Total pages in book: 142
Estimated words: 136507 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 683(@200wpm)___ 546(@250wpm)___ 455(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 136507 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 683(@200wpm)___ 546(@250wpm)___ 455(@300wpm)
“Yeah, I do. We would have gone to that party and then we would have come home. She wouldn’t have been hanging in a dark parking lot for some stupid guy.”
“And you have no idea who she was going to see?”
She shakes her head. “She never said. She probably thought I would tell my mother.”
Which means the guy had to be really wrong for her.
“I wouldn’t have left her there.” Isla’s voice wavers on those last words, and when she passes me to drop the soiled bedding into the wheelbarrow, there are unmistakable tears rolling down her cheeks.
No wonder the kid can’t sleep. She’s drowning in guilt that doesn’t belong anywhere near her shoulders.
Copper hovers at the stable door next to me, snorting impatiently. I reach up to scratch his muzzle, wordlessly telling him to wait. “Holly seems like she does what she wants.” I’m careful not to use the past tense, though the odds of the girl turning up alive shrink with each passing day.
Isla shrugs. “People think she’s trouble, but she’s not. She’s funny, and thoughtful, and she makes me laugh. She never talks bad about other people, unless they say something about one of her friends. She always has your back. She used to come to all my hockey games, when I was playing for Cold River, even though she hates hockey.” Her nose scrunches. “She just sometimes makes bad decisions.”
Like flirting with a recently released convict more than twice her age in a bar, I don’t add. If I’d been any number of the guys I met in prison, that encounter would have gone very differently. “We all do, right?”
“And she has the worst taste in guys,” she adds as if she read my mind. “But she didn’t deserve whatever happened to her.”
“No, she didn’t.” Both of those things we agree on. “Have you talked to your mom about this?”
She offers a one-shouldered shrug that I’m learning sometimes means no with these kids. “I know she’s doing everything she can. She doesn’t need to be worrying about me.”
And Isla doesn’t deserve to beat herself up about any of it. “You know, I played the ‘what-if’ game too, after that night I got arrested. What if I didn’t go out with Jay that night? What if I’d stayed here, with your mom? What if I’d talked Jay out of doing something stupid? What if I’d stopped Ian when he pulled that gun?” I’d lie in my cell bed, flexing my fist, imagining my knuckles cracking that asshole’s jaw. “I played that game for years.”
Isla gives up her half-assed effort of pushing hay around. “And?”
“And I promise you, there’s never any winner. You just end up dwelling on things you can’t change and blaming yourself for things you couldn’t control.”
Her inquisitive eyes roam my face. “Do you think you could have stopped it all from happening?”
“I don’t know. That night? Maybe. But there were plenty of other nights for Jay to get caught up.”
“Yeah, my mom said he was like that. Always getting himself into something.”
“He wasn’t all bad.” He’s the one who taught me how to ride a bike and a horse, how to throw a punch and hit a can with a .22 from two hundred feet away. I can’t recall how many summer mornings we spent fishing, just him and me.
“Do you miss him?”
“Yeah. I do.” It’s an odd thing to both miss and hate a person.
Beside me, Copper leans over and nudges my shoulder.
“Okay, buddy. I can take a hint.” Sliding on my work gloves, I guide the horse out to the paddock. The slightest hint of light touches the eastern sky now. Sunrise isn’t too far off. Normally, I’ll find a perch and sit back, waiting for it to appear.
Today, though, I head back inside.
Isla whistles for Biscuit, a comb gripped in her hand, and he comes in an instant, like a well-behaved dog, and sidles up to allow her to groom.
I grab a pitchfork. “How’s school going?”
“It’s hard right now. I can’t concentrate. All anyone does is talk about Holly. They’re constantly asking me to tell them what I know, and they’re making up things about what happened to her. Bad things.”
My stomach clenches as my mind goes straight to the bad things I’ve envisioned. Isla shouldn’t have to hear them tossed around at the cafeteria table like a movie plot. “People can be really shitty.”
“Yeah.” She drags the brush across the horse’s shoulder.
My curiosity gets the better of me. “Are they saying I did it?”
Silence.
Which answers my question all the same.
“I have a tournament this weekend, so I don’t have to go in today. Thank God,” she murmurs a few minutes later, shifting the topic far from Holly.
This is the most we’ve ever talked outside of that night of cards. “Where’s the tournament?”