I crouched down and pulled up the briefcase. I put it in her hand. “I didn’t earn this money. I didn’t ask for it. I hate what it stands for. If it can give us a second chance, then maybe it’s not all for nothing.”

“Who said I wanted a second chance with you?” she said. She was right. I never assumed she would.

“Because it feels like the right thing to do, to try. Listen, Sophia. I can’t let you go back to the way things were. Your brothers … they turned you over to a fucking madman. That life, that wasn’t a life, that’s not a family. I can be your family.”

“Even though you’re in love with another woman,” she pointed out. “Who was she? Who was this woman who was worth all of this?”

“An old friend,” I said simply, ignoring the nails in my heart. I didn’t even want to say her name, not now while we stood there in Palm Valley, where I could almost feel her getting farther and farther away. I had to focus on what I had right in front of me: Ben and Sophia. Money for a new life. I had to make sure they were safe first before I could even indulge in thoughts about Ellie.

I hated that I had to choose.

“Please, let’s just get out of here. Somewhere safe. We can lay it all out, discuss our next move.”

She turned and looked behind her at the shop, my beautiful shop, built on lies and ink. “This isn’t safe? It’s your home.”

“This will never be safe. And it’s done being my home.”

She nodded, seeming to understand. “So what, you’re going to leave right now, like this? Your father …”

“I’ve already left, Sophia. I shouldn’t even be here.” I shouldn’t have been so careless to think a man like Javier wouldn’t go after me and take the things I loved. He gave some of them back to me and I had to make it work.

I looked at the GTO, the car that Ellie named Jóse, sitting in the driveway. It had seen so much already. It was time for it to see more.

I grabbed Sophia’s hand and tried to grab Ben’s but he pulled away from me. Would he recognize himself inked on the back of my leg? Would he one day realize how much he meant to me? I wanted to feel like a father again. I wanted him to feel like he had a dad.

We had just reached the car when I heard someone call out from the street.

“Camden!”

“Shit,” I swore under my breath and turned to look. It was Audrey Price, one of my clients. Her pale skin glowed under the hot sun like skin cancer waiting to happen. On her arm was the sleeve of cherry blossoms I had partly filled in a few weeks back. The day I met Ellie. The same cherry blossoms I would later add to Ellie’s leg.

“Who is that?” I heard Sophia whisper.

“A client,” I said and put on my most charming smile as Audrey approached us. “What’s up, Audrey? How’s the tat?”

She stopped in front of us and quickly glanced at Sophia over her retro shades. She took her in first, then Ben, who was still as quiet as a mouse. Finally she looked to me.

“I came to see you the other day. You were closed,” she said uneasily, and slid her shades back on.

I shrugged as casually as I could muster. “Going on a vacation with my family.”

She frowned, then her head swung to Sophia and Ben again for a better look. Her mouth dropped open. In the stark light, it wasn’t obvious off the bat that Sophia had been knocked around. “Family? I … I had no idea you were … I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” I told her, knowing that Audrey was running over a few scenarios in her head. She’d always had a female hard on for me, that much was obvious. It didn’t help that I tattooed her ass late one night and in turn she sucked my dick. Now, all of that, combined with what seemed like a hidden wife and child and obvious case of spousal abuse, probably made things seem that much more wrong.

She never really knew Camden McQueen, did she?

She smiled tightly at me and I went on, trying to put her at ease. “I’m just going off for a bit, need some quality time, that’s all. I’ll re-open when I return. Did you want another session? Let me take a look.”

I reached for her arm as I would normally do, to inspect my work, just to see how it was holding up and if it had somehow gotten more beautiful as it melded with the skin, something I’d notice time and time again. They say tattoos are permanent, but in my eyes they adapt, ever changing.

She jerked her arm away as if my fingers were needles themselves and shot me another one of those awkward smiles. “I should be going.”

I swallowed my fear, the kind that would paralyze me and keep me here to make sure I wasn’t given a bad name, so no one would think ill of me. “Alright, well drop by in a week or so.” I could see now I was no longer the hot tattoo artist but something more sinister. In a week, she wouldn’t return. And I wouldn’t be here anyway.

Audrey gave me a vague nod, turned and quickly walked away, her sex heels echoing on the sidewalk.

“Are all your clients that awkward?” Sophia asked as she moved over to the passenger side door of the car.

“I guess none of this looks very good,” I said with a forced shrug.

“It’s beyond looking good,” she said, throwing the briefcase inside and squinting at me gravely. “Because this is all very, very bad, Camden. I don’t think you realize how bad this all is.”

Oh, the thing was, I did.

I took one last look at Sins & Needles and got in the car, not even feeling the heat that only an old car can hold.

I’d only been driving for twenty minutes before the depraved finality of everything settled in. Beneath my hands was the wheel of a car that wasn’t mine and wasn’t his and wasn’t hers but it was all I had left. I had lived too fast and too hard and now I was just supposed to accept it, accept that it was a parting gift, like the briefcase in Sophia’s hands, my reward for giving up my love.

I wasn’t giving up, was I? Every bone in my body ached to turn the GTO around, to go back for Ellie, to take her from something she didn’t need to do, from a life she didn’t need to return to. From a love that never was, that could never be what she needed.

“We’re about to run out of gas,” Sophia spoke up, her voice hoarse and emotionless. My eyes drifted sideways to Ben sleeping on her lap and my lungs burned like I’d swallowed a pint of sand. I couldn’t give up on Ellie. But I couldn’t give up on Ben either. My choice had been made when I drove away from Palm Valley, I just didn’t know if I’d get my second chance one more time.

I pulled the car over to the next gas station and filled up as quickly as possible. I needed to keep it together, I needed to keep control. I needed, needed, needed.

The passenger door opened and Sophia got out, Ben still in her arms, still asleep. “I’m going to get some food,” she said, nodding at the convenience mart with the garish lights that wouldn’t hide a thing.

I put the pump back in the receiver. “Why don’t you leave Ben with me? You don’t need to take him with you.”

She shook her head. “I don’t want to wake him. He’ll sleep as long as I’m holding him.”

Things I should know about my own kid. Things that I didn’t.

“Don’t you trust me with him?” I asked coming around the car.

She raised her brows. “No, Camden. I don’t. You might be his father by birth but that’s the only father you’ve been.”

“I wrote letters …” I trailed off.

“No, you didn’t,” she snapped.

It fucking figured. My heart began to pump loudly in my ears, my fingers twitched. “I did, Sophia. I wrote him. I sent you money too, but I’m guessing you never saw any of that.”

Her eyes darted to the store and back. She licked her lips and looked back at me. “No. I haven’t gotten a dime from you.”

“Fuck,” I muttered, trying hard to keep myself from pounding my fist on the back of the car.

“If it makes you feel better, I believe you.”

I raised a brow and unclenched my fist. “Just like that?”

“Just like that.” Still, she walked off toward the store, Ben’s head on her shoulder.

I sat back in the car and rested my head on the steering wheel. I needed to think and think fast.

I had two problems. Sophia and Ellie. Both seemed impossible to fix, to make right, but it didn’t matter. I had Sophia in my hands and that was the one I’d have to fix first.

Sophia was turned over to Javier by her brothers in exchange for the money I stole from them. It didn’t really surprise me, not really. They’d always been the types to throw each other under a bus if it meant coming out on top. Her whole family was fucked up that way, rotten to the core. Ellie had theories that they were tied to the Mafia but they weren’t Sicilian, just Italian. They were tied to something big and bad, that’s all I knew.

Now, obviously Sophia couldn’t go back to them. She wasn’t living with her brothers. Last I knew they were at least in LA, near her in Silverlake. They were too close for comfort and I was pretty sure if they ever saw my head popping up in their neighborhood, they’d shoot it clean off. I had to convince Sophia to leave LA with Ben. I had to get them somewhere far away and safe. At the depth of mud I was sunk in, I couldn’t take things to the police, not without going to jail myself. Fuck, if I really thought about it, there was a grocery list of felonies I’d committed in the last week alone.

Once I got Sophia away, maybe even in another state, Oregon, who knows where, I’d contact Gus, the guy Ellie vouched for. We could get Sophia a new name. We had money. We could start again.

It sounded all too familiar.

What about Ellie?

What about Ellie?

What about Ellie?

What happened to her? Every day I was apart from her was a day she was farther and farther away. Three lives were at stake here and I couldn’t save all of them at the same time.

I exhaled loudly feeling nothing but hopeless and my eyes fell to the passenger side. The briefcase was gone. I sat up and craned my neck to look at the store. I couldn’t see Sophia inside. No …

Panic rose inside me. She wouldn’t take the money and leave me here? She didn’t hate me that much. She couldn’t …

I didn’t know her at all, did I?

I quickly got out of the car, my footsteps sounding hard on the asphalt in a rare moment of quiet from the highway. The store looked empty for all I could see and we were the only car on the lot.

I opened the door, the bell jangling too loud for my liking. A double-chinned man with fuzzy grey hair was looking at a crossword puzzle. The store was empty.

“Excuse me,” I said trying to hide the anxiety in my voice. The clerk didn’t even look up. I walked over and leaned over the counter, getting between him and the puzzle. Finally his tired, red eyes met mine. I knew those eyes, they were desert eyes, dried out from too much sun and too little joy.

“Can I help you?” the man asked. I could sense he was about to reach under the counter for the alarm so I backed off.