“Yeah, that’s the one…well, I’m going to see him.” I hold my breath, waiting for her reaction—waiting for her to yell at me not to go.

She pauses again and I can hear her breathing heavily on the other end. “Why?”

“Because he needs my help.” I’m surprised she’s not freaking out more.

“With what?” She’s not connecting the dots.

“With…with getting better,” I explain evasively.

“Nova, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she says quickly as it clicks in her head what I’m implying—what Quinton needs help with. I told her enough about last summer that she knows about him, but what she doesn’t know is about the car accident. So I tell her the details of the crash quickly as Lea heads in to pay for the gas. I make sure to tell her everything important, what he went through, how I feel about helping him—how important this is to me. When I finish, my mom’s silent and I’m anxious about how she’s going to react.

“So Lea’s with you?” she finally asks. My mom likes Lea a lot. I brought her home for Christmas last year and my mom spent a lot of time talking with her and hasn’t been able to stop beaming about her since.

I stare at the gas station window, where I can see Lea at the counter paying. “She is.”

“How long are you going to be down there?” she asks and I’m surprised she’s even made it this far without fighting it more.

“I’m not sure yet…it all sort of depends.”

“On what?”

“On how bad he is,” I say, wiping my sweaty palms on the sides of my shorts.

“Nova…I don’t think it’s such a good idea…” She searches for the right words, panic seeping in, afraid she’s going to lose her daughter again. “I mean, you barely got over this kind of stuff yourself and I’m worried that it’ll be too easy for you to fall back into that stuff.”

“Mom, I’m a lot stronger than I used to be,” I assure her. “And I have Lea here to keep an eye on me and you know how good she is at that stuff.”

She sighs heavy-heartedly. “I’m still worried and I don’t think I can just let you go.”

“I’m worried, too, but about Quinton,” I tell her. “Mom, he doesn’t have anyone else to help him, at least from what I know. And if you get really worried, you can come down and check up on me. It’s only like an eight-hour drive, but I promise I’ll be okay.”

“You’d let me check up on you?” she asks, astounded.

“Yeah, because I know there’s going to be nothing to check up on,” I say. “I’m going to be okay. I can do this—I want to help him. And I need to, not just for him…but for me…this is just something I have to do, whether you like it or not.” I hate adding the last part, but it needs to be done to get my point across that she can’t talk me out of this.

She’s silent again and it’s driving me crazy. Although I’ll still go no matter what she says, I want her to support me and I wish she would relax. But I do understand where she’s coming from, considering what I’ve put her through in the past.

My mom’s still not saying anything when Lea gets into the car. She drops a large bag of Cheetos in between us, along with a bottle of water and a bottle of Dr Pepper, then shuts the door. She gives me a weird look as I start the engine and crank the air conditioning. She starts to say something, but I hold up my finger.

“Mom, are you there?” I ask, rolling up the window.

“Yeah, I’m here.” She exhales loudly. “All right, I’ll let you do this, but I’m not happy about it at all. And I want you to call me three times a day at least and if things get bad, I need Lea to tell me. Not you.”

I’m a little wounded by her last remark, but at the same time I can’t blame her. All that time I spent telling her I was okay, when I was dying inside—she knows how easily I can be silent when things get hard.

“Okay,” I tell her, knowing she can’t really force me to do anything, since I’m an adult. Calling her is just me trying to be a good daughter and let her know my plans. “I can do that for you.”

“Now put Lea on the phone,” she says in a stern tone.

“What? Why?”

“Because I want to talk to her.”

“Okay…hold on.” I hand Lea the phone.

Lea takes it, her face contorting with confusion. “What’s up?” she asks me, staring down at the screen.

“She wants to talk to you,” I explain, putting the car into drive. “But I don’t know about what.”

Lea places the phone up to her ear and says hello as I drive back onto the freeway. They chat for a while, Lea keeping her answers pretty simple. Eventually Lea hangs up and puts my phone down on the seat between us. She doesn’t say anything, opening up the bag of Cheetos as she relaxes back in the seat, and aiming the vent at her face.

“So are you going to tell me what she said?” I ask.

Lea shrugs as she pops a Cheeto into her mouth. “Nothing much. She just told me to keep an eye on you, which I was already planning on doing.” She puts her feet up on the dash. “She really cares about you, you know.”

“I know,” I say, taking a handful of Cheetos. “I hate that she’s worried.”

“You should be glad that she does worry. It means she loves you.” She says it sadly, probably thinking about her own mom and their strained relationship since her father took his own life and her mother left Lea and her sister to live with their grandmother, because she couldn’t handle being a mother alone. I think she’s been trying to get back into Lea’s life, but Lea’s struggling with it.

“I am glad.” I switch lanes, then wipe my Cheeto fingers on the side of my shorts. “But I hate worrying her.”

And I do. I’ve put my mom through enough already, but going to Vegas—to Quinton—is something I have to do. If I don’t, I’ll always look back and regret it, and like Lea’s tattoo says, I don’t want to live my life with regrets. I have a lot of them in my life and I don’t want any more.

Lea and I eat Cheetos and talk about what we’re going to do for the next few weeks until the city comes into view. Then Lea sits up, lowering her feet to the floor, and leans forward to look at the city sinfully glinting in the distance. “God, it’s small, yet it’s not.”

I nod in agreement as I take in the uniquely shaped towers and buildings stretching toward the sky, and the massive billboards on the sides of the road trying to convince us of how much fun we’re going to have.

“You know, I came here a few times when I was younger,” Lea says. “But I never went directly into the city onto the Strip…but now I’m sort of curious.”

“It looks intense,” I remark, checking the GPS on the dash for directions. “This thing says we don’t even go into the city to get to your uncle’s house.”

Lea slumps back in the seat and turns the air conditioning up a notch. “Well, we’ll have to go do something fun.”

“Don’t you have to be twenty-one to do things in Vegas?” I ask as the voice on the GPS tells me to make a turn in 1.5 miles.

She shakes her head. “No. I mean, you have to be twenty-one to gamble and shit, but there’s a ton of other stuff we could do, like go see bands play or do karaoke. It could be a lot of fun.”

I remove my hand from the shifter and extend it to her, not really wanting to go out while I’m here, but she seems sad and maybe going out could cheer her up. “Okay, it’s a deal. We’ll go out and have some fun while we’re here.”

She smiles as we shake on it. “Deal.”

We let go of each other’s hands and I put mine back on the shifter, tapping the brakes as I follow the GPS’s instructions and make a right off the nearest off-ramp. As we pass by average-looking houses, I wonder what kind of place Quinton’s living in. I have an idea, since I saw the place he lived in a year ago: a trailer in a very run-down trailer park that had a lot of druggies living in it.

My thoughts remain focused on Quinton’s living situation until I pull into a neighborhood where all the houses look identical and so do the yards. There are sprinklers watering the grass and people outside checking their mailboxes, working on their cars, walking their dogs. This neighborhood has sort of a homey feel to it, which I wasn’t expecting in a place nicknamed Sin City.

“Which one is it?” I ask as the GPS announces I’ve arrived at my destination.

Lea points at the house at the end of the cul-de-sac, a decent single-story stucco home with a garage, and a lawn in front of it. The driveway is empty and there’s a fence around the backyard, but it’s short and I can easily see over it.

I park in the driveway in front of the shut garage door. “Is he home?”

Lea takes off her seat belt and cracks her door. “No, I told you he was out of town for a few days on some business trip or something, but he said there’s a key under a flowerpot in the back and we could just let ourselves in.”

We get out and meet at the front of the car. The first thing I notice is the heat, like I’ve just stepped into a sauna, only there’s no moisture and it’s like it’s feeding on mine.

“Holy hell, it’s hot.” I fan my hand in front of my face.

“Yeah, desert heat,” she says, walking toward the side of the house. “You got to love it.”

I follow her as she wanders to the fence line and peeks into the backyard. There are a few neighbors outside in their yards and driveways, and one of them, a heavier guy with a visor on his head, watches us like we’re about to rob the place.

“What if someone calls the cops on us?” I ask as she swings her leg over the fence.

She shrugs as she grabs the top of the chain link fence and hoists herself over it onto the grass. “Then they call my uncle and he can tell them that they’re crazy,” she says as she lands on the other side and wipes the sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand.

I glance back at the neighbor guy still eyeing us and then put my leg over the fence and climb to the other side, brushing the dirt off on the back of my shorts. The backyard has a Jacuzzi in it, along with a flower garden and a gazebo that has a bunch of wind chimes hanging on it.

“Is your cousin married?” I ask as we round the corner of the house. “Or single?”

“He’s single, thirty-four, and from what I remember he takes up all these weird hobbies, like collecting wind chimes.” She nods at the collection of them singing against the gentle, hot breeze.

“What’s he do for a living?”

“He works at a bank.”

“A bank.” I sidestep a large flowerpot. “That sounds…”

“Boring,” Lea says, grinning over her shoulder at me. “Yeah, Brandon is pretty boring, which is why it’s good we’re staying with him. He’ll keep us out of trouble.”

I smile as she strolls up to the sliding glass door. “You are the best friend ever.”

“You know we’re going to have to get friendship bracelets or something and then push them together every time you say it,” she jokes as she cups her hands around her eyes and peers through the glass.

“Sounds like a plan,” I joke back, walking up to a flowerpot beside the door. I lift it up but there’s no key under it. “Okay, no key.”

“Hold on.” Lea comes over and crouches down beside me. Then she rubs her hand across the bottom of the flowerpot, pulling at something. When she pulls back she has a key in her hand.

“Ta-da,” she announces, holding the key up as she picks some tape off it and straightens her legs.

“Bravo.” I clap my hands.

She grins, pleased with herself, as she presses her hand against her chest. “What can I say, I’m a genius.”

I glance at the sliding glass door, which obviously doesn’t take a key. “All right, genius, now figure out where the key goes.”

She pauses, looking around the back of the house as she taps her lip. “Huh, that’s interesting.”

“Is there a garage door?” I ask, stepping to the corner of the house.

“I’m not sure.” She follows me. “He just moved into the house like six months ago so I’ve never been here.”

I backtrack to the fence and find the door to the garage. Lea nudges me out of the way with her elbow so she can put the key in the lock. It fits and the door opens up.

“Hell yeah.” She raises her hand in the air as she grins proudly.

We high-five and then step inside the garage, which doesn’t have a car in it, just shelves and boxes and a couple of four-wheelers. I can’t help but think about my garage back home filled with boxes of my old stuff, a lot of it connected to Landon. I was planning on going through my things when I got there this summer, because I can now. I was going to make an album with the photos and some of Landon’s sketches. I have to make sure I do it, after I’m done taking care of stuff here. It’s important.

After we go into the house and unlock the front door, Lea and I unload the trunk of the car and put all our stuff in the guest room at the back of the house beside the den. It’s a nice place, clean carpet, tile floors, with two bedrooms and two bathrooms. The furniture is plain, but not trashy, and there are a few photos hanging on the wall in the living room, one of which Lea tells me is of her dad and her uncle.