Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 68598 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 343(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 229(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68598 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 343(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 229(@300wpm)
Six women, all incredibly beautiful, stood in the middle of the candy aisle.
All of them were dressed in flowy gowns and frilly skirts. They looked like mysterious, cooky, beautiful young ladies. Not uncool moms like I was.
“Wow,” she breathed, her eyes taking them all in.
They all looked different but the same. If that made any sense at all.
Like, I could see features about them all that were very similar, but not a single one of them had the same color hair. One brunette with dull-brown hair, but another brown-headed lady that looked like her hair had slicks of oil in it. Then there was the black-headed lady, and wow. They were all very, very gorgeous.
It wasn’t just JP that was smitten.
“Candy?” my girl teased.
I rolled my eyes. “As long as it’s not on the forbidden list.”
JP knew exactly what she could and couldn’t eat.
That was why, when she snaked her way down the aisle, weaving in and out of the beautiful women taking almost the entirety of it, she went straight to her favorite candy. A plain ol’ Snickers.
“Oh, good choice,” the woman that could’ve very well played the live version of Brave in theaters said. “That’s my favorite. Though, just sayin’, Nutrageous plays a close second.”
JP smiled and said, “Nutrageous is good, too.”
I waited for her to come back, and together we checked out the rest of the store.
It was as we were checking out that the ladies all but fell into line behind me.
One was cracking a joke at her brother’s expense when said brother came barreling through the door with a glare. “How long does it take for you shi…” He saw JP and stopped his tirade midword. “Sisters to get some chocolate and get back out here? It’s been twenty minutes!”
I nearly laughed.
Chocolate decisions were hard. Especially when there was a fine selection like this store seemed to have.
Out of everything in the store, that was the one thing that they had an overabundance of.
Priorities.
“We’re in line, brother,” the long, black-haired chick said. “Chill. Go back outside and wait for us.”
The brother did not chill. He also didn’t go back outside to wait.
He crossed his arms and glared at them from the front of the store.
Ahh, brothers.
Gotta love them.
I had two of them myself that I hadn’t talked to since I’d decided to leave while pregnant with JP.
Timothy and Anthony were three years older than me. One adopted, one not.
I kept an eye on them through cyberspace, and from what I could tell, both were doing good.
Though neither one of them had given up on me, and still, to this day, spent time on the internet looking for me. Because that’s where they knew, if I wanted them to, they could find me.
After we checked out and we were headed back to our car, my eyes once again went to that van that the circus ladies came in, and an idea hit me.
For now…it could totally work.
PART II
CHAPTER 7
Things I’m no longer interested in:
-driving at night
-leaving my house at night
-driving in the winter
-leaving my house in the winter
-driving
-leaving the house
-Text from Folsom to Kobe
KOBE
One Year Later
With a circus?
Out of all the places that I’d expected to find her, that place definitely wasn’t it.
But there I was, looking at her across the large atrium, her eyes glued to her iPad.
It’d taken me one year to get here.
One long year of searching for her.
It all started with an email I’d sent to myself, knowing she would read it. I’d had no other way to contact her since she’d gone completely off the grid.
Not even Morrigan had seen or talked to her. It’d been so unexpected, according to Morrigan, that her heart was broken.
I could say the same.
Which was embarrassing to say, to be completely honest.
There I was, a forty-one-year-old man, and all I could do for the past year was think about her.
Surprisingly, at first, I’d thought that she was going to feed me information, giving me a guess on where she went and what she was doing. Or hell, even why she’d done it.
But there was nothing.
The only thing she did that let me know that she was there was her rooting around in my life through the walls of cyberspace like she’d done before. Everything would be exactly as I’d left it, though there’d be highlights in all of my notes and notes on my notes as if I’d made the notes myself but hadn’t.
The first time it’d happened, I’d been confused. The second I realized that was her way of “helping” me without actually appearing there to work.
Eventually, I’d be sent news articles from anonymous sources that would help something ping in my brain when it came to a case, and from there, things started to line up on my end. We’d solved three cold cases this year, ones that’d been so cold that not even a speck of light could be seen.