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There was one nursing position I really wanted. The pay was good, the benefits were solid, and the schedule would work perfectly for me and Kaidence. Unfortunately, from everything I’d heard, getting hired there wasn’t easy. I had submitted my application anyway, updated my résumé, followed up, and done everything I could do without becoming the annoying woman calling Human Resources every damn morning. Now all I could do was wait and keep applying elsewhere. If nothing came through soon, I was going to have to call my old hospital.

I didn’t want to, but pride doesn’t pay bills, and sometimes life backs you into a corner until you realize you can either keep protecting your pride or do what needs to be done, especially when the little money you had left was disappearing one charge at a time.

For the most part, things were beginning to feel normal.

Or as normal as they could feel when I was living in a mansion that might or might not have something strange going on inside it, while my missing man had apparently started making appearances that I still couldn’t explain.

***

“Mommy, can I get these?”

I looked down and found Kaidence holding a family-sized bag of chips.

“Put those back.”

“Why?”

“Because we have chips at home.”

“Not these.”

“Kaidence.”

He released the kind of exhausted sigh only a child with absolutely no bills could give before reluctantly returning the bag to the shelf.

I pushed the cart forward.

The mansion being paid off helped tremendously, but free housing didn’t mean life suddenly stopped costing money. There was no mortgage hanging over my head, and other than utilities, property taxes, and the normal upkeep that came with a house this damn big, living there wasn’t what had drained me… moving back to Hallowridge had.

I had burned through more money in a few weeks than I normally would’ve spent in months. Gas, food on the road, replacing clothes and personal items that smelled like smoke, buying things we needed immediately after the fire, Granny’s prescriptions and little medical expenses, school stuff for Kaidence, and all the random purchases that came with uprooting your entire life without planning for it. Insurance covered a lot, but insurance didn’t magically put money back in my account the same day I spent it.

Then there was food.

Feeding four people every day was already expensive as hell, and technically I needed to count Willow as two because for somebody who never gained a damn pound, she ate like a retired NFL lineman preparing for a comeback season. That girl could finish a full plate, announce she was stuffed, then walk back into the kitchen fifteen minutes later asking who ate the leftovers. Between her, a growing five-year-old, Grandma, and me, groceries disappeared almost as quickly as I bought them.

Add that to the fact that I hadn’t had a paycheck since leaving my old job, and my savings had been taking hit after hit with nothing coming in to replace it. I wasn’t broke because I had been reckless; I was broke because life had gotten expensive all at once, and I had spent what I had making sure everybody else was okay.

I was down to roughly five hundred dollars between what I had available in my checking account and the small amount of room left on my credit card.

“Mommy?”

I looked down again.

Kaidence was holding a box of cookies.

“Can I get these?”

I sighed. “Baby, didn’t I just tell you we were only getting what’s on the list?”

He studied the box before looking back at me. “But Granny likes these.”

I stopped pushing the cart.

Damn.

He knew exactly what he was doing.

“Give me those.”