Then, it came to me.
There was one thing I could do for her.
One fucking reverse GOOGLE image search. That’s all it took to find out who Doe really was. I’d uploaded a photo of her I took from my phone the first night she’d slept in my bed and pressed search and there she was, staring into the camera like she was looking right into my eyes. I wished I’d never done the search. I wished I’d never known who she really was.
I’d used the fact that I knew who she was and what that could do for me as an excuse to bring her back to me. Even though it was her I wanted since the very first moment I saw her.
I’d planned to keep her forever, and her secret even longer if need be.
Until now.
Seventeen-year-old Ramie Elizabeth Price.
Either the police were really shitty at their jobs, or they never really tried to find out who she was to begin with, because for the second time after searching her image, less than a second after pressing search, I was staring at multiple images of the girl I’d fallen in love with on my laptop.
There were no articles about her going missing, just pictures of her from various events. Balls, galas, fundraisers. It was her in the pictures, but it wasn’t. The gowns, the makeup, the fake smile, if there was any smile at all.
The last picture of her I found was taken almost a year ago. She had a blank look on her face. Her eyes were vacant.
I knew that look. I’d regrettably put it on her face myself. It was a look that broke my fucking heart.
Indifference.
She was holding the hand of a boy who looked a little older than her, who was smiling from ear to ear.
I wanted to reach through the computer and break his fucking hand and then break every single one of his pearly white teeth.
Senator Westmore Bigelow Price, with daughter Ramie Elizabeth and long-time beau Tanner Preston Redmond at the Heart Ball Gala to raise money for pediatric cancer.
Even though it was my second time scanning the pictures, my blood boiled. I don’t know what made me madder. The boy who was touching my girl. Or the man they listed as her father.
A senator running for president. A man who would want to avoid scandal at all cost. That’s probably why they didn’t even try to find their missing daughter.
Fucking asshole.
I stood from the kitchen table and threw the laptop across the room. It smashed against a cabinet and fell to the floor in a million pieces.
Bear came storming into the kitchen. “What the fuck?” he asked, looked over at the broken laptop. “You on the rag man?”
“We have to take a trip,” I said, staring down at the now broken laptop as though the image of Doe or Ramie, or whatever the fuck her name was and her boyfriend were still up on the broken screen that was flashing from blue to black over and over again.
“Where we going?”
“Tell me something, Bear, and be honest. What are the chances of us getting the kind of money we need for the payoff to the senator for Max?”
My eyes met his for the first time since he came into the kitchen.
“Slim to fucking none, man” he answered honestly.
“Then, get the fucking truck. I’ll drive.”
“But you still haven’t said why I’m getting the truck.”
“Because, my friend, there is a deal with the devil that needs to be made.” I looked down the hall at the closed door of my bedroom, where the girl I’d fallen in love with slept peacefully in my bed. She was mine, and I would always think of her that way. But she deserved a better life than the one I could give her, which seemed to only hurt her at every turn.
After Preppy’s funeral I was thinking about giving her the truth.
Now, I was just going to give her away.
“And who is the devil in this scenario?” Bear asked, shrugging on his cut.
I was going to see the senator and offer Doe in exchange for him making sure that I had signed custody papers for Max.
The only family I had left.
I stared out the kitchen window, but couldn’t see a thing. It was like I was staring into a white abyss, a place I was about to go, that I wasn’t ever going to be able to come back from.
“Me.”
King
When you fall in love, you know it’s the real deal because you come to the realization you would take a bullet for that person. And when you become a parent, you realize that you would not only use your own body but the body of the person you love as a human shield to protect your child.
That is the place where I existed.