Reed was a liar. So why honor a promise to a liar?

Still, Reed had lived up to his end of the bargain, which was the only reason Spud had this money waiting for him. Spud had agreed to the plan, shook on it. But how was it fair that Spud had to stay in that crappy shack when he had so much waiting for him in St. Paul? What if he just walked out, left Reed to fend for himself and went back to St. Paul for good?

Reed could hurt him. He might even go so far as to kill Spud if he went back on his word. Spud hadn’t believed that to be a possibility when this all began, but the way Reed had been acting lately… Spud had to admit, he was scared.

Spud looked at Pip in the backseat, quietly staring out the window. What a perfectly wonderful little boy. Pip was never supposed to be part of the equation beyond a few weeks of babysitting, but something had changed. Of all the terrible things that Spud had done, none tore at him as much as the thought of what he was about to do—leave Pip with his father. How could he do that? The thought of what Reed would do to toughen his son up turned everything in Spud’s stomach sour.

“How you doing back there?”

“Fine.” Pip kept his head turned toward the window.

“Can I ask you something? You like me, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“We’re buddies.”

Pip looked at Spud, his lips arcing up in a little smile. It was a beautiful smile.

“We’re more than buddies,” Spud said, “don’t you think? I mean…” It might have been the elation of everything that email represented, but the swell of emotion in his chest had Spud saying things he shouldn’t. “If it was just you and me… if we were—you know—a team, that’d be okay with you, wouldn’t it?”

He saw Pip nod.

Spud tucked the thought away. He shouldn’t put ideas into Pip’s head until he’d had time to work them through. If Pip slipped up and said something about the car rides or the two of them… Spud was treading on very dangerous ground.

He drove back to the shack but didn’t bother to park in the same spot or at the same angle. He’d decided he would not be there when Reed came home from work.

CHAPTER 26

Technically, Max owned a cell phone already; it lay in the bottom of a drawer, its battery dead, its screen dusty. He had canceled his provider back when he moved to the cabin, and now the phone was little more than a paperweight.

Still, he brought his old phone with him to the store, thinking he could fire it up with a new account, one that wouldn’t have a pile of unanswered messages from Niki waiting. But the woman at the store convinced him to upgrade, selling him the smartest phone she had. It needed an email address, so he created a new one. He promised himself that all this was temporary, a necessity that he’d shut back off as soon as they found Sandy and Pip.