Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 75723 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75723 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
“It’s alright. I get it. I’ve thought that, too, so many times. No one blames me. Maybe my mom doesn’t, really, but things changed after. I’m not around, and I made the company my life, even if I was doing it from the house I bought, this one, while I recovered. I drowned myself in work. It was Bradford who moved to Philly when we expanded things later. I worked like a dog to make that happen. He’s a good face of the company. Blonde, handsome, young. People can think he’s running everything. I don’t mind it at all. The less publicity I get, the better anyway. I just wish—the people I stopped seeing, my friends and all—I wish I had done that differently. That it wasn’t so much work, work, work, hiding away, and licking my wounds. I should have made time. I blamed them for a while, but it was all me. My family…we don’t do things anymore. Not together like we used to. Not even during the holidays. We’re scattered all over the place. My mom and I made our peace a few years ago at my dad’s funeral, but it’s still not the same.”
“I don’t know what to say,” Ev mumbles.
“My dad, he had a good few years, but he deteriorated so quickly. He had home nurses and people my mom hired, the best of the best, yet he still got out one night and made a break for it. He was confused. He wasn’t found for hours, and by then, he’d been outside for so long. Soon after, he contracted pneumonia, and he ended up passing from that.”
There’s the smallest of shifts, and then Everleigh crawls into my lap. It’s a challenge back here because there’s almost no room. She swivels and tucks her legs up and twists so that she’s sideways. She still keeps her arms around my neck, but she looks up at me, and it’s enough to slay me. “I’m so, so sorry all this happened. That all of it happened. It’s mean, and it’s unfair. Life can be so brutal sometimes.”
“You’ve had a few knocks in that department too. I came to see if you were okay, and somehow, we ended up here, and I’m the one who did all the talking.” I blink against the burn in my sinuses that warns me I’m going to lose it soon in a much different way than I usually lose it in a car.
“That’s okay.” She nods like she wants to believe that. Like maybe she does believe it. “Should we get out?”
I can’t believe I told her all that. What’s more? I can’t believe I told her all that in the backseat of a car. I’m shocked to find that the panic has passed, and I’m now just uncomfortable. And not in a good way. Not in a way that I feel like I can handle just yet, but I don’t feel like I’m going to leap out of my skin or leap out of the car or throw up because I can’t breathe, especially since air is vital in keeping one’s cookies from being tossed.
“Has Hans ever threatened to call you Big Daddy D? And is that why you let him get away with just calling you D?”
“What?” I gasp.
She grins and scrambles off my lap, leaping out of the car the same way she got in. She walks around to the other side and opens the door, shifting the seat forward so I don’t have to risk another faceplant trying to get out.
Her nostrils flare slightly, and she can’t keep her smile from nearly cracking her face in half, but it falters at my confusion.
“That bastard,” she hisses. “I knew he was kidding. I asked him about it a few days ago. About how he started calling you D, and that’s what he said.”
“Oh my god. I have never asked him to call me Daddy anything.”
“That’s a relief. I mean, I’m not judging or anything. If you want to go by Daddy, then by all means…”
“You’d call me Daddy?” I realize I’m outside of the car and that the panic never truly set in. The door is closed, and I’m on the other side of it, and I did it. For the first time since the accident, I fucking did it. No sedation whatsoever. Yes, Everleigh was basically holding me down, but in a good way. Then she distracted me when I was getting out, and now I’m here on solid ground again, my feet back on concrete.
She shakes her head. “Nah, never.”
“Did Hans really say that, or were you just trying to distract me?”
“You’ll never know,” she says and shrugs, but then she loses it and tosses her head back and laughs. I wanted to make her smile, and now, look at this. I got laughter instead, even if it wasn’t really me but Hans. I guess it was Hans. “Alright, so he did. There’s no way I’m inventive enough to make that up.”