Total pages in book: 91
Estimated words: 86751 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 434(@200wpm)___ 347(@250wpm)___ 289(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 86751 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 434(@200wpm)___ 347(@250wpm)___ 289(@300wpm)
“In a legal sense, he’s not. His names were on my accounts, so it was his money, too.”
“What did your family say about all this?” It boggles my mind that he’d be allowed to set foot on this property after what he did to her.
Her eyes drop to the floor. “My mom only knows that we broke up. I told Sadie what he did, but not everything. I was too embarrassed.”
Even though I stay seated next to her on the bed, in my mind, I’m striding to the door, running across the property, and pounding Rick’s face in. It’s about as satisfying as thinking about food when I’m hungry.
But there are reasons beyond decorum for why I can’t vent my anger in a satisfying way.
“When I first started dating Rick, my mom didn’t like him, and she told me it was too soon to think about marriage. But after we got engaged, he turned the charm way up, and he won her over. My mom liked him so much, I’m not sure she would have believed me if I told her what he did. She thinks I did something to make him leave.”
My jaw drops open at that, but I close it. Showing Callie what I think about her mother isn’t going to help the situation.
“If she did believe me, there’d be a big ‘I told you so’ coming my way, so I kept quiet. I got roommates to help with the house payment, and I took an extra job so that I can build up my savings again. I hope to go back to school, but it’ll be a while.
“I thought I had moved past most of the bad feelings about it all. I want to just chalk it up to a big life lesson and move on, but as soon as I saw Rick yesterday, all the guilt and shame came rushing back like a tidal wave.”
I turn her toward me, my hands grasping her arms, needing her to believe me. “Callie, it’s not your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I didn’t do anything right. I was an idiot.”
“We all make mistakes. We all have things we regret,” Max says. “That’s what makes us human.”
He meets my eyes, and from his pained expression, it’s clear we’re thinking about the same thing. Our biggest regret.
It’s not something we like to talk about, but maybe hearing it would help Callie.
CHAPTER 44
CALLIE
The men are giving each other one of their twin looks. Several times, I’ve noticed them communicating without words. Everyone does it, of course, but they seem to express volumes with just their eyes.
This time, their eyes are sad.
I look back and forth between them. “What is it?”
Miles trails his fingers back and forth over my leg. “We had a friend,” he says. He glances at Max again, as if making sure his brother will be okay with where the conversation is heading.
Max nods. It’s almost imperceptible, but I catch it.
“He was our best friend in elementary school. The three of us did everything together. We used to say we were triplets rather than twins.”
I hope Miles is going to tell me they got in a fight and that’s why they aren’t friends anymore, but the heaviness in his tone warns me that this story is going to be heartbreaking.
“We were still friends in high school, but we had different classes and played different sports, and we hung out with different people.”
When Miles’s pause stretches on, Max takes over. “He got involved with some people he shouldn’t have. He had a girlfriend who was bad news. We suspected his new friends were into some bad stuff, but we thought our friend was too smart to get mixed up in that himself.
“We should have talked to him. We should have asked questions, but we didn’t. We were so busy with our own lives that we didn’t know anything had happened to him until we were sitting in class on a Monday morning and there was an announcement that grief counselors were available because a student had died over the weekend.
“He took a lethal overdose, almost certainly unintentionally. Illegal drugs, smuggled into the country, trafficked by greedy criminals, and provided to him by his new friends.”
“I’m so sorry.” My heart is breaking into a million pieces for the two of them.
Miles’s voice is thick. “We should have seen it coming, and we should have stopped it before it happened.”
“There’s no way you could have known what would happen! It wasn’t your fault.”
“We should have been better friends,” Max says. “That’s what we regret.”
My eyes are filled with tears at the thought of all their pain. I pull Miles into a long hug, wanting to send comfort through my body and into his own. When I break away, I wrap my arms around Max and do the same.