Owen. Jake. Everything. He knew what his monster of a nephew had done.
The sheriff handed me a thick yellow envelope and walked away without uttering a word.
I closed the door and sat back down on the couch, losing my will to flee. I dropped my backpack onto the floor beside my feet and examined the envelope in my hands. It was too thick and heavy to be a letter. My name was written in feminine handwriting, in large black marker across the top flap. I opened the seal and poured the contents out onto the coffee table.
What little there was left of my heart nearly stopped.
It was money—stacks that had bands around them, labeling how much was in each. I had never seen so much money in my entire life. I prodded around inside the envelope. There was no note—just a business card. It read Bethany Annabelle Fletcher, ESQ, Attorney at Law. Owen’s mother. And on the other side, in the same handwriting as my name on the envelope it read:
To ease your troubles…
The Fletchers were trying to clean up Owen’s little mess. This made them as sick and twisted as Owen. At least I knew then where he got it from. The money— ten-thousand dollars from what I estimated—was hush money, meant to keep me quiet. The Fletchers obviously didn’t want people to know that their golden boy was really a sadistic rapist. The thought made me gag.
I wondered how many times he’d done this before, how many times this worked for them in the past.
It sure as shit wasn’t going to work with me.
Bethany Fletcher was trying to give me money to ease my troubles. Like money would undo the damage Owen had done to me, over and over again. There truly was only one thing that could ease my troubles completely. Since Jake was gone now, it was no longer an option.
But if Jake were here…
He wasn’t, though, and he would never be again. I would never experience his reassuring touch. I would never again see his stone face turn soft when he looked at me. This kind of pain, coming from a heart that I thought I had successfully closed off to the outside world years ago, was worse than any physical pain anyone could cause me. It was worse than what I’d experienced the morning after Owen attacked me.
I would go through what Owen put me through a thousand times over to have Jake be the person I thought he was.
Jake would put Owen to ground if he knew, and I would want him to. Frankly, I didn’t care if that thought made me a bad person. Bad, good. Right, wrong. The lines were so blurry lately. I was in love with a killer, and I wanted Owen dead.
When I thought of it as simply as that, maybe it wasn’t so blurry after all.
The money on the coffee table mocked me, and I could feel all the pent up anger that had been distorted by the sadness from losing Jake rise to the surface. No matter what they tried to pay me, I wasn’t going to say anything to anyone except Jake, anyway. Did they think I’d be seeking justice from a failed system? That I’d tell people what their precious son did to me? Little did they know Jake leaving had just bought Owen a reprieve from his almost guaranteed death sentence. Something clicked inside me. I wasn’t sad over losing Jake, or upset that Bethany Fletcher thought I was poor, stupid white trash who could be bought.
I was fucking enraged.
I couldn’t remember a time in my life when I’d been so angry. The heat from below the surface of my skin felt as if it had been dropped in oil. I wanted to jump out of my skin and harm someone, throw something. To destroy for the sake of destroying.
The hair on the back of my neck stood up. My heart rate went from normal to borderline cardiac arrest in a matter of seconds.
Fuck. This. Shit.
This bitch thought she could buy my silence? Well, she was dead fucking wrong. All the Fletchers were. And, I was about to show them how dead fucking wrong they really were.
The argument Jake and I had in the kitchen over me paying him back for the camera he’d bought me played in my head. “I’ll just burn the money,” he’d said, when I insisted on paying him back.
I stuffed the bills back in the envelope before grabbing Jakes truck keys from the rack. My move to nowhere would have to wait a little while. I grabbed a half empty bottle of lighter fluid from the shelf over the barbecue and a pack of matches from the drawer below it.
I got into his truck and drove. I tried to ignore the part of me that was thinking about how much the truck smelled like him, how his old black baseball cap was still sitting on the dashboard, and how much all I wanted to do was curl up in the back seat and sleep surrounded in his smell.
The misery wasn’t going anywhere, either.
I became more and more heated as I drove. I saw red again. The anger poisoned my blood, and I was drunk on it. High on my hatred. My heart pounded in my ears the closer I got to my destination. I didn’t follow a single traffic law. The gas pedal was squeezed between my foot and the floor board the entire way.