All Chapters of Ride With Me, The Biker President's Love: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Chapter 11: Packing took eleven minutes. I want to be honest about how it went. I didn't fold anything. I grabbed a laundry basket and I filled it with Lily's clothes and her bunny and her blanket and the purple crayons and the dinosaur drawing and I dumped my stuff on top. Four shirts. Two pairs of jeans. Underwear. My toothbrush. The three rules taped to the inside of my closet door — I peeled them off and folded them and put them in my back pocket. My mother stood in the doorway with a trash bag. "I don't have anything," she said. "Everything I own was in that motel." "We'll get you clothes." "I can't pay you back." "I don't want you to pay me back." She looked at me. Then she looked at the trash bag. Then she went into the bathroom and took the little hotel soap and the toothbrush I'd never opened and she put them in the bag, and something about that made my eyes hot and I had to turn around. Kael was in the hallway, on the phone. Not to his father. He was ta

Chapter 13: I couldn't sleep. That's not a surprise. I'd slept maybe four hours in two days and my body had gone past tired into that weird electric state where your eyes hurt and your brain won't shut up. Lily was out cold in the crib. Marisol had found a nightlight somewhere and plugged it in and the room had a soft yellow glow. I stood there for a minute and watched my daughter breathe. Then I went downstairs. The house was quiet. The kitchen light was on. My mother was sitting at the table with a cup of tea going cold in front of her. She looked up when I came in. "Can't sleep either?" she said. "No." "Sit down." I sat down. We didn't say anything for a while. The fridge hummed. Somewhere outside a motorcycle went past on the road beyond the wall. "I need to ask you something," I said. "Okay." "You said the man who paid you wrote you letters." "Sometimes. Mostly it was just the money." "Do you still have any of the letters?" Colleen looked at me

Chapter 15: I said it again because my brain couldn't hold it. "Pay up." Colleen had her hands over her face. "Mom." "I didn't know," she said. "I swear to God, Ella, I didn't know." "Didn't know what?" "I didn't know it was him." The kitchen was dead silent. Kael was standing by the counter with his phone in his hand. Sierra was in the doorway. Marisol had come in from somewhere and was standing by the sink with her arms crossed. "Start at the beginning," Kael said. "Slow." Colleen wiped her face with both hands. She looked like she'd aged ten years in ten minutes. "I bought the house eight years ago," she said. "With the money. I bought it outright. Cash. In my name. A little place on Tuller Street. Two bedrooms. A garden." "How much?" Kael said. "Ninety thousand." "And the man who sold it to you?" "I never met him. It was through a lawyer. A woman. She had all the papers. She said the seller was a company that had inherited the property and they want

Chapter 17: The basement smelled like old paper and coffee. The man's name was Solomon. He didn't give a last name and I didn't ask. He sat down across from me at a folding table covered in files and took his glasses off and cleaned them on his shirt. "Okay," he said. "First thing. You're not gonna cry." I blinked. "Excuse me?" "You're not gonna cry. Not in here. You can cry in the car. You can cry at home. You can cry in the shower. But not in here. Because the second you cry I start feeling sorry for you and I stop thinking straight. And I need to think straight right now." I looked at Kael. Kael was standing by the door with his arms crossed. "He's not a people person," Kael said. "I'm not a people person," Solomon said. "I'm a paper person. Paper doesn't cry. Paper tells the truth." He put his glasses back on. "Now. Start at the beginning. And when I say the beginning I mean the actual beginning. Not the part where you ran. The part before." I started at the

Chapter 19: I stood on the porch with a photograph of my daughter in my hand and a note from my uncle in my other hand, and I felt something I hadn't felt in three years. Not fear. Not exactly. Rage. It was cold and quiet and it sat in my chest like a stone. "He was in the diner," I said. Kael took the photo from me. Looked at it. His jaw moved. "Two days ago," he said. "Two days ago he was sitting in my diner taking pictures of my kid while I was carrying plates." "Ella—" "Which booth?" Kael looked at me. "What?" "Which booth was he in? In the photo. You can tell by the angle." He turned the photo over. Studied it. Solomon had been right about him — he looked at corners. At edges. At things people don't mean to show you. "Booth on the left," he said. "Back wall. Behind the pie case." "The one with the broken seat." "How do you know it's got a broken seat?" "Because it's got a broken seat. Rita's had a piece of duct tape on it since before I start