Total pages in book: 53
Estimated words: 49669 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 248(@200wpm)___ 199(@250wpm)___ 166(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 49669 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 248(@200wpm)___ 199(@250wpm)___ 166(@300wpm)
“What changed?” I asked.
King shrugged. “None of us can fucking figure it out. He’s just not… our Christopher.” King took another drink. “He had all these plans, Rush. He knew what he wanted from the time he was a kid, and he was doing it. Nursing, Duke, all of it. But something had been different about him for a while. He stopped interacting with the family as much, especially after he left Seattle. But when he got back a few months ago, he was… a stranger.”
I couldn’t help but agree that the title was a fitting one.
“How so?” I asked.
“He wouldn’t come to family functions, wouldn’t even talk to Micah or Con. They called, they stopped by his house which he’d bought on his own without even telling anyone. And he never enrolled in the nurse practitioner program. He works remotely for an insurance company processing claims. He has all his groceries delivered, he never invites anyone to stay if they come for a visit. Hell, he’s remodeling the place and hasn’t asked for help. And those books…”
“The romances?” I clarified.
King nodded. “He loved those books. He’s probably got thousands more on his Kindle. The ones we took over are the ones he read when he was real young… He’d get them from thrift shops for pennies on the dollar using coins he found lying around the house or on the street. Even though he could have gotten them on his Kindle once he was older, he still hung on to those paperbacks.”
“They meant something to him,” I observed.
“Yeah,” King murmured. “Con and Micah had been storing them while Christopher was gone, but when they brought them over here along with Christopher’s other stuff, he told them to throw them away. Gio and I took them instead because we both knew how much he loved those books.”
“Tough love,” I murmured as I remembered that had been King’s plan when we’d taken the books over. “That turned out to not be so tough.”
King didn’t respond, and I hadn’t expected him to. My friend was a cold-blooded, chillingly dangerous man when it came to dealing with murderers, rapists, and sex traffickers, but around his family, he was totally different. He was the man who’d pleaded with Christopher to talk to him tonight.
“I shouldn’t have blindsided you like that, Rush,” King said with a sigh. “But when I saw a little bit of the old Christopher, I just thought…”
“I saw it too, King,” I said. “The old and the new. Your Christopher is still in there.” I was reluctant to say any more since I felt like what had transpired between myself and his nephew was private and needed to stay between us.
“This is going to kill Gio,” King whispered.
“Christopher and Gio don’t talk?” I asked. “They’ve been best friends for years, haven’t they?”
“They talk… but it’s not real. It’s Gio talking through the walls Christopher had put up, so the only things that get through are the simple, polite crap. ‘How are you? Can you believe all this rain? Fettucine is good.’”
Fettucine was Gio and King’s mastiff. If the conversations between the two friends had come down to discussing the dog’s antics, then yeah, something was really fucked-up between them.
“Did all of this start after that night in the club?” I asked.
King nodded. “But it was still the old Christopher then. He was just… just quieter if that makes sense.”
I dipped my head because it made perfect sense. The reality was that they wouldn’t have been in that club if Gio hadn’t gone looking for King. I had no doubt Gio blamed himself as did King. It also wouldn’t have surprised me in the least to know that Christopher carried just as much guilt.
“We tried to get Christopher to talk to a professional about it, especially after what happened to him when he was a kid, but he kept saying he was fine.”
I shook my head. There was no way the young man could be fine after not one, but two violent assaults that had barely been stopped in time. Just because he’d escaped being penetrated hadn’t meant he didn’t carry the scars of those attacks day in and day out.
“He was legally an adult,” I responded. “There was nothing else you could have done.”
King’s eyes shifted briefly to mine.
I nodded and said, “Yeah, I know, it’s a bullshit line that doesn’t make anyone feel better.”
We sat there in silence for a moment before King said, “Come on, we should get going. Gio’s going to want to know what happened.”
I could already see the pained expression in King’s eyes as he had to contemplate telling his fiancé that Christopher was still as lost to them as ever. I followed King out of the bar and rode out the silence in the cab of his truck as he drove me to my hotel. I was so lost in thought that I didn’t even notice we’d arrived until King said, “Thanks again, Rush. I’ll call you tomorrow.”