Total pages in book: 96
Estimated words: 94106 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 471(@200wpm)___ 376(@250wpm)___ 314(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 94106 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 471(@200wpm)___ 376(@250wpm)___ 314(@300wpm)
“I’d love to ignore it. But I can’t.” He groaned.
“No, of course. Get it.” His relationship with his sister was one of the things I liked most about him. She drove him nuts, but he was there for her a hundred-and-ten percent.
He swiped to answer, and the simple raise of his arm caused a muscle in his bicep to flex. I lifted my wine to my lips. That’s up there pretty high on my list, too.
“What happened?” Ford immediately stood. He dragged a hand through his hair as he listened. “I’ll be right there.”
One hand dug into his pocket, and he tossed a few bills on the table. “I need to go. Bella was just arrested.”
***
Saying the tension in the air was thick on the ride home was an understatement. Ford cursed at the car in front of him for making a right without a blinker and banged his hand on the steering wheel.
“Ford?” Annabella’s weak voice came from the backseat. She’d been lying down since we’d picked her up at the precinct. “I think I’m going to throw up.”
Ford mumbled a string of curses and pulled down a side street. Bella struggled to work the door handle and stumbled out of the car. She took a few steps and bent her knees, leaning forward in a position ready to vomit. I reached for my door handle, but Ford stopped me.
“Don’t.”
“But…she could choke. She’ll get her hair in it.”
“She’ll be fine. I’ll keep an eye on her from here. I’m not babying her, and I’m not letting you do it either.”
“Ford…”
He turned to face me. I’d never seen him truly angry before. His jaw was hard, his lips flattened to a grim line, and his voice had all the sternness of one very pissed-off father.
“She’s old enough to go to bars with a fake ID, buy weed, and get herself high and arrested, then she’s old enough to hold her own hair back. I’m not an asshole. I’ve sat in the bathroom and held her hair plenty when she was actually sick. But she’s on her own with this shit.”
While I struggled with watching a teenager get sick alone on the side of the road, it also wasn’t my place to decide how to parent her. I was a mom; I coddled people when they were sick or down—tough love wasn’t in my genetic makeup. Though I knew my ex-husband would probably be the same way if it were our son.
Watching Ford at the police station while he’d advocated on her behalf, and now seeing him angry and disappointed in his sister, I think I realized for the first time that he truly wasn’t a typical twenty-five-year-old. The life circumstances he’d been dealt had forced him to mature faster than most people his age.
He’d earned his adult card the hard way. And my treating him like he was still a boy had been insulting to him on so many levels. It was one thing to not want to date him because I wasn’t ready, but another altogether to hide behind an excuse that slighted him.
I looked out the window and checked on Bella, who was still dry heaving, then reached over and put my hand on Ford’s. His face softened infinitesimally, and he took a deep breath and laced his fingers with mine.
The half-hour drive home from the Hamptons took twice as long as it should’ve. We had to pull over three times for Bella to get sick—or at least because she thought she might get sick. As much as it pained me, I stayed in the car for all three stops. But when we got back to the house, I had to at least help her into bed. She babbled to me as I took off her shoes.
“Sometimes when I’d play at the beach all day, I’d be so tired after my bath that I’d fall asleep before Mom came in to brush my hair.”
I sat down on the bed beside her and pulled up the covers. “The beach knocks us out.”
“But when I woke up in the morning, my hair wasn’t a mess. Mom used to brush it while I slept.”
That made my heart hurt, whether she was wrong for what she did tonight or not. I smiled sadly and stroked her hair. “Moms have superpowers like that.”
“I miss her. She loved it out here so much.”
“It’s beautiful in Montauk, but I think what your mom probably liked best was being out here with her family without the everyday distractions.”
Annabella curled into the fetal position. I tucked the blanket all around her so she was wrapped like a sausage and stayed, rubbing her hair until she fell asleep.
I found Ford downstairs in the living room drinking an amber liquid from a tumbler.
“She’s asleep.”
He nodded and tilted the glass back to swallow the remnants in one gulp. “You want a drink?”