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Brooke had a gun. I hadn’t really processed that. She had been driving around this whole time with agun, and that was how she’d managed to save me.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,’ she said, her voice still a little defiant.

‘It’s fine.’ It wasn’t fine, but what else could I say? It had all been my fault anyway, so I couldn’t be mad at her for coming to my rescue.

‘Really?’ she said, prodding just a little now.

‘I don’t think he would’ve let me go so easily if you hadn’t had it.’

‘It’s not loaded,’ she confessed, and I almost laughed. That felt like a metaphor. The illusion of power, but none of the reality.

We fell into an uneasy silence, and Brooke started picking up leaves and shredding them into tiny pieces.

‘Are you going to leave me here?’ I murmured.

Brooke’s head snapped up. ‘What? No. Of course not.’

‘Oh. Good.’ I forced myself to sit up straight. ‘I don’t mind where you drop me off. Wherever’s easiest is fine.’

‘What are you talking about, Mouse?’ She sounded irritated again, and my shoulders hunched as I tried to make myself smaller.

‘You’re …’ I wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence. ‘You want to get rid of me, right? I’m a liability.’

She laughed then, shattering the tension. ‘You’re a liability all right, but I don’t want to get rid of you.’

‘Oh.’ It took a second for that to sink in. I didn’t fully believe her. ‘Really?’

‘Yeah. I’m mad about what happened, but I’m not mad atyou.’

She should have been mad at me, though, because there was a lot I wasn’t telling her, about my house and the Creep and all the blood. Jesus, so much blood.

It had seemed like such a good idea last night to get in Brooke’s car and go wherever she wanted to take me. Now, though, I had to face the truth that I’d dragged her into a whole tangle of messes that I’d made. Brooke was on the run with a girl the police wanted for murder. And she didn’teven know it. But when I tried to shape my mouth around the words – around the truth – nothing came out.

‘What happened with you? Did you get the cash?’ I asked, deflecting from my inner turmoil.

She nodded. ‘I managed to empty two cards. I got a grand out of one, and eight hundred bucks from the other.’

‘Mine had a thousand,’ I said. ‘But I only had the one card.’

It wasn’t exactly a shock that Brooke had access to more cash than I did. She was from a wealthy, prominent family, and I came from a single mom who was well known to CPS. We weren’t equals.

‘That’s okay,’ she said quickly. ‘We should probably divide it up and stash it in different places. Just in case, you know?’

‘Yeah. I’ve got another couple hundred bucks in cash, too. From home.’

I ran my hands across the surface of the bench, liking the way the grooves of the wood felt as they dug into my palms. Far away from other people, I felt safer out here than I had anywhere else since we’d left Seattle.

‘Right, I’ve got –’ she tipped her head to the side – ‘about the same? A little more, maybe.’

I did a quick mental calculation. ‘That’s, like, three and a half thousand dollars!’

‘Holy crap!’

‘Should get us to Disney World, right?’

Brooke collapsed into laughter, and after a moment, I joined her.

I’d seen her laugh like this before, with her friends at school. She had a way of commanding attention in the hallways or in classes, and I often watched her when I was sure no one was looking at me. Now I was the one making her laugh, and a warm feeling curled in my chest.