Total pages in book: 138
Estimated words: 138981 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 695(@200wpm)___ 556(@250wpm)___ 463(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138981 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 695(@200wpm)___ 556(@250wpm)___ 463(@300wpm)
Deep down, that terrified me.
So I found my excuse to run without realizing it until later.
Now, I glance at the clock with my heart hanging low.
It’s after eleven p.m. Seven more hours alone.
I can’t stand it.
I snatch up my phone and stare at the screen with his last text.
Lucas: Can we talk without going nuclear on each other, darlin’? Give me five minutes.
God, I almost do it.
I almost mash the call button and reach for what I really want in that scared, flighty little hollow in my heart buried under so much grief.
I almost call out to him.
It’s not pride that stops me.
It’s the fact that I don’t even know what I’d say. How to explain why everything just spiraled when my feelings are so tangled into Gordian knots I can’t begin to sort them out.
Call it a delayed trauma reaction or something.
And that was before I found my creepy ex-boyfriend mangled and dead on my roof.
Roger was warped and so sick he might’ve hurt me, but he still didn’t deserve that.
He should’ve had his day in a courtroom like anyone else.
Just like Lucas Graves doesn’t deserve my clumsy flailing around now.
So I’ll talk to him.
After I get myself sorted out and I can find the right words, we’ll sit down for a heart-to-heart chat.
When I stab at my contacts with tears in my eyes, it’s not Lucas’ contact I’m mashing with my fingertip.
It’s my mother’s.
Mitsi Clarendon is the kind of night owl you can only be when you spend twenty years running your own all-night diner, so I’m not worried about waking her up.
“Delilah!” she chirps as bright and cheery as ever. “I’ve been on tenterhooks waiting to hear from you. One text when you arrived? Really.” She clucks her tongue in mock disapproval, but her voice is overflowing with warm laughter. “How are things with your new job? With everything? Are you all settled in?”
“Oh, Mom. You don’t even want to know. Mom, I—” That word stops me every time. It’s been years, and it still gives me that little hitch of breath, having someone to call Mom. I exhale and start over again. “Mom, I think I really fucked up.”
“What’s the matter? Is the job not working out, love?”
“The job is the only thing that’s working out.” I roll over and bury my face in the plush pillow of my borrowed—well, technically free—bed, mumbling around it. “Don’t get me wrong. The kids are great. The school is nice. I love the staff, and they seem to like me. But I think I accidentally stumbled on a portal to hell. Redhaven is one bad never-ending thriller film.”
“Really? But it has such wonderful reviews!”
I can’t help smiling. My mother loves her nosy little neighborhood apps like NextDoorish that let her snoop around on the neighbors.
“Some things don’t get reported to the police or NextDoorish,” I say dryly, propping my chin up and staring out the window. I can’t tell her everything that’s been happening.
She’d explode into Mom-bits with worry.
The woman does that.
It’s like she’s trying to cram eighteen years of missed parenting in all at once.
So I divert with a question. “What do you put on a police report for a broken heart, anyway?”
“Oh, Lilah.” She clucks her tongue in sympathy. “You always attract the worst men. Stop that.”
I laugh.
“That’s the hell of it, Mom. This time... this time I actually got a good one, and I went and screwed everything up. I just—I can’t let myself trust him enough to be genuine. He made mistakes too, but I wouldn’t even give him a chance to apologize.” It hurts to say it, somewhere down low in this heavy place in my chest. “I was an asshole. I let my temper come out to play and I hurt him. Bad.”
“Are we talking unfixable?”
“Maybe?”
“You aren’t telling me everything, baby girl. What else?”
There it is. There’s the mom voice that always makes me smile.
I sigh, dragging a hand over my face. “...he wants to talk. He’s tried. Even after I went off hard enough to level the whole town, he actually wants to talk to me.”
“Then why don’t you let him?” Mom asks innocently.
Oof.
“What do I say?” I sputter. “We’ve got issues, Mom. We bang heads a lot and then my gasket blows. Why would anyone want me when I’m just this porcupine?”
I can’t bring myself to use the cactus analogy when that belongs to him.
“Because I want you around all the time,” she points out softly. “And I’m quite familiar with your temper after watching you nearly pin a diner’s hand to a table with a fork for smacking your bottom.”
I can tell she’s trying not to laugh at the memory.
My face turns into a tomato.
I’m just trying not to crawl under the bed from sheer mortification.
“Lilah,” she continues gently. “If I’ve seen your temper and still love you, it’s because that fire is part of you. I know you’re always working to rein it in. It’s part of what makes you so strong. If this man’s any good, don’t you think he can see it, too?”