I kept crying but did it braced for her to say something ugly.
She didn’t.
She pulled me in her arms.
And she hugged me.
Hard.
Thirty Minutes Earlier…
In Room Three West
Knox Chambers heard the door snick shut.
He opened his eyes.
He saw ceiling.
Physically, he felt pretty much nothing.
Mentally, he felt hazy and out of it.
Even so…
His lips curled up in a smile.
TWO
A WIN WAS A WIN
“Get up. I have to go to work, and you have to stop hiding.”
Hearing these words through sleep, I opened my eyes and saw my sister bending over the playpen with some kind of organic spritz cleaner in one hand and a microfiber cloth in the other.
I was on her couch, where I’d slept after bawling, then letting the whole story leak out, then Dream’s clients came to get their kids while I texted the only text I sent (or read), one to Raye asking her to look after my French bulldog, Jacques.
After that, Dream force-fed me (not quite, but I wasn’t hungry, and she did get super bossy in making me eat) some vegan white chili (how could vegans eat that “cheese” she’d sprinkled on top—it was awful, though the rest of it was rather tasty). She’d then DoorDashed a dozen gluten free, vegan cupcakes.
I ate six (yes, six, the love of my life was in a hospital bed, but even before that he was lost to me, what else was I gonna do?) and they were straight up tasty. Considering I thought that through heartbreak, that meant they were tasty.
I passed out on the couch while Dream nibbled a cupcake and watched Mississippi Burning.
Even so, the couch was the only choice I had since I wasn’t about to go home and be bombarded by Angels and their questions, seeing as we all lived in the same apartment complex, they all had keys to my pad, so avoiding them would be impossible.
And Dream rented a tiny, two-bedroom house in an okay neighborhood in central Phoenix.
It was one of those neighborhoods that, block-to-block, could garner anything. Rows of houses with patches of dirt for their yards and not-so-great cars in their drives, and the next block could be lots that had been scraped to build perfect little houses with red or yellow front doors and firepits outside festooned with furniture and décor ordered direct from Frontgate.
So one room was hers, the other room was a kids’ wonder bedroom (my single, unemployed (at the time) sister popping out three kids in four years was not something I remotely considered a bright idea, but you couldn’t fault her mothering—she adored my nephew and nieces, Dusk, Feather and Harmony, (and yeah, I didn’t remotely think those were awesome names either, but they weren’t my kids)).
In other words, the couch was my only choice.
Because yeah…I was hiding.
I sat up and it felt like my whole body was one big kink.
I pulled my hair out of my face and arched my back.
