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Before et into et the rest of our personal stuff we had left behind I also wanted to grabto be out of treat faible to come back to Race and Bax went by the house and can in the front yard and it looked like the place had been vacant for a while There were those locks Realtors use to keep people out on all the doors, but they were no match for a professional car thief, and a few days later,to find as much of our old life as we could in a rush I only wanted things that had goodseveral fas from the house that I personally would’ve left behind

When I stuck my head in my dad’s office, I wasn’t at all surprised to find it cleaned out He had left not only us, but all his other responsibilities high and dry I didn’t ot dark and his jaw clenched when he looked over my shoulder into the empty room I knew er was onto ask Race to let it go, to just let et about the debt Not because I knew deep down he couldn’t do that and still expect the rest of the people ed hi to really believe people needed to suffer the consequences of their actions Maybe if one to jail after the accident, she would have been forced to be medicated and wouldn’t have ended up such a wreck And maybe, just maybe, Dreould have felt like his father and brother’s deaths hadn’t been in vain and that justice was served and none of this nightmare would have had to happen In the end, it landedas that was the end result, I wouldn’t coh ride it had been so far

I had a minor attack of nerves the first ti to forever see Booker’s bleeding body and Dovie standing in the doorith a gun pointed at Drew, but with the shining new floors and all the htly colored furniture Race had letinto an entirely new space, a space that felt ly past and bloody recent history, than any other place had in a long time

Race and I settled into a pretty easy pattern really quickly I still went to school, still went to work at the restaurant, and he still ran around town, still came hohts he called and toldat the loft because it was close to dawn and he was burned out I could read between the lines and tell thathe hadn’t shaken off just yet and wasn’t ready to bring it into this place that was his safe haven I wasn’t like Dovie I didn’t just let hi to be with, and I wanted him home even when he was raw and still covered in the city If I was in, then I was all the way in, and he never tried to give e and my tummy hurt to knohat he was up to after dark, he always told ht worrying about him until I heard him come up the stairs

It took a few more weeks for me to realize that Karsen wasn’t nearly as settled into the new routine and life as I was I started to notice that she was really quiet, that she see on around her I asked Race what he thought about it, considering he had taken Dovie under his wing and practically raised her when she was only sixteen He suggested just talking to her instead of trying to guess because the teenage-girl mind was like a labyrinth, so I pulledon

At first she tried to tellto a new place, that she missed Mo else was going on with her I let it go for a few days until I caht and noticed that she not only had a fat lip, but was also ed asthe das at school had only gotten worse since the house had gone into foreclosure The rich kids were picking on her, the boys were harassing her, and when one of the girls had gotten in her face about Mo in rehab, Karsen had lost it and sht in the hall She toldto be suspended and that she didn’t want to go back to the Hill ever again She felt strongly enough about it that she had already looked into alternative schooling, because she knew there was no way I was going to let her drop out, and there was no way either Race or I was going to be co her into the war zone that was the public high school in the Point She had taken it upon herself to find a charter school that was really close to where Dovie and Bax lived It was a school that was just a step down froh she would have to wear a uniforo with her to enroll I was never going to get used to howto this new life and our new set of circumstances like a duck to water