“Well this is delightful,” I said, wiping a bloody hand over my pants.
“Would this be a good time to talk about Miss Honey?” Riley asked.
This was a good time for curling into the fetal position and sleeping for nineteen hours.
“Riley, do not doubt that I’ll reach down your throat and pull out your fucking intestines if you say another word. I don’t need your shit right now.”
“I think we should talk about what happened with Miss Honey,” he said.
Pressing my fists to my eyes, I groaned. I was ready to vomit. Another word, another breath in the wrong direction, and I was spewing that wretched night all over the shiny linoleum floor. “Don’t fucking call her that—”
“Actually, I’d like to know the answer, Matt,” Patrick interrupted, crossing his arms over his chest. Few were the days when we weren’t talking over each other. “Did you call her?”
“Why do you care?” I asked.
“Because she’s nice, and she makes you happy,” Riley said. “You’re a dick with an attitude problem when she’s not around.”
“I can’t believe you fucked this up,” Sam said.
I was definitely vomiting. The jackhammers in my head coupled with the disinfectant that I could fucking taste on the air and the siblings who knew all about poking the rough spots left me choking back bile.
“You need to call her, Matt. She would want to know what happened, and she’d be pissed you’re sitting on the floor in wet clothes being all grumpy,” Shannon said.
Riley, Sam, and Patrick nodded in agreement, and I gulped back another wave of nausea rocking my stomach. God, I was never drinking again.
“Is it possible I’mnotthe one who fucked it up?”
“Sam’s right. Riley, too,” Patrick murmured.
“Not really sure why I’m the douche canoe here, or why you’re all tearing my ass up right now. She’s no angel, you know.”
“Yeah, Matt. Keep sitting there, thinking about how perfect you are,” Shannon said. “But if you don’t call her, I will. Believe it.”
Perfect I was not, but I wasn’t interested in listening to them bitching at me anymore, and I slumped against the wall.
“Do whatever the fuck you want, Shannon. It’s not like anyone gives a damn what I think anyway,” I said.
“Could you give it a rest, Matt? I don’t feel like listening to your pissing and moaning about us ignoring you and your precious opinions,” Patrick said.
“It’s not pissing and moaning, Patrick. I told her I loved her and asked her to live with me, and she basically told me to shove it up my ass because she didn’t see this going anywhere. Why don’t you geniuses enlighten me: what did I do wrong?”
Maybe that was a slight oversimplification, but the one thing I knew to be true was that Lauren wanted something else, someone else.
“Oh,” Shannon said, the word stretched and contorted to contain a dozen different reactions. “That’s not what I expected to hear.”
“Yeah,” I snapped. “So either tell me how to fix it, or shut the hell up.”
Unable to endure another minute of this debate, I closed my eyes. I sensed their wordless reactions pinging over my head, but I was too exhausted for another round.
Shannon spent the afternoon on the phone with Angus’s lawyer, who couldn’t get to his office to determine whether Angus wrote any medical directives into his will, because last night’s storm dropped a little over two feet of snow and most residential streets were blocked. Patrick went to work getting snow removal crews deployed to our jobsites, and Riley and Sam prioritized the properties at risk for roof leaks and collapse. All in all, a regular day at the office, with the minor exception of the office being an ICU waiting room and my fucking soul was shattered.
As I fell asleep in the corner, I wondered about the roof at Saint Cosmas. This was the kind of snow that would bring it all down, and part of me wanted to see the wreckage. I couldn’t be the only thing destroyed right now.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
LAUREN
17:45 Shannon:I know my brother’s on your shit list but I need my friend right now.
