to contact me right away if there were any developments, and so naturally—
‘Sorry,’ Bell said. ‘Work thing.’ She pushed the cell back in her pocket.
‘Can’t you turn that off?’ Sam said. He might have meant her cell, but he also could have meant her passion for her job. Ever since she’d become prosecuting attorney, he’d complained about it. She was paid too little, he scoffed, for what the office required, the long hours, the constant aggravation.
‘This is our child, Belfa,’ Sam went on piously. ‘Our little girl. She wants to talk to us. Seems pretty important.’ He paused. ‘At least it is to me.’
Bell gave him a slit-eyed stare. In years past they’d been interrupted many, many times during important family conferences by his cell, his work, his ‘emergencies’ – she couldn’t even think the word without attaching pincers to it, the invisible grappling hooks of sarcasm – and he had the nerve to criticize her?
At least her calls were about things that mattered. They were about people’s lives. Not last-minute details about some golf junket for a bunch of on-the-take congressmen, some trip bankrolled by a pharmaceutical company desperate for FDA approval for some new anti-cellulite pill that was going to make somebody a gazillion bucks. Which constituted Sam’s main business these days, the splendid use to which he was putting his law degree: smoothing the road for rich guys to get richer, courtesy of the United States government. Strong, Weatherly & Wycombe was a top lobbying firm in D.C. One-stop shopping for any company seeking inroads with Congress, the regulatory agencies, even the president – and willing to pay for it.
Sam was a lawyer. A damned good one. He had the skill and the knowledge to help people, to level things up just a bit in a world that was relentlessly slanted. Instead he’d gone for the big payday.
There was little left in him of the man Bell had married.
It wasn’t the only reason they had divorced – Sam’s occasional infidelities also put a crimp in things – but for Bell, it was right up there near the top. It might have been even more crucial and damning than the affairs, which Sam seemed to regard as additional fringe benefits of being rich and successful, like two-hundred-dollar haircuts and bespoke suits, affairs which never bothered Bell as much as other people told her they ought to.
Now she refocused on her daughter. She leaned forward and smiled, feeling the pinch in her shoulder but realizing that the other pinch – the one that came in her heart when she looked at Carla’s sour wounded face – felt worse.
‘Sweetie,’ Bell said, ‘why don’t you tell me what you wanted to—’
‘Forget it,’ Carla snapped. ‘Just forget it.’
Carla knew she sounded mean and that was perfectly fine, because she wanted to sound mean. Her mom didn’t care about her. That much was obvious. All she cared about was work, the stupid cases and the stupid people and all the stupid lawyer stuff. Carla was sick of her mom’s job. Sick of Acker’s Gap. And behind all that, fueling it, pushing it, causing it, really, although Carla didn’t want to admit it, she was scared of what she knew about the shooting and even more scared of telling her mother how she’d come to know it.
Carla realized, even as she was letting the bitter thoughts about her mother unspool in her head, that they were unfair and inaccurate; the thing about irrational anger, though, was that it satisfied. It was like a sugar rush. Temporarily, it felt damned good. To hell with the aftermath.
Carla had been teetering. Hadn’t been able to make up her mind. The text her mother received was just the nudge Carla needed. She doesn’t care about me. Never did. Never will.
And that was why, when she saw her mother’s face, earnest and concerned, with a kind of melting softness in her eyes, Carla felt something twist inside her, something that hurt, burned, because of course she knew that her mother did care, did love her, loved her more than anything else in the world, and that made it worse somehow. All Carla could think of was that she wanted to punish her mom, to make her pay, make her pay for loving Carla so much and for letting things get to be so complicated and difficult and confusing, for putting this hot twisty thing in Carla’s stomach – and Carla knew how to do that. She knew how to