While Rosie visited the campus bookstore with Trina to re-purchase their books for class, I dealt with the police and the property manager. I knew that Rosie was upset that her home was ruined, but in all honesty, she shouldn’t have been living in an apartment like this in the first place. It was never safe for her to be living here.

The landlord was unreachable, absent scum, the property manager was tremendously incompetent, and the police seemed suspiciously unsurprised to be called out to the building. In fact, they seemed eager and uncharacteristically prepared for their visit. They rolled up promptly to Rosie’s address with three squad cars and a full crime scene investigation team. It wasn’t very long before I learned why.

“This whole place is a cesspool,” Sergeant Alvarez explained to me as he used a metal pole to test the floor before stepping inside. He proceeded carefully into the apartment, one step at a time. “We’ve known there was something sketchy going on here for a while. Months, I’d say.”

“Oh yeah?” I asked absently. I hadn’t identified myself as a lawyer. There was no quicker way to get police to dislike you, and quit talking to you, than to be a lawyer who isn’t a prosecutor. Instead, I was just Ryan Conroe, concerned friend of an innocent tenant.

“Oh yeah,” Alvarez confirmed. He poked a patch of floor, noticed that it buckled under his pipe, and frowned. He poked in the opposite direction and seemed more encouraged when the floor stayed where it ought to be. Above all, he looked excited to get his hands on some evidence. “We’ve seen a bunch of sketchy folks buzzing around this address. Low-level street dealers are whatever, but there were some higher-level distributors too. You know, the dangerous guys. The guys that shoot people. Whoever owned this place knew what they were doing when they set up the property the way they did. They had enough ‘regular’ tenants like your friend who they basically gave free rent to in order to camouflage all the illegal shit.”

How the hell had Rosie ended up living here? I was beginning to put together the pieces of the puzzle.

Rosie and her father must have had some sort of a falling out that resulted in him cutting her off financially. I suspected she’d pushed him away when he got too controlling. Since Rosie’s mom was unwilling to talk to her since she’d reconnected with her father at all, Rosie had no choice but to take matters into her own hands. Her alternatives were effective homelessness, capitulating to her father by accepting his control over her life, or capitulating to her mother by cutting off her father again. Knowing Rosie for even just a few hours, it did not surprise me that she chose homelessness. Well, actually she’d chosen Trina.

The two had gone out and found the cheapest possible apartment possible. Rosie was probably living off student loans, and Trina probably didn’t have a lot of money, either. They’d settled on this hell-hole. And now they were both paying for it.

“So, my friend can’t come back to her apartment at all, can she?” I asked Alvarez. I already knew the answer, but I asked anyway.

He shook his head from side to side apologetically. “I’m really sorry, but no. She definitely can’t. Even though she had nothing to do with any of this, her apartment is a crime scene.” He pointed to one of the pot plants with his pole. “It’ll probably be weeks before we separate out everything that’s evidence from everything that’s not.” He paused. “Actually, weeks might be too optimistic. It could be months.”

That was the bad news. The good news, if you wanted to call it that, was that because the damage to Rosie’s property was due to some fairly gross negligence on the part of her landlord, there was a very decent legal chance that I’d be able to get her compensated for all her losses. If, and it was a big if, the landlord had any money left after the police had their way with him. According to Alvarez, no one had seen the guy in months. He might have already fled the country.

A ping from my phone distracted me from the conversation with Alvarez. I excused myself and stepped outside before I gave Ian a call back.

“I hope you grabbed me a few of those pots,” he said by way of greeting. “It does wonders for my anxiety.”

I rolled my eyes. “I might have.”

I did. I had four or five in my car. Under a tarp. There were way too many cops buzzing around to advertise the fact that I’d stolen evidence to help my brother with his anxiety disorder.

“So, Rosie’s apartment was underneath an illegal grow operation that collapsed atop her living room? Those pictures were crazy.” Ian sounded appropriately shocked.

I frowned into the phone. “Yeah. The reality is even crazier.”

“I can only imagine. Is Rosie upset?”

“She’s pretty freaked out. She basically just lost everything but two outfits and her guitar.”

“Sounds familiar.”

He was right. When Ian and I were living hand-to-mouth in Dallas as kids, a fire in our duplex had wiped out virtually everything we owned. We’d been nineteen and twenty-two, respectively. We’d been totally unprepared to deal with a real, adult crisis. We came home from classes to discover that what we had in our backpacks was what we had, period. The difference was that we had parents who were there to swoop in and help.

We didn’t come from a wealthy family, and despite being divorced, our mom and dad rallied behind us and fixed everything. They somehow both got time off from their demanding-but-still-somehow-shitty jobs. They drove up from the suburbs and found us a new place to live that very day. I have no idea where they got the security deposit from. Probably their meager savings. I remembered our mom making us macaroni and cheese in an empty apartment while our dad bought a couple of air mattresses from a nearby Costco, so we’d have somewhere to sleep.

It wasn’t even the material help that really made the difference during those first, confusing and upsetting days after the fire. It was the fact that when we needed them, our parents were there for Ian and me. I remember feeling very loved. Our parents hated each other, and still do, but when we needed their help, they were willing to put those feelings aside for our sake. I was angry on Rosie’s behalf that her parents weren’t mature enough to do that. They were so far from that, she couldn’t even call them.

Instead, Rosie got parents who treated her like a toy they could fight over. Like two children fighting over a doll, they both held on to opposite ends for dear life and pulled. Rosie got to be collateral damage in their private war against one another whether she liked it or not. After two decades, their war appeared to have become one of attrition. They honestly didn’t seem to mind if their only daughter ended up as a casualty.

Rosie had learned through experience that she shouldn’t even tell her father the extent of her problems. If she did, he would use it against her, to control her. It all seemed so ridiculously unfair. Parents were supposed to protect their children, not use them like pawns in a high-stakes game of ego chicken.

Rosie’s dad had even sent me, a stranger, to impose his will on her from four states away. Little did he know, the only agenda I was interested in advancing was my own. I’d now fully made up my mind. I wanted to snatch Rosie away from the game her parents were playing over her. Protect her. Keep her.

Maybe that made me no better than either one of them, but I suddenly couldn’t imagine letting Rosie go. This was all supposed to be temporary. A simple assignment from a boss that I knew to be manipulative but never dreamed would stoop to this sort of low. There was no way I was going along with anything he wanted for Rosie. That being said…

“I’m not sure what to do now,” I told Ian. “I don’t know how to help Rosie.”

“Yeah, I get that.” His voice was sympathetic. “It sounds like she’s having a really shitty couple of days.”

“That’s putting it mildly.” I sighed deeply. I’d never felt as conflicted. "I’m afraid if I come on too strong, she’ll run away. Her parents are super controlling, and I’m pretty sure she’s suspicious of anyone who says they know what’s best for her. I don’t want her to think that I’m trying to tell her what to do or manipulate her. But I want to help her.”

Ian was quiet for a second. “You’re really into her, aren’t you?”

“I guess I am.” It had been, what? Twenty-four hours? Less than that. And I was already dreaming of more. I was dreaming big. Really big. Long-term big.

“Does she know that?”

“I kissed her.” Part of me still couldn’t believe it, but it was true. I’d kissed her within an inch of her life. And I couldn’t wait to do it again.

I could almost hear Ian rolling his eyes at me. “Well that’s a good first step. Try telling her now.”

I couldn’t think of any words to even reply to Ian, so telling Rosie how much I wanted her seemed a bit beyond my powers of communication at the moment. When he spoke again, Ian’s voice was uncharacteristically mild. “Well, why don’t you ask her what you can do to help? Have her tell you what she needs. That way you won’t seem like a creep, and you can help if she lets you.”

I frowned into the phone. “I guess I could do that.”

Damn Ian, always being so damn reasonable lately.