Page 111 of Cain

“On it,” she said, going to grab a bag then disappearing down the short hallway.

“You okay?” I asked when her mom was gone. I pulled her out from my side, looking her over. I snagged her chin, gently tipping it up. “Is that a shadow, or—”

“Or,” she said, exhaling hard.

A low growl escaped me. I wished I could resurrect the fucker just so I could strangle him myself.

“Why don’t you take Georgie into the other room for a bit?” Briggs asked. “I can get started here.”

I took him up on that, leading Georgie into a room that was stuck in time. This was the room of a teenaged girl—pink walls, posters, a floral comforter on the bed. Her pom-poms were still sitting on top of her small dresser. Littered on every surface were little clay figurines—animals, mostly. And you could see the evolution of her skills, from lumpy little animal-like figures to the ultra-cute types she seemed to be working on toward the end.

Likely right before Perry plucked her off the vine. And if there’d ever been a part of me that thought the age gap wasn’t wrong, seeing the evidence of the girl she’d been at the time really solidified the inappropriateness for me.

“She kept it a shrine,” I said as I pulled her over to the bed. Dust flew up into the air as we sat.

“It’s more likely that she just didn’t want to deal with it.”

“I don’t know. She seems to love you.”

“I don’t think I ever doubted that she loved me. In her own way. She showed up in some ways—teaching me about men not hitting me, explaining sex to me in a way that didn’t make me want to curl up and die, not making a big deal about me starting my cycle. She was more like a cool older sister who popped in with advice. She didn’t do well with the everyday parenting thing.”

“You turned out pretty damn well, though. And she showed you again today how she handles men who put their hands on you guys.”

“She’s so calm about it. My insides feel like they’re shaking.”

That might be true, but she was handling it better than I thought she might.

“He really was trying to kill me,” she said, looking over at me.

“Yeah.”

“Over… what? Me leaving him?”

“Over him being involved with a local loan shark,” I explained. “He didn’t want to have to go through discovery and have the lawyers find out that a nice chunk of his income isn’t legal.”

Georgie sighed.

“What now?”

“Now, we get this cleaned up. You take a walk with your mom. Then we go back to the clubhouse.”

“And then?”

“We wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“For someone else to report him missing. You’re estranged. You have no idea what his daily schedule looks like. But someone at work will miss him and report it.”

“Keep going. It’s helping to know the steps.”

“Then there will be an investigation. By then, you will have had some training on what to say. And what not to say. Like you don’t know where Perry is. Because, technically, you won’t.”

“And they will question my mom.”

“Yep. And she has no idea where he is either. After that, the trail will eventually go cold.” I would make sure of that.

“And what about the divorce?”