Page 13 of Don't Leave Me
“You know I’m not staying here permanently,” I told George, even as I shoved my hands into my pockets.
He sighed. We’d had this conversation too many times when he’d visited me in prison. “I don’t know what you think you’re going to accomplish, but you’re a grown man. It’s not like I could stop you.”
I nodded. Pleased he was resigned to my decisions.
“I’m not going after him right away. Like I said, I need some cash first. And then I thought…”
I still wasn’t sure it made sense, but the idea had gotten stuck in my head and I couldn’t shake it loose.
“What?” George pressed.
“I thought about trying to find Mom.”
“Maybe if you found her, talked to her, you could put the past behind you and really move on.”
At the time, I’d rejected the idea out of hand. There was no point in finding Marie Campbell. She was an addict who loved her drugs more than she did her son. But the idea of having some closure with her, had started to take root when all I had was time to think.
There was never going to be any closure when it came to Ash. Just her last goodbye, the bruise on her cheek. The fact that I didn’t tell her I loved her. And her just being gone.
No body, no criminal brought to justice. Just gone.
So if I looked for, and found Marie, either dead or alive, then at least I could put a fucking pin in that. At least I would know definitively where things stood, and having that had suddenly seemed necessary.
“Son, I don’t know how it would be possible. You know the likelihood is she overdosed at some point. If she was homeless, buried as a Jane Doe—”
“I know,” I said, not letting him go down the endless road of possibilities. “Finding her might be as impossible as finding proof Sanderson killed Ash, but I’m going to do both things. We know when she left us the last time, she headed to Florida. You tried then to track her down. How far did you get?”
“Tampa Bay.”
I nodded. It was a place to start, and I had nothing but time.
