Page 1 of Hell or High Water

Prologue

Montana

The scent was one I’d grown up with. It was likely I had even smelled it in the womb. There were folks who stuck their noses up at it and complained about it, and those who craved it and couldn’t walk away from it, no matter the cost.

My momma had once been the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. I’d wanted to be just like her—that was, until I understood her. We were an odd pair. While my friends believed she was the coolest mom around, I knew better. As much as I loved her, I wished she were different.

Even now, as I sat in her bedroom, watching her shrivel up as the disease took more and more of her every passing second. She was only thirty-eight, and just like her momma, she would die too young, leaving her daughter behind to figure out life. I’d never met my grandmother. She had been taken by the same thing that was taking Momma. Some got to smoke for decades and not face the consequences, but not the Carrigan women.

When I’d been old enough to understand how my grandmother had died, I had begged my momma to stop smoking.

But she’d just smile at me with her red-painted lips. “Tana, baby, it’s my meal. You like living in this house and having nice things? Well, I can’t gain a pound. It’s a miracle you didn’t ruin me with stretch marks.”

Momma had been a stripper from the age of eighteen until she turned thirty-three. When she turned thirty-three, the smoking and years had started showing on her. She took over the job of managing the dancers until two years later, when the coughing started. Then the diagnosis. It had all changed after that.

Thankfully, I’d managed to stay in school and work a job to help pay the bills. But we’d used every last penny of Momma’s savings. Especially the last four months, when she’d gotten so bad that she couldn’t even sit at the computer and handle the office tasks that Peg—the owner of the club where she worked—would give her so that she still got a paycheck.

In less than three months, I would graduate high school…and I knew my momma wouldn’t be there to see it. She’d never gotten her high school diploma or even a GED. She’d dropped out at eighteen and started working at Diamond Club when her momma died. I didn’t want that. I was so close though. I wasn’t like Momma. The idea of dancing in nothing but a sparkly G-string and stilettos in front of men was something I knew I could never do. Momma had come into this world oozing confidence—or at least, that was what she’d told me her mother used to say—but I hadn’t.

For the past two months, as Momma faded, I’d lie in bed at night, wondering how I’d feel about that smell of nicotine when she was gone. Would I hate it? Despise it for what it had taken from me? Or would I think of her and wish more than anything for her arms to wrap around me one more time? But the real question burning in the back of my head that I was afraid to acknowledge was, what would I do? How would I survive? I couldn’t pay the bills and the mortgage without her income and still go to school. The house would have to be sold. We were already a month behind on mortgage payments. We should have put it up for sale months ago.

“You go make him help you,” Momma wheezed.

I shook my head. We’d had this conversation before.

“I want nothing to do with him,” I replied.

She knew that, but she kept insisting that I go to Mississippi and demand the man who had knocked her up at nineteen help me until I could graduate and work full-time.

“He owes you. He—” She stopped, struggling to inhale, and I winced.

“Please, Momma. Don’t talk. Just relax.”

The effort it took for her to pick up her arm and move it toward me so she could hold out her hand in my direction was another ache in my heart. I’d painted her nails her favorite color of OPI Big Apple Red just two days ago. I moved closer and encased her frail hand in both of mine.

“He owes me,” she rasped, then coughed weakly.

“We never needed him, and I’ll be damned if I go ask him to help me now,” I told her. “I’ll be fine. You don’t worry about that. I’m a badass, like my momma.”

Her lips curled up, but barely. “You got to, baby. There’s too much debt.”

The medical expenses had piled up, but I’d set up payments that I could afford—although I might have to live in a box and not eat.

“I have that all figured out.”

She closed her eyes, and her chest jerked as she fought for her next breath. The hospice nurse was in the kitchen, and I wondered if I should call for her. Panic began to rise up and tighten my throat when she opened her eyes back up and looked at me.

“He promi-i-sed me…” She paused.

I wanted to beg her to be quiet, but I didn’t know when I’d hear her voice for the last time, and I clung to the sound.

“We’d go to Mon-t-tana, but he g-gave me y-you.”

Tears filled my eyes. I already knew this story. The reason she had named me Montana. The bastard who was my father had sworn he was leaving his wife and taking Momma to his mansion in Montana. One I doubted he ever had. But she had been young and foolish then.

“Y-you were the be-best, Montana,” she said and smiled weakly at me.

“We never needed him. I never needed him. I had you, and I’ll always have you right here,” I replied, placing a hand over my heart.

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