Page 34 of Finding Our Reality

“Trash is supposed to meet with his parole officer. I know the guy. I called and he was more than happy to turn the reins of the meeting over to me.”

She flips a few pages in her notebook. “He’s been out of prison for a little over seven years, right?”

When Lulu first found out my brother went to prison, when reading over Carrie’s updated case file, she was unable to hide the gleam in her eye. You would’ve thought it was Christmas morning and she just saw presents from Santa stacked underneath the tree.

“Yeah.” I answer quickly, hoping my one-word response doesn’t garner her attention.

“And he was arrested for the drug charges in September, after we both left town?”

“Yeah.”

She flaps her hand in the air. “Care to elaborate? I haven’t searched all the records on Trash yet.”

“Anonymous tip.” I glance down, pretending to busy myself with some emails on my work laptop. “Marcum received an anonymous tip regarding the drug activity at the gas station. It happened right after you left town.”

She doesn’t say anything for a long time. Areallylong time. Eventually, the anticipation forces me to look up.

She knows I’m hiding something. She’s rubbing the back of her neck and eyeballing me with suspicion. “You’re hiding something, Ry. What aren’t you telling me?”

I have to tell her. Her investigative skills are pretty stellar, she’ll piece it together sooner or later. “I called. I turned them in.”

She gasps, not expecting that. “What?”

“I called Marcum. I told him everything I knew about the drugs, who was involved, the system for buying, everything. Officially, the tip was listed as anonymous, but it was me.”

“You turned your own brother in?”

I snort. “You know how I felt about my brother. How Ifeelabout him. He’s always been a piece of shit.”

“So that’s what Marcum meant when he said you told him about the drugs before you were on the force.” She shakes her head, dumfounded. “But why? You wouldn’t let me say anything. You wouldn’t let me go after them. You said the risk of danger was too great. What changed?”

“What changed was you. You were gone. Safe.”

She scoffs. “Safe. Right.”

I don’t like the sound of that. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

She stares at me, quickly avoiding the question with her glare. “Nothing. How did you know I was gone? How’d you find out?”

“Harlan. He said you came by and saw him before you left town. Said you married Hudson and moved far away for college. I didn’t get a chance to talk to him until I was in SOI for a couple of weeks. You were already gone by then. I called Marcum the day after I talked to Harlan.”

She lowers her head, for once not looking me in the eyes. It’s unnerving. That’s not the Lulu I know. “I asked him not to tell you… not to tell you that I married.”

Bile rises in my throat. I’m not sure if I prefer my own vomit or my own anger when it comes to thinking about Lulu being married to Hudson. “Yeah, he told me that you didn’t want me to know.”

I’ll never forget that conversation. Never. For as long as I live. For the first half of it, he told me everything she said when she came back from her charity trip. He told me she wanted to follow me, be with me, do anything to make our relationship work. She was ready to drop out of college. For me. My stupid brain wentinto overdrive, thinking my point was proved—I was ruining her life.

And then he dropped the bomb. The second half of the conversation had My Lulu getting married and leaving our world behind.

“Did he tell you other things too?” she asks.

“Meaning?”

“Well, Marcum and my family say they didn’t talk to you about me. What about Harlan? Did he?”

“I mean, we talked about the past. Nearly every time I called him when I was in the service, he wanted to rehash some old story about the fun times the three of us had. Is that what you’re asking?”

She cocks her head, gauging my reaction. “Yeah, sure.”

---