6
Lane
Piper was like a bright ray of sunshine, a shot of rotgut whiskey and a poked bear all put together in a tiny, feisty little body. f**k, she made me laugh, and I hadn’t done that in a while. Between the s**t with the mine and Lil being sick, the past year had been a struggle. The only person who knew about Lil, at least the truth of her, was Spur. I’d lied about her for so long, it felt like the truth. Everyone in town assumed Lil was a working girl and I was especially—and consistently—interested in her attentions. Hell, even Walker and Luke Tate thought she was my paid mistress. Instead, she was a sixty-year-old woman with cancer who’d taken Spur and me in when we were eight. Our mothers had succumbed to their rough lives as whores and we had nowhere to go.
At sixteen, we struc
