I felt Bane’s hand wrapping around mine and looked up, watching the leaves shaking on the trees. And I thought that, if this was a fairytale, this is how I’d end the chapter:

The princess’ sword was bloody.

But she refused to tuck it back in.

She wanted to leave a trail of their misery behind her, so they could always find her.

JESSE ASKED IF WE COULD stop by her house first.

“Why?” I groaned, already frustrated with the prospect of meeting Pam again.

“I need to do something important.”

Pam wasn’t home—she was probably lawyering up and getting ready to dispute the will, according to Jesse—and I let out a sigh of relief as I took a seat on her bed. She crawled onto it on her knees and stood in front of the Polaroid pin board, staring at it.

“Do you have a lighter?” Her eyes were still hard on the pictures.

What kind of question was that? I was a stoner from hell. I had two Zippos and a box of matches at any given time. Every pyromaniac’s wet dream. I fished one from my pocket and tossed it over into her hands.

“Are we finally going to burn this ugly-ass place down?” I sniffed.

She turned around and smiled. “Not the entire house. Just the pictures.”

We went to the backyard, where Shadow had died, by the Moroccan sunbeds, stacking the pile of pictures into a makeshift bonfire.

“The funny thing is, I never took a picture of Darren’s back. He was so good at blending in with his fake lisp and his B-grade suits.” She flipped my lighter, began to burn the edge of a picture of some teenager’s back, and dropped it down to the rest of the Polaroids, which caught fire quickly.

“Yeah, he kind of tricked me that way, too.” I sat on one of the sunbeds, admiring her ass and pondering over her stepfather. “Hey, know what I was thinking?”

She twisted her head to watch me. “What?”

“I fucked my stepsister, and I didn’t even know it. That’s hot.”

Jesse bit her lip. “I want to leave the Rover here. It’s not even mine, anyway. Would you lend me your truck if I need it?”

Why not? I’ve handed you everything else I own, including my heart, which I don’t want back.

I rolled my eyes, playing exasperated. “Knew you’d be a gold digger.”

We drove around downtown a while after that, trying not to think about the scene that was playing out back in El Dorado.

We were supposed to wait until Villegas called to ask us to come to the station, and while I was glad Jesse had forgiven me—or maybe she was just making a habit of hate-fucking me and was still mad— I also knew we had a lot of loose ends.

“We’re driving in circles,” I pointed out after doing the fifth round from one point of the promenade to the other. People were starting to wonder what the fuck was my problem, going back and forth like my mission in life was to slow down traffic.

“I don’t mind driving in circles.” She looked out the window, munching on her hair again. It was a gross habit on any other girl, but I swear this chick could take a shit directly on my chest, and I’d still think she was the cutest. I scratched my beardless chin. I was starting to get used to the smooth face. It made me look young, but that was good, because I no longer felt like a pervert for pursuing Jesse.

“I do. Let’s go somewhere.”

“Where?”

“My mom’s,” I said, swallowing hard. Jesse may have been okay with leaving the Artem shit hanging in the air, but I wasn’t. The two women I loved—the only people I loved—not only didn’t know each other, but one of them actively saw the other as the villain. My mother wasn’t the antihero of this story. She was the greatest fucking person in the world. Jesse needed to know that.

She whipped her head around, flinching like I’d clocked her.

“You want me to meet the woman who…” she started, before clamping her mouth shut and looking out the window again. I had to remind myself that for many years (four, to be exact), Jesse’d had to share the only thing good about her life—her father—with Mom and me. And that Artem had been at our place. A lot.

It was probably easier to pull shit like that off when you were a social worker and had to work your ass off, and many of your cases got you on the road, but at the end of the day, he’d been with us days and nights. Entire weekends, sometimes. He’d told my mother he was married to his job, and probably told Pam the same thing. He’d brought my mom and me over to his place plenty of times. Only it wasn’t his place. It was his dead mother’s place—the apartment he and his brothers never got around to selling. My mom found out about it after he died and she went over there to see if any of his living relatives needed any help. “Artem didn’t live here,” his brother, Boris, had said. “At least not in the last ten years,” he huffed.

My suspicion was that she’d vowed to never let a man in again.

And she hadn’t.

Trent Rexroth had been a fuck buddy.

All the ones after him were more of the same shit.

It killed me that my mother had given up on love, but maybe that’s why I owed it to myself to be less of a dick in general.

Snowflake’s posture crumbled, her chin shaking slightly. “O…okay,” she whispered. “I mean, sure.”

“We don’t have to.” I was staring hard at the busy road and hoping my long, internal scream wasn’t audible to the outside world.

You need to give her a fucking chance, Jesse. For me.

I glanced at my phone every now and again. Saw something I’d been waiting for. Smiled.

“Why are you smiling?” she asked, shuffling in my peripheral.

“Beck won the competition. First place.”

Her jaw nearly dropped. “That was today?”

I nodded.

“And you missed it, even though you trained him?”

I hadn’t really thought about it like that. I just knew I couldn’t be there when Jesse was dealing with so much shit. Even if she didn’t let me be a part of that shit.

“No biggie. I’ve been to plenty of surf competitions before.”

“Oh, Bane…”

“It’s Roman.”

“I want to meet your mom, Roman.”

“What made you change your mind?”

“You.”

I spun my head to look at her. She let loose a bitter grin.

“You made me change my mind. Your sperm donor was obviously an asshole, and yet you’re the best person I know. She must have done something very right to make that happen. So, yeah, I’d like to meet her.”

I nodded, taking a sharp right toward my mom’s place. It was the weekend. She’d be home. She’d be happy to see me. She’d be happy to see Jesse—even though I’d brought her up to speed with our issues. It’s not like I’d wanted to, but she’d nearly kicked down my door when I’d been mourning my lost relationship—and had told me everything was going to be okay.

Possibly.

Probably.

Hell, hopefully.

I parked in front of my mom’s house and rounded the truck to open Jesse’s door. She kept on checking her phone, waiting for that phone call from Madison Villegas, and I had to pluck it from between her delicate fingers and tuck it into the back pocket of my pants.

“Don’t worry. They didn’t arrest them only to let them go because they forgot their weed at the party,” I said. She crinkled her nose at me, which was also adorable, and also made my dick hard. Then again, there weren’t very many things about Jesse that didn’t inspire my blood to rush straight to my dick.

We walked into the house. I kicked my boots off against the wall, Jesse slipped off her Keds then arranged them neatly by the door. She wasn’t the tidy type, so I took it as a good sign. She was trying to make a good impression.

“Mamul?” I called out from the hallway. I heard a thud coming from her bedroom, then a loud moan of pain. She came out a few seconds later, looking flushed and flustered, knotting a robe over her waist. She wiped her hair away from her face and smiled through a suspicious blush. “Roman. My sun.”

I took a sidestep and motioned for Jesse with my head. “This is Jesse. Jesse, my mom, Sonya.”

They shook hands. I asked her if it was a bad time. She said it was never a bad time to see me. I had a feeling that there was someone in her bedroom, but I really didn’t want to know, so I offered to go out and grab some takeout coffee while Jesse made herself comfortable. Mom sighed with relief while Jesse looked like she was about to stab me. I couldn’t see someone doing the walk of shame out of my mom’s room without breaking both his legs on his way out.

“My phone, please.” Jesse opened her palm and stared holes in my forehead. I produced her phone from my pocket and put it in her hand, curling her fingers around it. “Take lots of pictures of him, so I’ll know who to stab later.”

“Bane,” she hissed. She called me that because I was acting like an asshole.

“What? He fucked my mom.”

There was a line that seemingly started from the gates of hell at Starbucks, then when it was finally time to order, I found out they had run out of the complicated shit my mom usually ordered, so I had to drive to another location, and before I knew it, it had taken me twenty minutes from the moment I’d left them to the moment I came back. I walked back into Mom’s house worrying I’d find hair scattered on the floor as they’d beaten each other senseless, so I was pleasantly surprised to find them sitting in front of one another. My mom’s hand was on Jesse’s knee, and tears ran down Snowflake’s face. They were silent and brave.

I stepped into the living room, dumping the Starbucks paper bag with the double glazed donuts and sliding a cup of coffee for each of them. My mom immediately took a sip. Jesse looked up and smiled through her tears.

“I hate coffee,” she said.

I shrugged and took a sip of my latte. “Ditto.”