere.
"Sure," I say. Because apparently I don't learn.
She pulls off her sunglasses. Her eyes are red-rimmed and puffy—she's been crying, or she hasn't been sleeping, or both.
Up close, she looks worse than she did at the kitchen table.
The Vegas lifestyle hasn't just caught up with her; it's running her down.
There are hollows under her cheekbones that aren't from contouring, and her hands—wrapped around her own elbows, hugging herself—are shaking the way they shook around that glass of water.
"I know what you think of me," she says.
"You don't know anything about what I think of you."
"I know you think I'm a terrible mother.
I know Colton thinks I'm a terrible mother.
I know my own daughter told me I'm not her mother at all.
" Her voice cracks, and the crack sounds real.
Not performed. Real. "And maybe they're right.
Maybe I am terrible. But I didn't come back to Morgantown to cause problems. I came because I'm scared, and I didn't have anywhere else to go. "
"Okay," I say. Not agreeing. Just acknowledging. The way I acknowledge patients who tell me things I can't fix—I hear you, I see you, and that's all I've got.
"You're not what I expected," she says.
"What did you expect?"
"I don't know. Someone harder, maybe. Someone more like the club." She looks me up and down again. The scrubs, the sneakers, the lanyard with my hospital ID hanging against my chest. "You're a nurse."
"I am."
"And you're... with him."
"I am."
Something moves across her face.
Not anger, exactly—something closer to grief.
The specific grief of watching someone else live the life you threw away, and knowing you threw it away, and knowing you can't get it back.
"I was with him first," she says. Quiet. Almost to herself.
"I know you were."
"I was with him when Wrenleigh was born.
I held her first. I was the first person she ever saw.
" Her chin trembles. "I know that doesn't mean anything now.
I know I lost the right to—I know. But I was there.
I was her mother. I was Sadie Jo's mother.
And now I'm standing in a parking lot watching another woman move in my children's lives like she owns them. "
"I don't own them."
"But they love you."
The words hit me somewhere I'm not prepared for.
Not because they're wrong, because I haven't let myself think about it in those terms yet.
Love. The girls.
It's been PT exercises and homework help and dinners at the kitchen table and Sadie Jo migrating to whatever room I'm in.
It's been Wrenleigh asking for me by name when her friend OD'd.
"They're good kids," I say. "That's because of Coin, not me."
"I know." Her voice breaks on it. "I know that's because of him. That's the worst part. He did everything I was supposed to do, and he did it better, and he did it alone because I was too selfish and too broken to stay."
I look at this woman: blonde, thin, shaking in a parking lot, and I feel the thing I've been trying not to feel since she sat at that kitchen table.
Not sympathy, exactly. Not forgiveness.
Something more complicated than either of those.
The recognition of a person who is genuinely, deeply damaged, who made choices that destroyed the people she was supposed to protect, and who is standing in the wreckage of it with nothing left but the knowledge that she did this to herself.
I've seen that look in the ER.
On addicts who've relapsed.
On parents who've hurt their children.
On people who hit bottom and found that bottom was further down than they ever imagined.
It doesn't excuse anything, and it sure as hell doesn't fix anything.
But it's real, and I'm not built to look away from real.
"I'm not trying to replace you," I say. "I couldn't if I wanted to.
You're their mother. That's biology, and it doesn't change no matter how many years go by or how angry Wrenleigh is.
But being their mother and being in their lives are two different things, and right now, you being in their lives is Coin's call. Not mine. Not yours."
She stares at me.
The tears are back—running down her face now, not the careful, controlled tears she used on Coin.
These are messy. Ugly. Real.
"You're not their mother," she says. And there's a shift in her voice.
The grief hardening into something sharper.
Something desperate. "You'll never be their mother.
You're just the latest woman warming his bed.
How long do you think it'll last? A month?
Two? You don't know him the way I know him. You don't know what it's like to—"
"You're right." My voice is steady, through and through. "I'm not their mother. Their mother left. I stayed."
She has no answer for that.
I watch it process—the ugliest, truest thing either of us has said—and I watch her face collapse around it like a building with the foundation pulled out.
I should feel triumphant. I don't. Instead, I feel sick.
"Go back to the hotel, Angelica. Get some rest. And when Coin decides the girls are ready, show up. Be present. Be honest. Don't make promises you can't keep." I pause. "That's all any of us can do."
I turn and walk to my car.
My hands aren't shaking. My voice didn't crack. My face didn't change.
I did good, I think.
I suck in a deep breath, and take a look around.
My shift ended at seven, and this time of year, everything is pitch black by five-thirty.
The kind of dark that settles into parking garages like water into a basement, filling every corner, eating the light from the overhead fluorescents that are always half-burned-out because this is a hospital, not a shopping mall, and the maintenance budget goes to things that keep people alive, not things that keep parking garages well-lit.
My car is in the far corner because I got here at six-fifty this morning and the close spots were already taken by the day shift.
My sneakers echo on the concrete and the sound bounces off the low ceiling and the walls, and it sounds louder than it should because the garage is almost empty.
I hear them before I see them.
Footsteps. Two sets.
Not the normal rhythm of people walking to their cars—deliberate, timed, closing the distance behind me with a pace that says they know exactly where I'm going and they want to get there first.
I don't run.
I should, probably, but something freezes in my legs—not fear, not exactly.
Something older.
The instinct that says if you run, you're prey, and if you're prey, they chase.
I've worked in emergency medicine for years now.
I know what adrenaline does to the human body.
I know the physics of fight or flight. And right now, every nerve in my body is screaming flight, and my legs won't move.
I turn around.
Two men. Nothing polite or professional about either of them.
One is tall, shaved head, tattoos crawling up his neck.
The other is shorter, stockier, with a jaw like a cinder block and hands that look like they've broken things for a living.
"Leah Mercer," the tall one says. Not a question.
My blood goes cold. They know my name.
"We know who you are," he continues, stepping closer.
"We know where you work. We know you've been spending a lot of time at Colton Adkins' house, playing house with his little girls.
" He smiles. It doesn't reach his eyes. Nothing about this man reaches his eyes.
"Tell your boyfriend the clock just ran out. "
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Sure you do." He steps closer. I step back.
My hip hits the side mirror of someone's sedan and I realize with a sick lurch that they've been herding me—walking me into the corner of the garage where there are no cameras, no exits, no one to hear.
The short one moves fast, faster than I expect.
He grabs my arm and spins me and my back slams against the side of a car hard enough to drive the air out of my lungs.
My coffee mug hits the concrete and shatters. My bag drops. The lanyard snaps and my badge skitters across the floor.