Page 16 of What Lies in the Woods

“That was my gas money,” he said in mock outrage. I’d forgotten all about that—him teaching me poker in the hospital, until the nurses kicked him out. “Or how about the time you convinced the whole town your dad had cancer, so they’d give you free stuff?”

I winced. “Not my finest hour.” I’d kept that ruse up for four months before my dad caught on. But since we were getting free pizza out of it, he let it keep going for another six weeks. I’d been such a wreck in high school. Maybe that was inevitable. Cody had saved me from the woods, but he couldn’t save me from myself. I picked at the label on my beer, peeling it from the glass. “I guess being a hero didn’t hurt your campaign.”

“It came up,” Cody said. “But never because I brought it up. I wouldn’t use you like that.”

“You earned whatever you can get out of it, as far as I’m concerned,” I told him quietly. He hadn’t just carried me out of the forest. He’d been at the hospital almost as much as my dad, checking up on me. Bringing me presents. Jokingly offering to smuggle me cigarettes. The prickle of tears stung my eyes. I cleared my throat. “So, two kids?”

“Twin boys,” he said. “Just turned four. And you? Boyfriend? Husband?” He paused. “Girlfriend?”

“None of the above. Probably,” I said.

“Probably?”

I shrugged. “I left on a note of mild ambiguity.”

“In my experience? When it comes to relationships, if you could take it or leave it, leaving is always the right choice,” Cody said.

“Stop. I cannot handle Cody Benham with words of wisdom,” I told him, fending him off with an upheld hand.

“Everything changes,” he said.

“Except Chester.” But that wasn’t true, was it? “Jesus. This place. I swear, every time I come back it’s like the ground starts crumbling under my feet. And what’s underneath is all the shit I’d rather leave buried.”

“I heard about your dad and the house,” Cody said.

I groaned. “I don’t know what to do. I know I should help, but how am I supposed to do that if he won’t let me touch a damn thing?”

“You could get a crew out. There are specialists for this sort of thing,” Cody suggested.

“Sounds expensive.”

“Got any of that murder money left?”

I snorted at the turn of phrase. “Turned out I wasn’t any better at managing it than Dad. Paid my tuition and then spent the rest as fast as I could. I didn’t like having it,” I admitted. “I’m doing fine, I just don’t have a ton of extra cash lying around.”

“You could sell the house. The land’s got to be worth something.”

“I’d have to talk Dad into it.”

“He won’t have a choice about whether to live there or not if it’s condemned,” Cody pointed out, but I shook my head.

“Nobody’s going to pry him out of there.”

“Maybe Cass could help you figure something out,” Cody said. “Once she puts her mind to something—”

“She steamrolls over everything in her path to make it happen,” I muttered. I stared at my beer, working the last soggy scraps of the label off with my fingernail.

Cody looked surprised. “You two were always thick as thieves. Did something happen after… you know.”

“No, nothing like that,” I assured him. If anything, the attack had made us closer. We might have grown up and grown apart naturally, drifting off into our disparate interests. But after the attack, we lived inone world, and everyone else lived in another. We’d barely spent a day apart until college.

“So you’re still close.”

“We don’t see each other as much as we used to, but yeah. I mean, I was a messbeforeI almost got murdered. I was a disaster after. Still am, in fact. But once Cass sets her mind to something, you can’t talk her out of it—and she decided we were best friends when we were five years old. So here we are.” Anyone else would have done the smart thing and ditched me a long time ago.

“What about Liv?” he asked.

I dropped my eyes to my bottle. “We don’t get to see each other much, but we talk all the time.” I didn’t mention how many of those calls came at odd hours of the night. Or just how complicated that friendship had become.

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