16. Disappointment
Chapter 16
Disappointment
Winnie
eighteen years old
And just like that, my high school graduation was added to that long list of life experiences blown off by my parents in the name of business.
More like drugs, sex, and money. But those were the tenets of their business, so…
The thing that made this one so hard to swallow was the absence of my best friend, my ride or die. Though seeing as how she had, in fact, almost died, I struggled with that particular phrase now.
Tru and I had been all set, our plans were solid and ready to be set in motion, until she disappeared without a trace.
Guilt nipped at my heels because I should have known something was off, that things weren’t right.
If I had been paying closer attention, I would’ve noticed the changes in her, in everything around us, really. But most of the changes were so small, too subtle.
Big changes happened when my father stopped having me meet his friends in the alley behind his club. That was the first and last time I argued with my father in public. For the most part, I didn’t bother arguing with him in private after that either.
The meetings—drops, really—became much more involved after that one. They went from scary, back alley exchanges that my father sent me to all alone, to being accompanied by one of his most trusted men. The only part of it that made me feel remotely safer was that they happened behind the closed doors of a select few high-class hotels and mostly during daylight hours.
Looking at the whole thing objectively, was it really any better to meet strange men in hotel suites? It was hard to say, but the change mattered to me.
Tru didn’t like it, though. She didn’t like that she went from having my back and manning the getaway car, to being relegated to the sidelines.
We fought about the whole thing more than once. Shit, we fought about it a lot. Tru didn’t trust my dad to put my safety first, rightfully so, but it scared me when she started following me.
At first, I just felt like I was being watched, I didn’t know it was Tru. I never thought for a minute that she was all that sneaky, but I felt eyes on me way before I eventually saw her parked across the street of the hotel downtown.
After that, the little hairs on the back of my neck prickled with awareness. And each time I had another meeting, those prickles got spicier, my shoulders filled with more and more tension.
When she disappeared, I expected the feeling to stop, but it never did. That prickly, itchy awareness became so familiar, it gave me a certain amount of peace. Security.
But Tru was gone. She disappeared without a trace.
Her father acted like nothing happened. He just waved me off with a mumbled proclamation that she was probably with her mother.
There wasn’t an ounce of truth in his claims, though. My best friend wouldn’t leave without me. We had a plan. We were leaving together…
I peeled the shiny polyester graduation robe from my sweaty skin and folded it as neatly as I could. It had to be returned to the school office because I didn’t have the extra cash to cover the outrageous fee. Sure, other parents foot the bill for their kids who were posing for pictures with their besties, making plans for college. They’d be the ones party hopping later that night, going from house to house and celebrating as high school grads do.
Not me, though. I handed in my graduation gown and started my lonely walk home.
Not home…to the woods.
Even after all the time that had passed, it was still my safe space. And every time I turned the corner on the trail to our tree, I couldn’t help but look for Christophe.
He was never there.
He’d disappeared from my life just like Tru. Little by little, piece by piece, everyone took off leaving me in their rearview mirror. Everyone except my parents. They just used me to make their lives easier.
I settled on the fallen log, deep in the woods that separated my house from Christophe’s. Really, the woods separated our worlds.
How many times had he invited me to his house? How many times had he invited me into his world? To meet his mother? To have my wounds bandaged, my emotions soothed? To experience what life entailed on the other side of the tree line?
And I never went.
Fear controlled me, keeping me from experiencing the world. And it wasn’t always fear of getting in trouble or fear for my safety—even as a little kid, I knew safety wasn’t something I had at home. No, it was the dread of finding out that life was better literally anywhere else. At six-, ten-…even twelve years old, that was too scary. Far too intimidating a thought to process.
Now though, at eighteen, I would jump at the chance. I quite literally had nothing and no one left here. If it weren’t for the constant, low key feeling of dread that simmered around all thoughts of Tru, I’d run. I’d go all the way around the world—to the exact spot where one step further would become a single step back in this direction.
My shoulders drooped under the weight of all the unknowns hanging over my head. I had a shit past, absolutely no plans for my future, not without Tru. I was depending on her. I needed her to get away, she was an integral part of our plan.
She took care of me.
She kept me sane
And now, I was completely alone.
I pushed myself up off the log, drawn to the large oak that held all of my dreams. The rough point of the heart I’d carved around my initials and Christophe’s points to a small opening in the trunk that cradled my journal and the cash Tru and I managed to save. It wasn’t nearly enough but even that small amount had been hard for us to come by—no one in town was willing to hire me.
Not even the diner wanted to give me a job waiting tables. I’d been in tears and almost crashed into a tall red-headed man in a suit as I left, feeling overwhelmed and utterly defeated. I still don’t know why the owner changed his mind, but when he caught up to me at the end of the block and told me he’d reconsidered, the tears flowed just the same, but my relief was very real.
Still, getting out of here didn’t look quite the same.
With nothing else to do, I opened my journal and quickly counted our cash.
I counted it again.
And then I counted it a third time, because the amount tucked between the pages was not the pittance that’d been there last time I’d checked. And in a wild twist…it wasn’t less. It was enough for me to leave.
Thousands.
I slapped my hands over the crisp hundred-dollar bills and spun my head around. There was no one lurking in the trees, no one stepped into my clearing, but my heart thundered in my chest anyway.
I’d been careful, so careful, each time I went out there. Who would have followed me? Who would have watched as I tucked my tips inside the cover of my journal?
I huffed a laugh.
Who would do all of that and then add twenty brand new, crisp hundred-dollar bills to my escape funds?
A ghost.
The ghost of my first foolish crush.
He was the only person I could think of who might’ve had money like that, but it made no sense. Christophe had left.
I hadn’t seen him, hadn’t heard from him, in almost six years, there was no way he would do something like this. Would he?
There was absolutely no way I could leave that much cash out here. My tree was solid, but it wasn’t a bank. Carefully, I folded the bills and shoved them deep into my pocket, before tucking my journal back into its hiding spot.
With a final sweep of the area, I made my way back through the woods to pack up what I could. It wouldn’t be much, but it wasn’t like I had all that much anyway.
This would be good. This is what I’d wanted. What I’d planned…just not how.
But I could go, get set up in a cheap apartment, just like I would have if Tru were still here, and then I’d try to figure out what had happened to her, where she’d been, and how to get her back.
What I hadn’t expected to find propped up against my door was a broken and battered Tru.