Total pages in book: 211
Estimated words: 201554 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1008(@200wpm)___ 806(@250wpm)___ 672(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 201554 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1008(@200wpm)___ 806(@250wpm)___ 672(@300wpm)
“Talk.”
“I sent Gigi the message and she freaked out. She thinks it’s a wire transfer number that points to her. She said she had wires into her account that were large and random. Isaac said they were bonuses, but then he asked for the money back as loans. And for the record, she just told me this. I didn’t have a secret to keep. I just found out.” She tries to duck around me.
I catch both of her wrists and pull her to me. “Why the fuck are you telling Gigi anything?”
“I thought she might know what the sequence was. I thought she could help.”
“Don’t tell Gigi anything you don’t talk to me about first. Do you understand?”
She sucks in a breath and nods. “Yes,” she whispers. “I get it. You hate her. You have reason to hate her. I just—”
“Don’t say another word,” I order, tenson rippling down my spine. “I don’t want to hear anything but your promise that it won’t happen again because I want to trust you, Harper, but I can’t if you’re with her.”
“I’m not. I’m not with her. You know that. We’ve talked about this.”
“And yet you were texting with her about the note.”
“I was trying to help,” she argues. “I thought—I thought she could help.”
I search her eyes for the truth that is hers, but all I find is the one that’s mine. I release her and leave her there, exiting the bedroom to the hallway and my hands come down on the railing, the past playing in my mind. Gigi. That fucking bitch Gigi. I squeeze my eyes shut with a flashback, me at sixteen, my mother barely forty and sick, but all she thought of was me. I’d gotten a ride home from a buddy. I’m back there now and I never go there:
Kevin pulls his Jeep into the drive, in front of our trailer that seems more broken down these days since my mother got sick. “Who’s the old lady with your mom?” Kevin asks of the woman standing with my mom on the wooden porch a neighbor built us a few years back.
The answer to that question punches me in the chest and I stare, squeezing the stress ball in my hand that the special teacher I’m seeing swears will calm my mind. “No idea,” I say, squeezing harder now, fighting the assault of numbers threatening my mind, “but the church has been coming around a lot lately.”
“They helping you guys?”
I shrug and crush the ball, holding onto it. “I guess. See you tomorrow.” I open the door and get out, slamming the door behind me, and worried my mother needs my support, I head up the stairs.
A wrinkled woman with orange-ish hair is standing in profile to me, facing my mother, and God, my mother looks so thin. She hugs herself and speaks to the woman. “You need to leave.”
“Mom?” I say, uncertain about this reaction. My mother is a kind person. She doesn’t speak to people like that.
The old lady turns her attention to me. “Is this the little bastard you want to call a Kingston?” She looks me up and down before eyeing my mother. “He’s no Kingston. He will never be a Kingston. Stay away, you little con artist.” She charges down the steps, passing me, and when my eyes meet my mother’s, I see the pain slicing through her stare.
I rotate and charge after the old lady. “My mom is no con artist. She’s dying, you bitch! You’re horrible. Who are you?”
“No one you will ever know. No one to you ever. Remember that in case she doesn’t. You are nothing. You will never be anything to me or us.” She climbs in the car and I rotate again and run toward my mother who is now inside the trailer.
I enter to find her waiting for me, her arms folded in front of her chest again. “We need to talk,” she says.
I shut the door. “Who was that woman?”
“I have lied to you your entire life.”
I clutch the ball in my hand. “What?”
“Your father wasn’t a Navy SEAL. He didn’t die serving his country. That was your uncle, my youngest brother.”
“I don’t understand.”
She grabs another stress ball from the bar behind her and walks to me, pressing it into my free hand. “I had an affair. I slept with a married man, but I swear I didn’t know he was married until I was pregnant. He called me a slut and liar and—” She sobs and covers her face with her hands.
I know on some level I should comfort her, but I can’t do it. Numbers begin to stream and speak to me, they speak in ways I can’t explain, in ways I can’t calm. They tell me what to ask, what to think. “Who was that woman?”