I look at her, deep into her eyes. There are a few lights on in the parking lot across the field, and they are enough to light up her face. I can see so many questions in there, so many questions that I have failed to answer. I don’t even know where I am meant to start.
So I decide that I’ll try starting with the truth.
I take a deep breath and reach out for her hand. I half expect her to pull it away, but she doesn’t. She eyes me, curious, waiting.
"I wasn’t meant to get attached to this place," I admit. "I...when I came here, it was because my father wanted me to have a year of normal life. Something that I could hang onto after I went back to him, and after I became a part of the family business for good."
"The family business?" she asks. I nod. I have avoided talking to her about this side of things as much as I could, but it looks as though there is no way for me to avoid it now.
"My father," I reply. "He runs – he runs a cartel."
I let the words hang in the air between us, waiting for her to react. She stares at me.
"Then how the hell did you end up in Sweetheart?” she blurts out.
"My father sent me here, from Boulder," I explain. "One last year of normality before he took me on for good. I wanted to get down to business with him, but at the same time, I knew that before I did, I needed to know what everyone else got to experience."
"So you were always going to leave?" she asks softly. I nod.
"I didn’t want to tell you anything," I confess. "I knew that you wouldn’t let me go, and there was no way that I was going to let what I was involved in get in the way of you living your life. You had a whole plan in front of you, I didn’t want to mess that up..."
"So you just left?" she demands. I can see some of the anger there again, the hurt. I wish that I could take it from her, carry it for her instead, but I know it’s not that easy.
"I had to go back," I reply. "They would have come looking for me, and I couldn’t bring that to your door. Or to Sweetheart. I was always going to leave, but I didn’t intend to leave you behind, too."
I can still remember, all too vividly, the day that I left. After prom. When I had packed up my stuff and left without a word to the woman that I loved, and I returned to Boulder. I had struggled so long and so hard with that choice, but it was the only one that would keep her safe. She wouldn’t want to be caught up in my world. She should never be subjected to it.
I had cried on the plane back to my father. I never let myself cry – not since then, not before. But the thought of her back here, thinking that I had left her, that I had abandoned her to her life here, was more than I could take.
"You went back to that?" she asks me. She sounds shocked. I suppose I should take that as a compliment – she doesn’t think that I could be capable of anything like that.
But in truth, she doesn’t have any idea just what I am capable of. And I know that she will never be able to understand it. I don’t want her to. I want her to know this new version of me – and I know that I will not be able to let go of her until I am sure that she does.
7
BAILEY
I sit there, his jacket draped around my shoulders, his eyes searching mine for some kind of reaction, and try to make sense of what he’s just said to me.
He was a criminal. Is a criminal?
I have no idea what he has been trying to communicate to me. I’m so confused. He left – he left because his father wanted him back to run some criminal empire? It seems almost too wild to be true. But, as he looks at me, waiting for a response, I know that it’s the truth.
"You run his cartel?" I ask, finally. I don’t know what to say. This is the last thing that I had expected him to come out with. Somehow worse than everything I had been imagining.
He shakes his head. “No. I ran it. Past tense. I worked under him for a long time," he explains. "I – I did some bad things, Bailey. And I know that you might not believe me, but trust me, I would never make something like this up–"