When she didn’t speak up, I added, “You’re my friend. That’s something I’ve been working at this whole year, since last year when you and Sunday informed me how I wasn’t being a good female friend. I’ve been trying this year. Maybe I’m messing up at it, I don’t know, but I think when I know that somehow you’re the connection, I feel like you should tell me how that came to be. It’s friend code.” A breath. “Or girl code? I’m sorry, I’m still trying to figure that out. I knew crew code and soulmate code, and I’m a fledgling for everything else.”

“Oh my God. Shut up.” Tabatha lifted her head, rolling her eyes, but she reached up and flicked away a tear. “You’re like a baby demon who’s all cuddly. I can’t take it, and yes, it was me. How you figured that out, I have no ide—”

“It was a guess.” That she just confirmed.

As if she realized this, too, her head went back down on a soft sigh. “Right.”

“Tell me why, Tab. Tell me how.”

Another soft sigh, but this one ended into a sob. “You know why. Harper was killing my mom. I mean,” at my look, she clarified, “the stress of him, what he was holding over my parents is what was killing her. I found out two things that day when I went home. I found out that Tim Harper, Sr. was threatening my dad if he didn’t pay his debts, and he had dangerous friends so he could follow through with any threats he was saying, and I found out that my mom has a heart condition. I didn’t know about either, and let me tell you, it rocked me. It rocked everything about me. The old Tabatha, gone. Done. She died that day, and when you hear a legitimate threat being made against your family and you’ve never been exposed to that world, everything looks different. You count up what weapons you have, what options you have, and when you come up seriously short, you reach a desperate level that you’ll never understand.” She looked over, another tear slipping from her eye, but they were hollow. And they were haunted, just like me, but I saw a bitterness underneath them.

Tab had changed, but it didn’t have to do with Harper, Jr. like we thought.

“What’d you do?”

“I had to, Bren. I know you guys were trying to help, and I know your brother was keeping tabs on my mom for me, but it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t going to be enough.” Her voice broke, trembling, before her face hardened again. She rasped out, “I didn’t know how to fix it, so I tried to figure out how to make it go away. That’s what I did.”