“By the way, you’re going to want to sell that car.”

“Oh, my god, I can’t believe they arrested Lyle.” She dropped her face into her palms. “He’s going to hate me. I’ve ruined … everything. All for that man. That man wins again. Somehow he wins every time.” Her chin quivered as she thought back. “There was this one time he got me a really nice CD player. I was maybe twelve. I knew I wouldn’t have it for long. He’d lose money at the track or at the bar, and come to hock it. But I loved it. I wanted to keep it so bad, so I hid it in the crawlspace under our house.

“It’s so stupid. I mean, I couldn’t even listen to it. But I just wanted it, so I told him it was stolen. That someone broke into our house while he was at work and took it. I came home from school two days later, and it was gone.”

When she looked at me again, the fury she felt deep inside her billowed in the depths of her irises. “He never even mentioned it. Neither of us did. We just went about our lives like I’d never had it. A CD player is one thing, but my life.” Her voice cracked. “He bet my life like it was an object. Like it was disposable. Like I was disposable. He deserves all the pain he’s experiencing right now.”

I certainly couldn’t argue that. I made bacon and eggs as she packed her things. She’d even thought that far ahead. She took nothing from her house. She bought all new toiletries and clothes. We ate in relative silence, both of us miserable.

“I ruined my life. I ruined my life for that man.”

“Maybe not,” I said, putting my thinking cap on.

“What do you mean? I’ll be arrested. I’ll definitely lose my job. Forget having any future with Lyle.” She shook her head. “He was the greatest thing since sliced bread.”

“So, when you tried to break up with him?”

“I was trying to keep him as far away from this as possible.”

“I figured as much. What if we go about this whole thing a little differently? How good are you at lying? And how high is your tolerance for pain?”

* * *

Two hours later, the stage was set. I nodded to her. She nodded back. And I picked up my phone. “Parker,” I said, panting and swallowing hard like I’d been running. “I was right. Get down here. Hurry! And bring an ambulance with you. She’s alive.”

I gave him a description of the general area and hung up. We waited in the dark.

“You’re sure they couldn’t really know if every single drop of that blood was yours?”

“They don’t have the time or the resources to check every strand of DNA in that car. It would take a lot of work to figure out if it were really enough blood loss to kill me.” She reached out her hand, her roped wrist scraping across the warehouse floor. “I don’t know how to thank you, Charley.”

“You can thank me by giving your dad another chance.”

“Then I won’t be thanking you anytime soon.”

“I understand,” I said sadly.

“But maybe someday. I’m going to tell Lyle, though. Not about you. I’ll tell him I set up the whole thing and called you or something. But he needs to know what he’s getting into.”

“How do you think he’ll take it?”

“I don’t know. Not well, I’m sure.”

We heard sirens in the distance.

“Just make sure he knows you did everything you could to make sure he wasn’t implicated.”

“I will.”

We waited as cars slid to a stop in front of the warehouse. “Hey,” I said before they burst through the doors with guns blazing, “want to grab a coffee sometime?”

“Hell, yeah.”

We fist-bumped, then I hooked my arms under hers and stumbled, falling to the floor with her just as the first flashlight landed on us.

“Over here!” I called, praying this worked. Orange may have been the new black, but what it did for my complexion was barbaric.

* * *

Uncle Bob showed up on scene, and I knew he could sense something awry, but he disliked Joplin just enough to not give a shit. They whisked Emery away in an ambulance immediately, but they detained and questioned me for years.

If this worked, I promised to straighten my act up. To do good things and stop making fun of other people’s choices in accessories. The one thing that could tip the scale in our favor was the fact that Emery had fallen down a ravine the day she got to the cabin. She’d already been sporting some nasty bruises and scratches and one rather garish gash across her leg where she’d been impaled by a broken branch. That would work in our favor magnificently.