Total pages in book: 137
Estimated words: 138642 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 693(@200wpm)___ 555(@250wpm)___ 462(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138642 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 693(@200wpm)___ 555(@250wpm)___ 462(@300wpm)
I don’t want to judge.
I don’t.
Sometimes, small-town girls just find themselves and change overnight, realizing there was a big-city vixen inside them all along.
Yet it’s barely ten in the goddamned morning and I think they’re both drunk off their asses, swaying from side to side as they stumble into each other. Not a single care given for the more conservative folks steering around them with looks of baffled distaste, then second looks when it hits them who that is sloppy-drunk and probably high on Aleksander’s arm.
Damn.
If Ros really wants me to keep her relationship with Aleksander a secret from Ophelia, she needs to be more discreet.
Sooner or later, this will blow right through the gossip mill and have everybody and their dog whispering about it.
I give it a day or two before it gets back to Ophelia, and there’s a knock-down drag-out fight between the Sanderson sisters that could level the whole town.
Nagging unease eats at me.
I should say something.
Tell Ophelia the truth, warn her, give her time to process this shit before Rosalind sails in and drops an atom bomb on her. I hate that Ophelia’s got to deal with this shit sooner or later on top of her ma’s medical situation.
I care about them both, even if Ros is more like a younger kid I never knew half as well as Philia.
And I’m torn between loyalties, wanting to honor Ros’ privacy but also wanting to do what’s right for everyone’s own good.
For Ros’ own good, too, I think.
I may need to keep an eye on her before her boyfriend—no, fuck, fiancé—drags her into something real ugly she’s not ready for.
My brain hurts.
I need more time to think about what to say to Ophelia—if I say anything at all.
Maybe I just need to clear the air. It’s funny how she reads my silences like a favorite book, plucking out crap I don’t want her to see, but when we start talking we just lock horns and start doing damage.
I start doing it, mostly.
I always say everything wrong.
When we were young, sometimes it felt like all Ophelia ever asked for was that I speak. And I never could, not clearly, not the way she needs.
That’s me.
That’s my dumb ass to a tongue-tied tee around her.
Even when she was little and I wasn’t that much bigger, before she turned into someone so beautiful she could twist my tongue in knots with a single glance from beneath her long lashes.
When we were kids I didn’t know how to tell her how much she and Ethan meant to me.
How they eased that loneliness an only child knows when he’s the quiet kid in a gossipy little town.
So I showed her by picking on her, pulling her pigtails, like any kind of attention was good attention—and that pattern just stuck, even as we grew up.
I pull her hair, and she sucker punches me and tells me how much of a colossal dick I am.
I’m not completely sure how long I’ve wanted to hear something else.
But what I hear now, as I watch Ros and Aleksander disappear into the Sanderson family shop, Nobody’s Bees-Ness, is my dash radio coming to life with a gritty crackle.
I’m expecting Mallory to tell me there’s been another silly incident, kids tagging the trees out in the logging areas or another punk caught shoplifting.
“Unit four-oh-two? Call came in from the Sanderson house, GPS shows you’re closest—some kind of trouble with an intruder, possible assault. What’s your ETA?”
My heart stalls.
Intruder?
Possible assault?
Ophelia.
Clammy sweat sweeps down my brow as I wrench the handset to my lips.
“Less than three minutes,” I say, twisting the key violently in the ignition. “Tell her to sit tight, Mallory. I’m on my way.”
6
ONE MEAN GRIP (OPHELIA)
I shouldn’t feel as guilty as I do for leaving the medical center.
I tell myself it’s only because I’d get in the way.
Yes, I may be a trained nurse, but without being on staff at the Redhaven MC I’d just be a liability if someone needed to get in there to provide my mother with emergency care.
She’s the reason I became a hospice nurse, but when it’s your own mother...
Sometimes, there’s not much you can do.
Thankfully, it only took a few minutes to sort out an incorrect date on her DNR. Several more minutes for me to process the fact that my mother signed a flipping DNR without telling me.
Then there was nothing else to do but sit back at her bedside with her thin hand in mine and silently beg her to wake up, to come back to life, to be the same vibrant woman I still see in my mind, clear as day.
She wouldn’t want this for me.
Stuck here in limbo, pining for her health, waiting for death like it’s my own life ending too.
Although Grant told me Mom was fighting and she promised me she was fine on the phone, the attending nurse said she sleeps a lot. She didn’t bat an eye the whole time I was there with my fingers tangled in hers.