That brought a gasp.

I kept going.

“Or she made it up, and that money was for her facial. It doesn’t matter. When I found out about all this and went back not an hour later, she was up, in the shower, had already stuffed my money in her wallet, but the laundry on the couch had not been sorted.”

Mom finally spoke.

“This can’t be true.”

“It is,” I confirmed. “I have pictures. So yes. I went there and I confronted her for swindling thousands of dollars from me, you, Brenda, and I got in her shit about taking care of her kids and getting a job. And outside the fact both Angelica and Brian have now cut me off from the kids, I don’t regret it.”

“Brian?”

“She’s been on to him too. And he says she needs ‘me time’ after all that’s befallen her. But no one had a gun to her head to date Brian, move in with him, get pregnant by him, get pregnant again by him, and then do shit about it when he started drowning himself in a bottle. That’s not on her. That’s on Brian. But the rest, that’s hers. She needs to own it. I can see being twenty-two and suddenly facing a life with two kids, no man, little work experience would be scary as hell. I might be wrong, Mom, but when you have two kids, you don’t have the luxury of taking years to sort your shit out. You lick your wounds on the go and keep motoring. And I doubt you’ll think I’m wrong, because you might not have been that young when it happened to you, but you licked your wounds on the go and kept motoring.”

It took a sec for Mom to speak again.

“How did you find out all of this?”

“Lottie’s friends, the commandos. I don’t know why one of them got curious,” that was a lie, obviously, but Mom didn’t need to know that, because Mom never needed to know about Boone, “but he did. He found it out and he shared it with me.”

“That’s a little…invasive, sugarsnap.”

I loved it when my mom called me “sugarsnap.”

She called Brian “honeycrunch” and I loved that too.

It was sweet.

In this instance, I wasn’t about to take her careful admonishment softened by a “sugarsnap.”

“You’re right. It was. But that’s negated by the fact that Ang has been playing all of us for years. Mom, she wears three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar flip-flops and the kids are eating Cap’n Crunch for breakfast.”

I had silence again from Mom.

I’d said my piece, so I waited through it.

She sounded a whole lot different when she spoke again.

“Do you still have those pictures?”

Um…

Hell.

I knew that tone.

Mom was again pissed.

No, she was morally outraged.

No, that wasn’t right.

She was grandmotherly outraged.

Crap, Ang was in for it.

“Mom, I told you this so you wouldn’t be grifted by her anymore, and straight up, so you wouldn’t be pissed at me. I think we need to let Ang and Brian and Brenda, if she doesn’t cotton on, handle this how they handle it from here on out.”

“I think Brenda should know that she’s had to cancel a weekend up in Estes Park because her twenty-seven-year-old daughter was throwing a tantrum,” Mom stated firmly.

I drew a long breath into my nose, but I said nothing.

“May I have those pictures?” she requested.

“Mom—”

“Kathryn,” she snapped.

“You can have those pictures,” I muttered.

“What? Speak distinctly, Kathryn Rose Jansen.”

“Yes, Mom. You can have those pictures.”

“I’ll be over in an hour. I won’t invite you to come along as I go have my chat with Brenda. You’ve had enough drama. But would you like to have lunch with your mother before I set out on this delightful task?”

I fought back laughter but didn’t stop my smile because she couldn’t see me.

I totally dug my mom.

I got my toughness from her.

I also got my sarcasm from her.

And it was only my niece and nephew lately who got it from me, but I got my mushiness from her too.

“I’d love to.”

“Are you dancing tonight?” she asked.

“No,” I answered.

She sounded surprised. “A Saturday off?”

“I asked Smithie for a rotation of them. Tips are the best on the weekends, but sometimes I just want to pretend I’m normal and have a weekend night off.”

“Normal, sugarsnap, I fear I’ve failed at instilling in you, is not what you should be shooting for. You’re one of a kind, Kathryn. And there’s little I’m proud of in my life, but I sure am proud of that.”

Okay, again, I totally dug my mom.

“Stop being gushy,” I demanded.

“Whatever,” she said. “See you in an hour.”

We hung up and I was getting out of the shower, when I heard my phone buzz with a text.

I dried off, wrapped up in a towel, padded down the hall and snatched my phone up to look at the screen.

From an unknown, it said,

Now you have my number.

For a second, I didn’t know what the hell that was.

Then came,

Program it.

And next time you’re kidnapped…

Use it.

Ohmigod.

Boone!

Why was he texting me?

Why did he want me to have his number?

Okay, so that kiss the other night didn’t seem like a good-bye kiss.

But he’d just acquiesced to me saying there would never be anything between us.

And after he’d laid that phenomenal kiss on me, he’d walked out.

So maybe it was a parting-shot kind of kiss that said, “We’re not going anywhere, all right, but that’s what you’ll be missing.”

Which kinda wasn’t nice.

Then again, if I’d lived my whole life never having experienced that kiss, that would totally suck.

And in the end, we were still acquaintances. We had shared friends.

There would be times when we wouldn’t be able to avoid each other. Lottie and Mo’s impending wedding, for one. The Memorial Day barbecue Mag and Evie were having, another.

So maybe this was a kind of badass olive branch.

We had our thing, we had it out, we’re moving on, but since we can’t avoid each other entirely, we should try to get along.

Bearing that in mind, I programmed him in and texted back.

Roger that.

You’re programmed and my first call

after my next abduction.

I’d gone back into the bathroom (and yeah, I took my phone, just in case he texted back, because we were moving on, but I couldn’t just turn off how I felt for Boone, it’d take time) when he texted back.

I was mid-swipe of toner when I stopped toning altogether, grabbed my phone and read,

Not funny.

He was wrong.

Because reading his text, it hurt just a little bit, having to give a go to this possible “friend” thing with Boone.

But I still laughed.

Chapter Five

By a Mile

Ryn

That night, I sat scrunched up in the corner of my couch, wearing a pair of short-short cutoffs I’d fashioned from a pair of jeans I owned way back in high school (so they were uber faded, uber soft, and uber cool). On top I had on a hugely oversized black-and-white-striped long-sleeve tee that was so OTT on the oversize, the shoulder drop went to my elbow (but the sleeves were designed shorter to allow for it, they still hugged the apple of my palms).