Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 72822 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 364(@200wpm)___ 291(@250wpm)___ 243(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 72822 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 364(@200wpm)___ 291(@250wpm)___ 243(@300wpm)
Still contemplating that, I walked away without looking back.
My eyes looked up at just the right moment, and I frowned when I saw someone that looked vaguely familiar.
He was tall with close-cropped, dirty blond hair, and he was well-built but incredibly scary looking. For some reason, I could picture his eyes as being bright blue.
How would I know the color of his eyes?
As I got closer, I saw him get on a bike and start it up.
Once I got to my car, I halted beside it with my hand on the door handle and stared.
Why was he so familiar?
But before my mind could make the connection, he rode off, leaving me watching him go.
My belly already in knots, I got into my car and started her up.
But instead of thinking about Drake or Marianne, I thought about that man.
Why did it feel like he’d just stolen something from me?
Chapter 6
I don’t understand why gyms have mirrors. I know I need some work, that’s why I’m here.
-Cobie’s secret thoughts
Cobie
Six months later
“Let me help,” Drake Garwood, my best friend’s widower, pleaded.
I shook my head.
“You can’t make me do this, Drake,” I apologized. “I don’t want treatment.”
Drake had been there for me, just like I’d been there for him, for six months now since Marianne’s death.
Those six months hadn’t always been great.
In fact, after a certain time period—about four months after his wife’s death—Drake had started to court me. Or at least he tried to, anyway.
I didn’t want anything to do with that—or him.
I still wasn’t over Marianne’s death, and it bothered me that Drake would think that I would want anything to do with him like that.
It felt like a slap in the face to Marianne.
So, I’d done my level best to keep him at arm’s length, but he did everything he could to push against the boundaries I’d set.
And now, with the news that I’d gotten just yesterday, he was already pushing to help me.
I didn’t want his help.
In fact, I wanted nothing to do with his help because having his help meant that I’d have to face cancer again, and I didn’t want to face it.
I just wanted to breathe easy.
Something I hadn’t been able to do since I was informed that I had cancer when I’d gone to the ER for shortness of breath.
Ever since, I hadn’t known what breathing easy was.
I just wanted to breathe.
I couldn’t breathe.
“I’ll see you later, Drake,” I apologized as I backed away. “Thank you for the ride home from the hospital.”
Drake watched me go up the front steps of my walk, and the moment I reached the door, I hurriedly pushed it open and locked it behind me.
If there had been anybody else in the world that I could have contacted right then, I would have.
However, I had nobody.
My co-workers, although nice, didn’t really know much about me.
I’d been a nurse for six years, and four of those years I’d been in the same labor and delivery unit, yet I was no closer to my co-workers then I had been when I started.
Though, I had a feeling that a lot of that had to do with me.
Women just never seemed to like me.
Never.
That’s why, when I met Marianne after she’d given birth to her son, I’d been happy for her extension of friendship.
We’d hit it off well, and during the time that she battled postpartum depression followed shortly after by her battle with cancer—which coincided with mine—I was happy to call her friend.
Now, I had nobody.
Not a single person.
No one.
I looked around at my house, wondering who I would donate it all to once I was gone.
Maybe the historical district.
They’d been hounding me about this house, and all of my grandfather’s things, for a very long time now.
They wanted me to restore the house, while I, on the other hand, wanted to remember the house how it was when my grandfather had lived in it.
I missed my grandfather.
He’d been the one who raised me, and not a day went by that I did not miss seeing him.
He’d died six years ago, now.
My eyes lit on the picture of him and my grandmother on their wedding day sixty-five years ago that was hanging above the fireplace.
He looked so happy.
So, so happy.
I couldn’t see much of my grandmother’s face due to my grandfather’s massive hand covering most of it as he held her mouth to his, but I could imagine that she was practically beaming just like he was.
I wiped the single tear that fell from my eye and went to step away from my door when a knock sounded at the back of my house.
Frowning, I moved through the hallway, around through the dining room, and stopped in the kitchen.
There was a man standing at my back door.
A blond man.
A familiar looking blond man.
I scowled.