I’d only found this out thanks to Romeo’s friend, Apollo, who’d done a deep dive into our background.
He was a computer guru who had a way with computers, which was the complete opposite of me.
“Jesus, what’s wrong with you?”
I looked over at my best friend, Shade, who sat on the opposite end of the couch from me.
Shade and I had been friends since we were kids. He was the one person that I’d always been able to count on, and truthfully, I probably wouldn’t be alive without him.
“Nothing,” I grumbled as I sat up from Shade’s couch, wiping my eyes with my fists. “Why’d you let me sleep?”
I’d promised him that I would spend time with him today, and I’d fallen asleep instead.
“Probably because you look like you’ve gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson,” he said. “And you haven’t been sleeping. You know you haven’t. You needed some shut-eye, even if we were supposed to be watching a movie.”
I looked out the window to try to gauge what time it was and saw the darkness glaring back at me.
“Shit,” I said as I scrambled off my butt. “I gotta go let Brawny out.”
“Brawny will be okay if you want to…” I shook my head, knowing he was going to say “leave him alone.”
I stood up and stretched my arms up high over my head. “I can’t. Mable entrusted me with his care.”
Mable and her fiancé, Romeo, were out of town for the weekend visiting Oregon. There was a weekend event that was for cottage bakers—people who sold food out of their homes—and she really wanted to go to it.
I’d promised them that I’d watch Brawny, and I’d been doing a damn fine job of it until right that moment.
I was surprised when Mable had asked me and not Cody, my half sister.
Cody’s mom was married to my dad, and from a young age, my mom had done everything in her power to alienate me from my father after my father had dumped her.
And, to my complete stupidity, I’d believed my mother’s lies about my dad for the longest of times. But my mother wasn’t just feeding me lies about my dad. My mother was also feeding Cody, Mable, and my father lies, too.
Lies that centered around me being a conceited, self-serving bitch.
A name that I’d lived up to because I’d thought that they were all awful people—including my mother.
For the longest time, I’d been completely alone in the world, constantly waiting for one more person to pile on the hate.
Now, after learning all that my mother had done to make the people’s lives that she was supposed to love as miserable as possible, I was slowly trying to force myself to extend an olive branch to my family.
It’d come easy with Mable and Cody, seeing as we’d trauma bonded over my mother’s murder.
My father and Grace, Cody’s mom and my stepmother, however?
That was harder than I’d thought it would be.
My dad harbored a lot of guilt with how little he’d tried over the years to bridge the gap that I’d put between the two of us. He was constantly trying too hard.
And me, being fiercely independent and unable to let people in? Well, let’s just say that it was harder than it probably should be, considering.
“Well, you owe me a make-up day then,” Shade said as he stood up and walked with me to the door. “And don’t think I’ve forgotten that you didn’t ever make dinner. You owe me that, too.”
I smiled as I grabbed my coat and threw it on.
My gaze went out over the quickly darkening sky. “Bye, Shade. Don’t get in trouble this week.”
Shade was a magnet for trouble.
