Total pages in book: 116
Estimated words: 112249 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 561(@200wpm)___ 449(@250wpm)___ 374(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112249 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 561(@200wpm)___ 449(@250wpm)___ 374(@300wpm)
Guilt gnawed at her heart from her earlier feelings—she needed to give Malachi a little bit of rope while not assuming he would somehow hang himself with it where they were concerned. Gracen couldn’t keep looking for the next thing he hadn’t even done yet to break her heart.
That’s not what he was here for.
She locked the car, and then took his palm in hers.
“Ready?” he asked.
Gracen smiled with a nod. “Get your mask on.”
*
“So, Mimi,” Gracen said, pushing her grandmother’s wheelchair down the corridor of her block, “I thought we could do something special today.”
“Gracen-n Elizabeth Briggs,” Mimi scolded.
That was the only thing her full name meant.
A verbal whipping was on the way.
“What?” Gracen asked.
Her walk, and the wheelchair, both came to a stop.
Mimi tipped her head back to meet Gracen’s stare to which she narrowed her gray eyes suspiciously. “When-n you say it like that—so; you drag it all out—you keep secrets from me.”
A twinkle gleamed in Mimi’s eye. Telling the truth that she wasn’t very mad and only joking with Gracen.
But.
Mimi was also right.
“I only used to do that when I was a teenager,” Gracen tried to deflect, pushing the wheelchair forward once more.
Mimi scoffed. “Right. Like that time you sn-nuck out of the house to go to the party in the field. Where the cows shit!”
Her grandmother crowed in the chair, pleased by her own delight in the memory.
“Oh, oh!” Mimi added like she remembered something else, too.
“That’s enough, Nan,” Gracen muttered. “I’m well aware of the stunts I pulled, thanks.”
That didn’t stop Mimi.
“The sour booze, too,” she all but shrieked.
Oh, God.
That was a terrible memory.
Well, mostly because of the hangover. The weekend camping trip with friends had been great until they opened that twenty-year-old bottle of wine one of her friends had stolen from their parents’ liquor cabinet. The seal must not have been good on the damn thing because they’d barely been able to stomach drinking it down. Gracen couldn’t remember a time when she had puked so hard that she’d honestly thought her stomach would come out of her throat.
“I could have done without thinking about that weekend today,” Gracen said more to herself than Mimi as they approached the end of the hall.
Her grandmother only laughed more. “You kept me wild, Gracen.” She peered back up at her granddaughter, smiling even wider as she pointed at her chest under the loose blouse she’d carefully picked from her closet according to the support worker Gracen found in her nan’s room. “Here—my heart.”
Well, maybe.
It was good to know that Mimi’s mind could still bring forth things even Gracen wished she could forget about. It made her think that all hope wasn’t lost, and she wouldn’t have to face a day when Mimi looked at her and didn’t see a familiar face.
Gracen waved at the nurse in standard scrubs who came to the doorway of another resident’s room to find the cause of the commotion in the hallway.
Surprise, she wanted to say.
It’s just Mimi.
“Nothing new to see here,” Gracen said as they passed on by.
The nurse actually smiled, but jokingly told Mimi, “You behave, okay?”
“I’ll see,” Mimi returned, never looking sideways.
Gracen could only shake her head.
“N-now, what’s the big secret, hmm?” Mimi questioned, settling back into her chair as they exited out of the block’s main doors.
“Well ...”
“You better tell me!”
Her half-hearted warning disappeared past the doors. The lobby beyond, a rec area connected to all the blocks in their current building for the residents to use for a variety of simple pleasures, bustled with activity. As hunting season was approaching the area, it looked like the team responsible for activities had set up an entire forest of fake trees. Christmas trees, to be exact, but they weren’t decorated or plugged in. Instead, they made up a wall of trees at various spots and heights across the room for an employee dressed up with makeshift deer antlers to dart in between.
All the while, residents armed with Nerf guns took their shots at the deer, occasionally landing the harmless foam bullets on their target.
Gracen had fully intended to take Mimi on their usual walk around the manor’s beautifully maintained property, but the joy that lit up her grandmother’s face at the sight of the game awaiting her and the other residents proved her initial thought about the activity true. The girl at the front desk mentioned it to Gracen and Malachi during sign-in as an option for the day.
The terror—or rather, Mimi’s enjoyment of terrorizing the staff in her own special way—had been written all over the Nerf gun hunt.
This was right up her alley.
No doubt, Mimi would have taken half a dozen deer down between the trees had her scooter been fully charged and ready when Gracen showed up in her room. For now, her grandmother would have to make do with popping off shots from her wheelchair.