My throat worked around a swallow. After all we’d managed to survive over the last few weeks, there was no way I was going to let us go to prison for a car.
Numb, I heard myself say, “We’ll find a way to pay for it.”
Ramón’s eyes dipped to the bloodstains on my coat. “I can disable the tracking on the car tonight. Start the bodywork in the morning. I’ll need seventy-two hours at least. But if anyone finds out about this, Vero—”
She threw her arms around him, holding back tears. “No one will find out.”
“I spend way too much time cleaning up after you,” he muttered into her hair. As she pulled away, he dragged a clean rag from his back pocket and tossed it to me, inclining his head toward my hands. “Vero and I found your van. I’ll need a couple of days to look at it, but it probably won’t be a quick fix. After parts and labor, you might do better to replace it. You want me to stick a FOR SALE sign in the window and put it out front?” he offered. “See if I can get you a few bucks for it?”
That van had been through a lot. Ramón was probably right. It was probably long past time to put it out of its misery and find a new one. But I’d test-driven the hot, flashy sports car that handled like a dream yet felt too much like a midlife crisis. And I’d driven Vero’s Charger, with its growling engine and confident lines, which sometimes felt too much like a police car. In spite of the crumbled Cheerios in the carpet and the car seats in the back, there was something simple and comforting about my van, and I wasn’t entirely sure I was ready to give that up yet.
“Can you give me an estimate to fix it?” I asked, rubbing the last of the dried blood from my fingers.
He nodded. “Sure thing.”
“We’ll need a loaner,” Vero said. “Can we borrow some keys?”
“Wait here.” Ramón disappeared down the hall to his office.
An uncomfortably long silence stretched out between us before Vero finally spoke. “I didn’t invest the money,” she confessed quietly. “I lost it. All of it.”
“Thanksgiving weekend. After you left my parents’ house, where did you go?” I already knew. I just needed to hear her say it.
“A casino. In Atlantic City. I … owe some people money. We had all that cash from Irina, but it wasn’t enough to pay them back. I thought for sure I could double it and everything would be fine. And it would have been.” She clasped her hands, pleading with me to believe her. “I was hot that first night, Finn. I was already up by a few grand, and some guy at my table noticed. As I was heading back to my room, he told me about a private party—big buy-in, high stakes. He said he knew someone who could hook me up with a marker if I wanted to go.”
“A marker?”
“Like an advance on your book—a loan.”
A loan she would have to win back. The marker Delia had overheard Vero talking about.
If she can’t get two hundred, Delia had said, she’ll be in big trouble.
“How much was the marker worth?”
Tears brimmed in her eyes. “Two hundred thousand.”
She started as Ramón came back into the garage. He tossed her a set of keys. Her hands shook as she caught them against her chest. He held out a folded envelope. “This was in my mailbox at my apartment this morning. It’s addressed to you.”
Vero took it, glancing at the name printed in bold letters—Veronica Ramirez. Her face paled, and she and Ramón exchanged a long look. “Thanks,” she said, tucking it in her coat pocket. “I’ll bring the car around.”
Ramón grabbed my sleeve as I turned to follow her out. His brow furrowed as he watched her go. “Keep an eye on my cousin. I love her, but she’s reckless. She can’t afford any more trouble.”
I thought of the photo album I’d found in the closet of her bedroom. About the scholarship letter addressed to a last name I didn’t know. About the man who’d gone to her mother’s house looking for her, and how the best place to hide a dirty secret was across a state line.
True, Vero was impulsive. She took risks, but calculated ones; she’d always been careful to weigh the odds whenever it came to money. If Vero had put our savings on the line without telling me, she’d done it for a reason. “What kind of trouble is Vero in?”
Ramón rubbed at a grease stain on his thumb. “That’s not my story to tell.”
I watched him retreat to his office. I knew, maybe better than anyone, that some stories had a way of getting stuck inside our heads. Usually, because we were afraid of what those stories revealed about us—our fears and our inadequacies, our mistakes and our failures. Sometimes, those stories needed a little nudging to come out. I tucked the bloody rag in my pocket, along with the bullet. Whatever trouble Vero was in, we’d handle it together.