Page 3 of No More Secrets

Lucas’s gaze narrows at her retreating back. He knows exactly what she’s doing because he’s done the same since he was eleven. It startedwith a Hot Wheels car he lifted that he regrettably let his younger sister, Lily, take the heat for. Next it was a candy bar, then a shirt he swiped from Big 5 just to see if he could do it. Until finally it ended with a six-pack of beer and a gun that didn’t belong to him. His reward? Six months in juvenile detention bunking with five guys in an overcrowded cell who’d committed acts ten times worse than him.

He wasn’t the guilty party, not entirely. But his friends, his football teammates since they were kids, let him take the fall.

He’s still falling. Flailing.

He wouldn’t wish his experience on anyone.

Face hard, he watches her disappear around the endcap. Lucas strides up the neighboring aisle to confront her. Ivy doesn’t have cameras. He needs to catch this little thief in the act with the merch still on her.

She comes around the corner and gasps. Lucas snatches her wrist, startling them both, and flips her hand. Clutched in her palm is a pack of Juicy Fruit. His gaze drops to the loaded kangaroo pocket before flying up to her face. Large hazel eyes, haunted and deep, sit atop a wave of freckles bridging her nose. She can’t be more than fifteen, sixteen at the most.

He lets go of her, stunned.

The girl doesn’t hesitate. She sprints from the store with her loot.

2

Lucas looks up and down the road, hand raised to shield his eyes from the sun’s glare. The girl is fast. She’s disappeared, and that’s not easy to do around here. Everything is spread apart, nothing but dirt and dust between sporadic clusters of buildings. No place to hide.

He should return inside, finish unloading the fruit, prep the deli counter. Take stock of what she took. Ivy will need the inventory numbers. But he can’t unsee the girl’s astonishment when he caught her, those hazel eyes that look so much like Lily’s.

He recognized that haunted look. Frightened but determined. She’s running from something—or someone—but driven to survive. And for a split second the past merged with the present, and he thought she was Lily, the little sister he hadn’t rescued from their father. He hadn’t tried to help her.

He thought that his sister was here. The one he’d let run away.

Disturbed, Lucas rounds the building and gets into his truck. He flips down the visor, and the key fob he hides there drops in his lap. He takes a right, cruising in the direction she ran. Nothing but an open field on his right, an abandoned strip mall on his left. He coasts around the building that’s boarded up tight and can’t find a crevice she could have slipped into.

He passes a gas station, a bar, an open lot with a fadedFOR SALEsign that’s been there since the eighties. The space is littered with abandoned cars rusting under the sun.

He wonders where she could have gone, where she sleeps at night when the temperature drops and the vagrants come out of the shadows to sift through the day’s garbage with no qualms about taking advantage of an unaccompanied minor, lost, frightened, and alone.

Would anyone miss her if she disappeared?

He drives with the windows open and thinks about the terrible things that could happen to her, what probably happened to Lily. Things he could have prevented if he’d cared enough to intercede.

Eight months ago he learned Lily, who ran from home sixteen and pregnant, had survived on her own, when her thirteen-year-old son, Josh, a nephew he’d never met, showed up alone at their sister Olivia’s house. He was looking for help to find his mom. Through a flood of texts from Olivia he read before he ditched his phone, he knows Josh and Lily reunited. He also knows Lily now goes by the name of Jenna Mason. Author, animator, and screenwriter.

She’s a bigger success than Olivia and Lucas combined. Though Lucas’s achievements, or lack thereof, don’t count for much.

But that slice of unexpected news—locating Lily and knowing she didn’t just survive but raised a son while launching a flourishing career—doesn’t make up for what he didn’t do: help her when she needed him.

Lucas keeps driving, looking out his windows, making U-turns, retracing his route, as he begins to wonder if the little thief was a mirage. She was never at the market. He was hallucinating, damn hangover. It wouldn’t be the first time he thought he was seeing things. His temples throb, and his mouth is cotton dry.

Hot, brittle wind cuts through the truck’s cab. Sweat drips into his eyes. He swipes his forehead. She has to be around here somewhere. He’ll find her, throw some cash at her. And if she’s homeless and willing, drop her off at a shelter. Things he hadn’t done for Lily.

He circles the city center, crawling past storefronts and restaurants, looking in windows and back lots. When he reaches the park, the phoneIvy insisted he carry when he’s out and about buzzes in his front pocket. He didn’t want the phone at first. He got rid of his for a reason. No phone, no connections back home. But this one meant he was sprouting roots here. He kept it on him for convenience, and admittedly, so Ivy could reach him. She was getting old.

He slides out the device. “Yeah?”

“Where are you? I came downstairs, and the door’s wide open, there’s stock on the floor, and your truck’s gone. Did you leave for good?” Ivy’s panic rings in his ear.

He slams the brakes in the middle of a two-lane road. The truck comes to an abrupt stop. What is he doing? A car swerves around him, horn blaring. The driver flips him off through the rear window. A second later, another car swings around the corner. Lights flashing, it heads straight at him at high speed.

His stomach caves in at the sight of the police cruiser. Sirens wail, lights blaze, and Lucas locks up, his apology to Ivy lodging in his throat. They’ve found him.

Instinct pushes him to split. Run! But he stops himself from gunning the engine. The cops wouldn’t come at him like this, not head-on. Unless they’ve been tailing him, which he’d know. They don’t know where he is.

Yet.

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