“I’m sorry,” Jagger murmured.
“Sorry doesn’t help me!” I shouted. “I’m so sick of sorry. Do you know how many people have told me they’re sorry about what happened to Bram and my parents?” I shook my head. “I want someone to be heldaccountable. I want someone to pay, like Bram paid. Like my parents paid. Like I paid.” I glared at Hawk. “The way I see it, you’re just a bunch of hotheads who do whatever you feel like doing, who live only for yourselves. So don’t you dare tell me to ‘let it go.’ Come back and talk to me when you give a shit about someone else. Come back and talk to me when you lose everything.” I hung my head, the weight of my grief just about crushing me. “When you’ve got no one.”
I hadn’t realized the truth of it until just that second. Hadn’t understood why it all felt so heavy even after all these years.
But I understood it now: I was alone.
Bram was there to make sure I kept a roof over my head, that I was safe, but there was no one I could talk to about the questions that haunted my darkest hours: what had it been like for my parents and Bram to know they were going over that cliff?
What had it been like for Bram during the twelve hours he’d been trapped with our dead parents?
“I’m going to bed.” I turned away from the Hawks, suddenly exhausted.
“The food…” Vigo spoke behind me.
“I’m not hungry.”
I just wanted to sleep. I wanted to sleep and sleep and not wake up until someone — anyone — cared even half as much as I did about what had happened to Bram and my parents.
Until someone cared what it had done to me.
26
VIGO
“Well shit.”I was still staring at the spot where Cassie had last stood, before she’d put Hawk in his place, before she’d put all of us in our place.
Jagger swore and started pacing the kitchen like an animal in a too-small cage at the zoo. “Fuck.”
Hawk took a calm swig of his beer. “How were we supposed to know?”
“We weren’t,” I said. “But we probably should’ve gotten all the facts before mouthing off about it. And by ‘we’ I mean you.”
Hawk shrugged, but I could tell he was a little off balance too. We were used to taking shit from people — we weren’t what most people would call socially acceptable — but not gonna lie: it hit different coming from Cassie.
I didn’t even want to think about why that might be the case.
I pulled out the Oreos and my Oreo cup. “Think she’s right? About Travis Dorsey?”
Hawk frowned. “The food will be here any second.”
“So?” I started crumbling the Oreos into the cup. I never understood why anyone would bother dunking and taking biteswhen it was so easy to crumble a sleeve of Oreos into the cup, cover them with milk, and eat them with a spoon.
Hawk shook his head. “It’s a big leap from a car accident on a winding mountain road to murder.”
But still… Cassie didn’t seem like an irrational person, even about something like the death of her parents.
“Her parents are dead,” Jagger pointed out. “All she has are the witnesses and the papers her parents left behind, which don’t sound enlightening. It sounds like she’s done all she can with what she has.”
I took the milk out of the fridge and looked at Hawk. “What’s your read on the DA letting Dorsey cop a plea?”
“Doesn’t mean a thing,” Hawk said, “except they didn’t think they could get a conviction. But that doesn’t mean the guy is guilty of anything other than driving too fast on the mountain.”
I used my long spoon to scoop a bite of Oreos and milk from the cup. “It doesn’t mean he’s innocent of murder either.”
Hawk hesitated, then nodded. “The only people who know what happened that night are Bram, Cassie’s parents, and Travis Dorsey.”
“Bram won’t even talk about it with Cassie,” Jagger said. “And the parents are dead.”