The man whose car this was wasn’t any boyfriend. He was her mother’s boyfriend, a man named Rourke who’d moved into their house eight months back and turned it into a place where everybody walked soft and nobody slept right and the good days were just the days nothing happened.
Her mother was using. Bad, and getting worse. Gone most days, and when she was home she wasn’t really home. Rourke ran things now. Rourke decided who ate and when and what it cost them.
Two days ago, Eli spilled a cup of juice on Rourke’s couch. Four years old, knocked over a cup. Rourke backhanded him clean off his feet. That was the bruise on his cheek.
Tasha saw it happen. She told me she’d been saving up to run for weeks, hiding crumpled dollar bills inside a tampon box where she figured Rourke would never look, waiting for
