Last Breath: A Novella. Karin Slaughter

opened her mouth to explain, but she got stuck on Flora’s desperate tone, her insistence that what Charlie was thinking was not what was actually happening. But what if it was? If the girl was being abused by her grandfather, that changed everything.

      “Charlie?” Belinda asked. “What’s up? Why are you hiding out in here?”

      “I’m not hiding, I was—”

      “Did you throw up?”

      Charlie could only concentrate on one thing at a time. “Did you make that frosting from scratch?”

      “Don’t be stupid.” Belinda squinted her eyes, as if Charlie was an abstract painting. “Your boobs look bigger.”

      “I thought your sorority taught you how to deal with those feelings.”

      “Shut up,” Belinda said. “Are you pregnant?”

      “Very funny.” The only religious thing in Charlie’s life was the schedule by which she took her birth control pills. “I’ve been spotting for two days. I’m cramping. I want to eat candy and kill everything. I think it’s just a bug.”

      “It better be a bug.” Belinda rubbed her round belly. “Enjoy your freedom before everything changes.”

      “That sounds ominous.”

      “You’ll see. Once you start having babies, that perfect, loving husband of yours will start treating you like a milk cow. Trust me. It’s like they think they have something over you. And they do. You’re trapped, and they know that you need them, but they can walk away at any time and find somebody younger and tighter to have fun with.”

      Charlie wasn’t going to have this conversation again. The only thing that seemed to change about her friends with children is that they started treating their husbands like jerks. “Tell me about Flora.”

      “Who?” Belinda seemed to have forgotten the girl as soon as she left the room. “Oh, her. You know that movie we saw last month, Mean Girls? She’d be the Lindsay Lohan character.”

      “So, part of the group but not a leader, and not particularly comfortable with the meanness?”

      “More like a survivor. Those bitches are next-level cruel.” Belinda sniffed toward the handicap stall. “Did you eat bacon for breakfast?”

      Charlie searched her purse for some mints. She found gum instead, but the thought of the peppermint flavor made her feel queasy again. “Do you have some candy?”

      “I think I have some Jolly Ranchers.” Belinda unzipped her purse. “Ugh, I should clean this out. Cheerios. How did those get in there? There’s some mints. Oreos, but you can’t—”

      Charlie snatched the bag out of her hands.

      “I thought you couldn’t do milk?”

      “Do you really think this white crap has milk in it?” Charlie bit into an Oreo. She felt an instant soothing in her brain. “What about her parents?”

      “Whose parents?”

      “B, keep up with me. I’m asking about Flora Faulkner.”

      “Oh, well, her mother died. Dad, too. His parents are raising her. She’s a cookie-selling machine. I think she went to the ceremony in Atlanta last—”

      “What are her grandparents like?”

      “I’ve only been doing this for a minute, Charlie. I don’t know much of anything about any of those girls except they seem to think it’s easy to bake a sheet cake and throw a party for twenty snotty teenagers who don’t appreciate anything you’ve done for them and think you’re old and fat and stupid.” She had tears in her eyes, but she had tears in her eyes a lot lately. “It’s exactly like being home with Ryan. I thought it would be different having something to do, but they think I’m a failure, just like he does.”

      Charlie couldn’t take another crying jag about Belinda’s husband right now. “Do you think that Flora’s grandparents are doing a good job?”

      “You mean, raising her?” Belinda looked in the mirror, using her pinky finger to carefully wipe under her eyes. “I dunno. She’s a good kid. She does well in school. She’s an awesome Girl Scout. I think she’s really smart. And sweet. And really thoughtful, like she helped me get the cake out of the car when I got here, while the rest of those lazy bitches stood around with their thumbs up their asses.”

      “Okay, that’s Flora. What about her grandparents as human beings?”

      “I don’t like to say bad things about people.”

      Charlie laughed. So did Belinda. If she didn’t say bad things about people, half her day would be spent in silence.

      Belinda said, “I met the grandmother last month. She smelled like a whiskey barrel at eight o’clock in the morning. Driving a sapphire blue Porsche, though. A freaking Porsche. And they had that house on the lake, but now they’re living in those cinder-block apartments down from Shady Ray’s.”

      Charlie wondered where the Porsche had ended up. “What about the grandfather?”

      “I dunno. Some of the girls were teasing her about him because he’s good looking or something, but he’s got to be, like, two thousand years old, so maybe they were just being bitches. You get teased about your dad all the time, right?”

      Charlie hadn’t been teased, she had been threatened, and her mother had been murdered, because her father made a living out of keeping bad men out of prison. “Anything else about the grandfather?”

      “That’s all I’ve got.” Belinda was checking her make-up in the mirror again. Charlie didn’t want to think in platitudes, like that her friend was glowing, but Belinda was a different person when she was pregnant. Her skin cleared up. There was always color in her cheeks. For all of her prickliness, she had stopped obsessing about the small things. Like she didn’t seem to care that her watermelon-sized stomach was pressed against the counter, wicking water into her dress. Or that her navel poked out like the stem on an apple.

      Charlie would look like that one day. She would grow her husband’s child in her belly. She would be a mother—hopefully a mother like her own mother, who was interested in her kids, who pushed them to be intelligent, useful women.

      One day.

      Eventually.

      They had talked about this before, Charlie and her husband. They would have a baby as soon as they had a handle on their student loans. As soon as her practice was steady. As soon as their cars were paid off. As soon as her nerdy husband was ready to give up the spare bedroom where he kept his mildly expensive Star Trek collection.

      Charlie tried to do a running tally of how much the Emancipation of Florabama Faulkner would cost. Filing fees. Motions. Court appearances. Not to mention hours of Charlie’s time. She could not in good conscience take funds from Flora’s trust, no matter how much money was left in it.

      If Dexter Black paid his bill, that might almost cover the expenses.

      She heard her father’s voice in her head—

       And if frogs had wings, they wouldn’t bump their tails hopping.

      Belinda said, “Why are you asking all these questions?”

      “Because I think Flora needs my help.”

      “Wait, is this like that John Grisham movie where the kid gives Susan Sarandon a dollar to be his lawyer?”

      “No,” Charlie said. “This is like that movie where the stupid lawyer goes bankrupt because she never gets paid.”

       2

      Charlie kicked the vending