Morrison (Caldwell Brothers)

More bills. More debt paid by Monte.

Stress consumes and mistakes happen, like missing a birth control pill or two. To keep an eye on costs, I cremated Momma. Two months later, I was allowed a trip to Santa Barbara to release her ashes. Feeling sick, I peed on one of those godforsaken sticks, and the two pink lines sealed my fate.

I am a statistic. The sins of the mother were passed on to the daughter.

Regardless of how this baby came to be, I will hold on to hope and give my daughter better than I had. Somehow, some way, the cycle will be broken.

I shouldn’t complain. Really, Monte allows me friends. His friends, of course, but I’m not nearly as tied down as my mother was. I have a nice car, a nice house, and a closetful of clothes. From the outside looking in, I have it made.

If only people knew I live in a loveless marriage of manipulation and corruption. I’m not the only one who owes Monte. Everyone in his life is in debt to him for some amount.

The hustler who refuses to be hustled, always in control, always making sure he has the upper hand, Monte has people who handle his other people. The ones who don’t pay up or have a service plan like me deal with those people as Monte keeps up the pressure until the debt is repaid, or someone suffers the consequences. As Monte says, “It’s a world of checks and balances, Hailey.”

And he keeps the checks and balances in his favor at all times and in all ways.

If I don’t walk the line, I will pay the price . . . with my life. My debt to him is beyond anything I could repay with a regular job. Hell, I don’t know if the bastard would ever actually allow me to leave, even if I tried.

At what point does enough become enough, though? When do I break free of the chains holding me down? When do I break the cycle for my daughter? When does Marisa Noelle Timmons get to see love in action? How can I teach her what love is when I don’t even know myself?

I haven’t learned a lot in my short life, but I do know I have never seen real love exist in any relationship around me, and it sure as shit isn’t what you read about in books. I haven’t lived what anyone would consider a normal life, but I damn sure know love isn’t about a debt, either. A real marriage, a real relationship—if one could ever exist—isn’t about owing your partner a damn thing.

I look down at my sleeping, precious baby girl, and my heart swells. I may not know the love of a man for a woman, but I damn sure know that nothing—and I mean abso-fucking-lutely nothing—tops the depths of emotion a mother feels for her child.

My world is warped. My life is shit. I’d managed to get not one thing right in my meager existence until I had this little girl. Every breath she takes is a breath of new life into me.

Monte can check and balance himself until the sun falls from the sky as long as I have my baby girl.

I want out.

But I want her more.

There is no way I can leave until I know I get to do it with her. There is no way I can escape until I find a way to make it free and clear with her. She is my very life, my very being, my entire world.

One day, I’m going to find a way to have something better for us both. I just haven’t figured it out quite yet.

“Sleep well, my sleeping beauty. Momma’s gonna make it right for both of us,” I whisper to the quiet room around me. “We don’t need Prince Charming, baby girl. Somehow, some way, little princess, I will make it happen.”

Chapter Three

After changing my clothes, I step out of the airport bathroom. I am someone different here. I am a high roller. I’m what those jocks and preps from high school wanted to become.

For a brief moment, I think of Annie and wonder if she found a man she could make over right out of high school. Annie’s tell was the glimmer in her brown eyes when she saw her little socialite friends checking me out. I made her look even better. Apparently to her it was cool to date down. But I had no intention of being anybody’s down.

Here, nobody would use me that way. I made the man whose reflection I look at in the mirror today. My sister-in-law Livi calls me Slick, and by God, she isn’t lying.

As usual, I throw a twenty in the airport slots. I walked off the plane with two grand, and that money will get me through a month, if not more.