Total pages in book: 104
Estimated words: 98264 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 491(@200wpm)___ 393(@250wpm)___ 328(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 98264 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 491(@200wpm)___ 393(@250wpm)___ 328(@300wpm)
P.P.P.S. I may not go to fancy Columbia, but after several college English courses, I can definitively say this is the correct way to the do the P.S. thing. More P’s and less S’s.
P.P.P.P.S. I’d rather be there with you.
Trying to reclaim your life is a lot like cleaning a house. You can work your ass off sweeping down the cobwebs and taking out the trash, but there is always a closet to be organized or a baseboard to scrub. And just when you think you’ve finished everything, it’s time to start all over again because, while you were distracted in one room, life happened in another.
But every day when I woke up and climbed out of bed, I told myself I was getting closer and closer to the woman I wanted to be. It helped a lot knowing that the people around me were thriving too.
Joe and his wife, Misty, were happier than ever, and because of Misty, I’d inherited a kinda-sorta stepsister, Tiffany. She was funny and always had the best fashion advice. Which, after years of forcing Thea into dresses and heels, was a nice change of pace.
Thea’s online travel agency had taken off, bringing in more money for her to squirrel away for the future. I didn’t have to read between the lines to know she wanted that future to be with Ramsey, even if they were virtually strangers now.
Ramsey was doing well-ish too. Or at least as well as possible when incarcerated. He had fallen in love with his career: working in the barbershop in prison. He and Joe had never been close before he’d been arrested, but it made me giggle that my brother had somehow managed to follow in his footsteps.
Work was amazing. Stressful and exhausting, but no less incredible. I adored being a teacher. Seeing their little faces light up every morning made me feel like I’d finally found my purpose in life. I hadn’t had the best childhood, but I was bound and determined not to let any of those kids fall through the cracks the way Ramsey and I had.
So I did something about it.
First Step was an after-school program to keep kids engaged and surrounded by positive role models. It was a slow start, but after almost a year of paperwork and applications, I managed to secure county grants and funds to make it free for anyone who needed it.
My next major project for the school district was a brown bag lunch program. The majority of students in Clovert qualified for free lunches during the school year, but I knew all too well how long the summers could be with an empty fridge and a bare pantry. I developed a plan to set up brown bag lunch stations around town for students to pick up healthy, balanced meals over the months when school wasn’t in session. However, it was an expensive endeavor, and I was denied city, county, and state aid at every turn. Eventually, with Thea’s help, I started a fundraiser and took it to social media.
For as much evil that existed in our world, it was shocking how quickly we met our goal. And over the three years I’d been heading up the program, the money never stopped. I spent almost every Friday night during the summer in the school cafeteria surrounded by volunteers packing those bags until almost midnight, but seeing those kids’ faces when they picked them up meant more to me than I ever could have imagined.
Camden’s words from all those years earlier when I was lying in a hospital bed after having attempted to take my own life filled my thoughts on a daily basis. “Something good has to come from this.” I'd never bought into his theory that I could be the something good.
But those kids. That was enough for me.
Camden and I had spoken exactly zero times over the last five years. I didn’t have his number at school, but I knew that Joe did. He was the keeper of all secrets in our family. If he’d been able to find Camden when I had been in the hospital, I ventured to say he had probably kept in touch with him through the years too. But reaching out to him when I was still piecing my life back together wasn’t fair. He’d told me not to let him off my hook, but constantly reeling him in just to toss him back out because I wasn’t ready for more seemed cruel. If and when I reached out to Camden Cole again, I wanted to be the woman he deserved. Though, as time passed without so much as a peep from Camden, either, I started to wonder if maybe he'd let himself off the hook.
Around the three-year mark, I got tipsy with Thea one night and decided to look him up on Instagram. I found an account for him, complete with a profile picture of him in a suit, sexy as ever and smiling at the camera, but there were no photos uploaded to his grid. There were, however, a handful of photos other people had tagged him in.