Total pages in book: 133
Estimated words: 126589 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 633(@200wpm)___ 506(@250wpm)___ 422(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126589 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 633(@200wpm)___ 506(@250wpm)___ 422(@300wpm)
He had tried reaching out on social media and she’d blocked and deleted him there as well.
He’d come over a few times, knocking on her door, while she hid in her house and refused to open for him. Cat knew the full story of what Gideon had done. She’d been appalled, but after Gideon’s return, she now knew from him why he had done what he’d done, and Cat had told Beth that his actions, while unforgivable, were understandable.
Beth didn’t want to understand. She wanted to nurse her anger, and continue fanning the flames of her outrage. Because listening to him may mean forgiving him, which could lead to Beth letting him back behind her defenses. And Beth had learned the hard way that it was advisable to keep your worst enemy firmly behind a barricade of impenetrable steel with no access to your soft, vulnerable parts.
Beth attempted to ignore the envelope for the rest of the evening. But found herself staring at it while she had her dinner, and then her eyes kept drifting to it while she tried to read her book. She was relieved to finally go to bed and leave it behind on the kitchen counter.
She fell asleep thinking about it.
She gave in to temptation the following morning just after breakfast. After opening the envelope with extreme caution, she dragged out the loose leaf of paper and then simply stared in awe at the beautifully rendered pencil sketch of Granny June and Spock.
On the other side of the page was a simple:
She wanted to tear the slip of paper into a million little pieces, but she couldn’t. Not with that adorable picture of Granny June and Spock on the other side of it.
She could frame it and simply forget the note existed.
She worried her thumbnail with her teeth as she pensively stared down at the sketch. It was so sweet. It wasn’t modelled on any of the pictures she had up on social media. And there was nothing remotely similar in her house, but he’d seen enough pictures of Spock and Granny June to have created something entirely new. Spock was perched on her grandmother’s shoulder and leaning toward her face, while Granny June stared at him with a wide, happy smile on her lips. While no such picture existed of them in reality, it was still a heartbreakingly familiar sight to Beth. She had often seen them exactly like this and for Gideon to have a captured something like this without having witnessed it was just magical.
She carefully placed the sketch, face-up, on the living room coffee table. She would deal with it later. She had work to do and because her concentration had been shot the last week or so, it had been slow going.
She sat down behind her desk, then, instead of working, simply stared at the house across the road for ages. She often looked for Gideon, wondering what he was up to. She avoided her desk in the mornings, when she knew it was time for his workout, and instead carried her laptop to the patio to work out there, as she’d done this morning.
Even that proved to be too much of a distraction. Her fishpond was nearly done, but Gideon hadn’t ventured back into her yard to finish the job since their ill-fated trip. She found herself glaring at the tarp covering the pond every morning, wondering what she was supposed to do with the eyesore now.
Thinking about it now made her growl and she did a quick online search for a local contractor. A few minutes later she’d made an appointment with a guy named Klaas to come and assess the job, with a view to filling the pit and paving over it.
Feeling like she’d already achieved something this morning, she dusted her hands and forced herself to focus on her work.
Cat’s message came a couple of hours later and Beth smiled. Cat was in her sixth month of pregnancy now, and she and Cam were incredibly excited about their imminent bundle of joy. They had been keeping everyone appraised of every step of the baby’s development and Cat’s pregnancy, sometimes revealing way too much information about her changing body.
They hadn’t mentioned the guardianship thing again, and Beth wondered what would happen now that she and Gideon weren’t even on nodding terms.
For that matter, would Gideon be there tomorrow? That seemed highly likely. Beth wasn’t ready to see him. She didn’t think she would ever be ready to see him and for a desperate moment, she tried to think of some excuse to avoid tomorrow’s dinner, before coming to her senses. She couldn’t do that to Cat and Cam. To the rest of the group. This was exactly what Cat had warned her would happen if she and Gideon got involved with each other and it went “south”. Cat had been worried that it would irreparably fuck up the group.