Page 64 of Quarter Miles (Runaway 3)

My stomach clenched. How could a mother name her child and then not use that name?

“She didn’t want me. To this day, I don’t know why she kept me. Maybe to be her punching bag.”

My heart stopped. “She hit you?”

“Pinched. Slapped. The occasional kick. I think my life would have been easier if I bruised easily.”

“But you’ve got the toughest skin on the planet.”

How many times had I teased her about it? The woman would run her shins into the coffee table and other than a slight red mark immediately afterward, she didn’t bruise. The only time I’d seen her black and blue was when we’d been playing baseball for fun and she’d caught a ball with her eye instead of her hand. Even then, it had healed in a couple of days without a trace.

“What about your father?” Kat hadn’t spoken of him, though I’d known she’d run away from her mother’s home.

“I don’t know who he is. Probably one of my mother’s meth-head friends.”

“Meth.”

Kat nodded. “Mom’s drug of choice during my teenage years. I didn’t care because when she was using, she’d disappear for days on end. It was when she’d come home that things were bad.”

“I don’t . . .” Christ, I wanted to hold her. “I’m sorry.”

“We never had money. If not for school food, I would have starved. She spent everything. Stole whatever I managed to scrape together, no matter where I hid it.”

Which had led her to the sidewalk, where she’d sat and begged for money to buy some fucking shoes. My insides twisted into a knot. I hated this for her. I hated that she’d had to endure so much strife.

“After I met Karson and followed him to the junkyard, I went home. There were some kids at my high school in foster care and I didn’t want to go through that, bouncing from place to place. The junkyard sounded fun so I spent a week slowly packing. Trying to make it inconspicuous. Then I waited for Mom to disappear. It took a week, but she left and I was ready. I figured I’d be long gone by the time she showed up again. But she only left for an hour. She came home and caught me three steps away from the door, carrying a garbage bag and a backpack.” Kat’s hand drifted to her eyebrow, to the small scar barely visible between the dark hairs.

I’d asked her once how she’d gotten that scar. “You didn’t get

that from running into a shelf, did you?”

“It was a shelf. I didn’t run into it though. She pushed me and I fell. For a woman who constantly spoke about getting rid of me, she really hadn’t liked that I was leaving. She flew into a rage and locked me inside my room. The window in my bedroom had been boarded up for years. I couldn’t get the door open. She locked me up and left for a week. If not for the bottles of water and the loaf of bread that I’d already put in that backpack to take with me to the junkyard, I would have probably died.”

“Kat—”

“I had to pee in the corner of my closet.” Her jaw tensed, her eyes narrowing. “I hope it smelled for years after I left. I hope she had one sober day when she realized what she put me through.”

I gulped. “How’d you get out?”

“One of her drug dealers came over because she owed him money. He opened my door, thinking she was locked inside. He took one look at me and decided I’d be payment enough.”

“No.” My stomach pitched. “He didn’t—”

“I was so weak. So hungry. I wouldn’t have been able to fight him off. But he got close enough, smelled the urine and decided a punch to the face was good enough. I blacked out and when I woke up, he was gone. He’d left the door open so I cleaned myself up, grabbed my bag of clothes and left. You know the rest.”

“Kat, I’m sorry.” My voice was hard to use past the lump in my throat. I clutched her hand to my heart and dropped a kiss to her knuckles. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she whispered. There was a numbness to her voice. A robotic tone that I hadn’t heard before. “I found my way out.”

For a lot of years, I’d felt guilty about what I’d done to her mother. Maybe Kat would hate me for keeping this secret, but knowing this, how her mother had treated her . . .

The guilt was gone.

“Thank you for telling me.” I clutched her hand, binding her to me so she couldn’t flee. “Now I have to tell you something.”

“About what?”

I met her blue eyes. “About your mother.”