“Tell me something, and I’ll tell you what you want to know.”
I nodded. “Okay. What do you want to know?”
“You said you were there the night of the accident, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I know that I’ve seen you volunteering around here in the past. But do you volunteer for the people you’ve served in the community? I mean, do you always check on people who you’ve been called to the scene of their accident in the days following, or are you assigned people to volunteer for?”
Her question made me nervous. I wondered how much she may have figured out already.
“When it’s a bad one, I do.”
“Why do you visit her every day?”
“Because no one else does but you, and I don’t want her to wake up all alone. So, I’ll do my part as much as possible. To answer your question, I asked if I could be assigned to her because I was there the night of her accident.” Some of what I said was true, but not all of it.
She turned her lips down at that. “That’s because she has no one else.”
I suspected as much from the length of time I had spent by her side. I hated lying to Waverleigh, but she didn’t need to know the real reason.
It was already my fault that her husband died in the accident, just as much as I was to blame for Lena being shot by her husband, Paul. Thank God that the truck driver survived the accident, and no one else was hurt that night.
“Well, let’s see, where can I start? She was an only child whose mother died during childbirth, and her father died whenshe was just thirteen. He had a brain aneurysm, and that left her to be raised by his mother. She loved Grams with everything that she had. We all did. The day that she had the accident, her grandmother had just died that morning.”
The wind was sucked from my lungs upon hearing that news. My audible gasp wasn’t unnoticed because Waverleigh nodded, while I sat there with my fingers steepled together, staring at her with wide eyes.
“Yeah, she lost her grandmother that morning and her husband that night. The three of us were all she had in this world. We buried Grams today, and it hurt knowing that she wasn’t there to tell Grams goodbye. That’s not something that she will be able to take easily when she wakes up and realizes what has happened.”
“I can imagine that will be difficult.”
“Although she didn’t have any other family, Sevyn is a very likeable person. People adore her wherever she goes, whether it’s her clients and their families, the staff that she works with at the nursing homes, the people here at the hospital when she visits and volunteers, or the person in the grocery store. She’s very likeable and well-loved.”
“Why is that?”
“Well, I guess because she’s naturally a caretaker. She’s always looking out for other people and putting them before herself. I have often had to get on her about that, though, because she’ll put other people’s needs before her own and neglect herself. She often has difficulty maintaining personal boundaries, and that makes her easily accessible to others. They sometimes take advantage of her good nature.”
She stroked Sevyn’s cheek and kissed it sweetly.
“She loves traveling and Mediterranean food. God that girl loves Mediterranean food. She watches crime shows and alwaystries to predict who did it, how they’ll get caught, and what will happen next.”
“Does she listen to music?”
“Yep. Jazz and R and B. She loves Chris Perry, Jovi Noelle, and Solemn. Her favorite colors are purple and yellow.”
“She sounds like she’s perfect,” I teased, watching how the woman stared adoringly at Sevyn.
She tore her gaze away and laughed. Her laughter was infectious, but it was hard to laugh today. “Honey, no. Trust me, she’s far from perfect. She can promise more than she can deliver, she’s impatient, and sometimes she lets whatever comes up come out of her mouth, no matter how undiplomatic it can be. She just celebrated her twenty-fifth birthday last month.”
“I’ve been talking to her about my job, so maybe she’ll enjoy hearing the real-life crime stories firsthand. What do you think?”
She giggled and nodded. “She’ll love it. As protective as she is about the elderly population because of her grandmother, she loves a good crime story just as much. Sevyn can sit down all day and watch those old crime shows, with some chocolate chip or white macadamia nut cookies and bottled tea. She can lose herself for hours in that stuff. She also listens to audiobooks about mysteries. You can play those for her. Maybe I can go to her place and find her tablet and bring it up here for you.”
“Don’t worry about it. I can download the Kindle app and read to her. You think she’ll like that?”
“She will love it. Having her own personal narrator would be right up her alley.”
“I’m glad that she has you, if she doesn’t have anyone else. Everyone needs someone.”
